AHP Connect Articles

CEO Corner: Reflecting on the 2018 AHP Annual International Conference

What a true pleasure it was to meet so many of you at the 2018 AHP Annual International Conference and to experience such a remarkable group of educational sessions. I am struck by how much expertise, professionalism, generosity and enthusiasm there is in AHP’s membership. Everywhere I turned, you were sharing best practices, giving and receiving advice, supporting one another and – best of all – enjoying one another. 

As I reflect on the week, I have a couple of key take-aways:

AHP needs to find ways to include more of the content from our events into other formats. A few come quickly to mind – both this publication, AHP Connect, and the Healthcare Philanthropy journal. We’d love to publish some of the terrific content delivered at International in both. If you presented a session and would like to turn it into an article, please reach out to Allana Schwaab, AHP’s communications manager.

We have a wealth of content, innovation, best practices, toolkits and expertise, and AHP should do more to harness it. In my conversations with members across the last six months, the topics that come up over and over again are:

• Building better relationships with CEOs, C-Suite partners, physicians and other frontline staff, boards of directors and our own organizations
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Recruiting, training and retaining staff and diversifying our teams to include a wider variety of racial, ethnic, age, experience, gender, LGBTQ, religious, geographic, types of organizations and other perspectives
• Harnessing the power of data and using it to develop deeper relationships with donors
• The changing needs and interests of donors and trends in generational giving, often including a desire for partnerships with other foundations and organizations
• The broadening health care philanthropy mandate, from mainly acute setting fundraising to community health
• Creating and executing a strategy to focus on major gifts
• Expanding AHP’s content in the areas of interest to operations professionals, behavioral health and hospice

I’d love to hear from you – what are you doing that is innovative? What have you found that works? Email me at alice@ahp.org or call at 703-538-3140 and share your story. I’d like to begin collecting and cataloging the best practices, innovations and tools for all of AHP’s membership – and that begins with you.