Speakers Bureau

Healthcare philanthropy is in a constant state of flux. AHP’s State of the Union series helps you make sense of the changes by addressing current events impacting the healthcare industry, philanthropy industry performance, and a rotating in-depth discussion of an emerging healthcare philanthropy trend.

This year’s session focuses on the changing interests of donors, including:

• Whether the number of donors is truly declining
• Why philanthropy is more important than ever to hospital margins
• What younger donors look for when choosing organizations to support
• How to build strong relationships with the next generation of major donors

This session explores how board engagement drives meaningful, measurable change in healthcare philanthropy. Through real-world examples, the conversation will focus on the power of leadership, storytelling, and strategic partnership. 

Participants will reflect on their individual strengths, clarify their roles, and walk away with practical ways to support fundraising success—whether by giving, connecting, shaping priorities, or sharing the mission with others. The session also offers a deeper understanding of how philanthropy fills gaps in the healthcare system, supports innovation, and improves patient care. 

Major––and increasingly, transformational––gifts, are shaping the healthcare philanthropy landscape, but the kind of relationships that generate them take patience and skill. This presentation takes you through all the steps to securing major and transformational gifts, featuring successful strategies for acquiring, cultivating, strategizing, soliciting, and closing, regardless of your organization’s size. Participants gain knowledge to build long-term relationships with donors that transcend the type of gift involved, including practical tactics to implement immediately.

This presentation highlights the role of gratitude in healthcare, combining insights from neuroscience, mental health, and ethics to help fundraisers connect meaningfully with donors. Attendees will explore how gratitude improves well-being for patients and clinicians, reducing burnout and fostering resilience. The session also addresses the ethical complexities of grateful patient fundraising, offering real-world examples and practical guidance to build trust, transparency, and fairness in donor relationships. Designed for healthcare fundraisers seeking to deepen donor connections while maintaining ethical integrity.

Stories have the power to move people in ways that facts and figures can’t. Whether you’re talking with donors, colleagues, or people in the community, the right story can build trust, spark emotion, and inspire real support. This session will explore what makes a story compelling, how to structure it in a way that flows, and how to connect it back to the work you do every day.

Change is necessary in any organization to improve processes and outcomes, but it is never easy. In this interactive session, our change management expert leads your team through successful change management in a philanthropy organization, from determining what needs to change to creating a project plan, building support for the change, implementing it, and measuring success. Using examples of real-life change management drawn from decades of experience in healthcare philanthropy, we will facilitate a discussion to enable you to successfully manage a specific change at your organization.

Even before the pandemic, mergers and acquisitions were multiplying rapidly, but the pandemic and the dire financial situation of many hospitals has only further expedited this trend. Changes in ownership and leadership always create uncertainty for all involved, but there are ways that philanthropy can help to reduce tension and alleviate fears. In this session, you will learn why it is so important to include the philanthropy leadership from the beginning of merger discussions, ways in which the philanthropy team can help make the merger a positive experience for all involved, and which areas of our work can be “systematized” and which should stay local.