FiS Conferences and Webinars

Celebrating its 30th year of serving community foundations, FiS is a Platinum sponsor at this year’s conference. FiS is a sponsoring member of FAOG and has been a volunteer consultant to the activities of the foundation’s Technology Committee since 2008.

At this conference, FiS will announce strategic alliances with other consultants in other areas of community foundation necessities not currently served by FiS. We will also introduce Angela Lust of Longview Strategies, LLC, who served for over a decade as a senior executive at the Amarillo community foundation.

Dick Myers, President of FiS, will be a panelist in this webinar, where three community foundations will share their experience in investigating and/or making a change in their major back office software. FiS has been a consultant to more than 40 foundations that have contemplated and made software changes in the past 10 years.

This year’s MESC conference will be the first MicroEdge conference held in conjunction with Blackbaud’s BBCON annual conference. Myers will co-present on the transition of the CF Insights’ community foundation work to the Foundation Center.

The 2014 MESC conference was held at Loews Miami Beach Hotel and attended by many MicroEdge clients. Myers’ presentations were entitled “Community Foundation Trends, Analysis, and Benchmarking” and “Streamlining Due Diligence and Check Processing.”

Attendees gained a better understanding of trends in growth and operations. An overview of the 2014 Columbus Survey and Enbolden’s GAB (Google Analytics Benchmarking) project allows foundations to compare themselves to their peers.

MicroEdge invited Dick Myers to develop sessions for their FIMS clients attending the conference. The event at the Sheraton Downtown in Denver and attended by more than 400 MicroEdge clients, 53 attendees of whom were from community foundations.

The co-presenters on “Donor Segmentation” were Lori Finch, Vice President for Community Foundations at Kimba, and Marc Goldstick, Research Analyst at the Arizona Community Foundation. The presenters discussed traditional methods for developing donor relationships and community foundation fundraising trends over the next 10 years. Myers’ second presentation, “Change Management in Community Foundations,” discussed the events and other catalysts that introduced the symptoms accompanying change.

On January 14, 2013, the Chief Financial Officers of the biggest community foundations gathered for their yearly meeting to discuss topics affecting community foundations. The CFOs are members of their respective Fiscal and Administrative Officers Group (FAOG), which sponsors active committees to discuss subjects crucial to accounting procedures, investments, FASB and GAAP reporting, and other important operational subjects.

In 2011, Dick Myers was invited to present information on the state of technology related to community foundation operations. Aside from technology trends, this session offered an annual update on the state of the software vendors serving community foundations.