Let's RAISE The Bar On Your Fundraising Potential! - A Petrus Development Show Episode on RAISE Regional Workshops

We come to you in this week's episode with an exciting opportunity.  We are thrilled to invite you to our 2025 RAISE Regional Workshops.  

Show Notes:

As Andrew and Rhen share in the episode, Petrus is changing things up in 2025.  Instead of hosting a large multi-day annual conference in 2025, we're changing our education strategy and offering 3 single-day fundraising workshops in different regions of the country.  In making this shift, our annual RAISE event becomes more accessible for more fundraisers.  We would love for you to join us in New Orleans, Notre Dame, or Denver in 2025!

For all the RAISE Regional Workshop details, please visit https://www.petrusdevelopment.com/raise.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

03:35.17
Host: Welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. My name is Rhen Hoehn from Petrus Development, and joining me today is Mr. Andrew Robison. How's it going, Andrew?

03:47.81
AROB: It's going fine, Rhen. How about yourself?

03:50.06
Host: Living the dream.

03:52.50
Host: Yup. Enjoying winter, getting ready for spring and looking forward to the year ahead.

03:55.77
AROB: Cool.

03:59.35
Host: We have some exciting things to talk about coming up this spring, summer, and fall with Petrus Events. We wanted to make an announcement today.

04:05.00
AROB: Yes. In the past couple of years, we have done our annual conference called RAISE: The Catholic Fundraising Conference. We do it nationally - one national conference, usually in June every year. We've moved it around - in 2024 it was in San Antonio, before that Louisville, before that Naples. It's great - love the conference, love getting people together, love the speakers. Always really enjoy that, but we are changing it up for 2025. Instead of one big national conference, we are doing three regional workshops, and I'm excited. We're going to have one in the spring, one in the summer, and one in the fall.

04:48.40
Host: Excellent. That sounds like a good idea. It's going to make it easier for people to attend. We're bringing it closer to people around the country in different regions, and it's going to be a lower price point and much easier to afford if your ministry is especially just starting out in fundraising. So let's go through them. Where are we starting? Where's our first workshop going to be this spring?

05:07.67
AROB: Workshop number one is going to be on Thursday, May 15th in New Orleans, Louisiana at Notre Dame Seminary. Really excited to go to New Orleans and gather together with people from that area, talk about fundraising. It's going to be really exciting.

05:29.85
Host: Excellent. What does the schedule look like? It's a one-day event. What's all included schedule-wise?

05:33.85
AROB: We'll start with registration at 8 a.m. and we'll have a light continental breakfast for attendees. Then at 9 a.m. we'll start with sessions. We'll do sessions all day - a mixture of lectures, discussions, workshops, and activities. We'll close by 4 p.m. At 4 p.m., everybody who wants to will be welcome to join us for a little networking happy hour. We'll go across to one of the local restaurants or bars and gather together for some end-of-day festivities to unpack what we talked about, build those connections, and celebrate all New Orleans has to offer. That's the schedule - nine to four is the programming, but we'll open earlier for registration and stay later to gather and hang out.

06:28.91
Host: Great. So we've done, like you said, the RAISE conference, three-day conference in the past. In the last few years, just a lot of costs associated. It was north of $1,000 a person.

06:38.22
Host: This is a one-day session. I assume it's about a third of that then, $300-$400 a person?

06:42.98
AROB: You would think that, but it is actually much less. The total cost to attend this is $59 per person. That includes, like I said, light breakfast, lunch, drink tickets at the happy hour session, and then a full day of sessions, discussions, and workshops.

07:01.26
Host: Wow.

07:01.96
AROB: Yes, yeah, that's great.

07:02.36
Host: I love it.

07:05.33
Host: Let's talk about our second location. Where are we going to be this summer?

07:10.28
AROB: Over the summer, we will be joining the group from CCMA, Catholic Campus Ministry Association. They are having their annual CALLED convention at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. We are going to be adding on a day at the end for either conference attendees or for folks who aren't going to the conference but want to attend the workshops. Thursday, June 5th, similar schedule - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. will be sessions. Because the conference is happening before that, our happy hour won't be the evening of the 5th, but the evening before on Wednesday, June 4th. Folks can come in a day early, join us for happy hour that night, and then we'll do the sessions the next day.

09:08.24
Host: Great. I've been told that the space where our workshop is going to be actually overlooks the football field. So if you're into college football history...

09:14.15
AROB: I think it's in the football field, yeah.

09:17.53
Host: That'll be a pretty cool location to be in.

09:21.10
AROB: And if you're with campus ministry and you're listening to this and haven't signed up to register for CALLED '25, I've been to that conference many times before. It's a great conference - lots of great opportunities for networking, good sessions on particular campus ministry topics. Please attend that, register for that, and then join us for the RAISE regional workshop the next day.

09:48.03
Host: Excellent. And then our third workshop of the year - we don't have quite all of the details ironed out yet, it's still in progress, but do you want to tell us where we're going to be this fall?

09:53.23
AROB: In September - most likely September, the date will come out here pretty soon - we will be in Denver, Colorado. There are a lot of great ministries and organizations in Denver and Colorado and the surrounding area, so we just felt like we had to go to Denver for a regional workshop this year.

10:16.12
Host: Excellent. Easy places to fly in and out of, right? Denver is easy to fly to, New Orleans is a pretty big airport, and Notre Dame is pretty close to Chicago. So if you're close, you can drive.

10:24.87
AROB: Yep.

10:26.30
Host: If you live close to a hub, it's not too hard to get a flight there and back for a day for one of these workshops.

10:32.75
AROB: What are we going to be covering in the workshops? We'll talk about annual fund, major gifts, capital campaigns, and planned giving. It's a workshop, so it's better suited for people earlier in their development career. If you've got a few years under your belt, we want you to join us for the networking and conversations. We might put you to work leading some table groups, bringing your expertise to support some of the newer colleagues. That being said, workshops like this are always great. Even if you're familiar with the content, bring your team at $59 a person. You can bring a lot of people, use the day to focus on planning out the year or making improvements to your strategy. It's definitely going to pay off in the long run.

11:32.62
Host: All of my best friends in the fundraising world are people I met at conferences and have continued relationships with to this day. They're good people to get ideas from, to share with, and have as a support network as you're doing your fundraising throughout the rest of the year.

11:42.19
AROB: Yeah, totally.

11:48.04
Host: So $59 is the cost and that covers all the sessions for the day, light breakfast, lunch, drink tickets. Anything else we can throw in for people along with those costs?

11:58.71
AROB: Yeah, I like the way you're thinking. As a bonus, we'll also give everybody access to our Basic Training digital course. Basic Training was designed to accompany our RAISE national workshops as a way to get new development officers up to speed on the language and basics of fundraising before they step into the wild world of conference sessions. If you sign up for the RAISE regional workshops, we'll include access to that Basic Training digital course for you and anybody on your team.

12:36.17
Host: I love it. It's an excellent way to get up to speed. What else can we throw in? Maybe something inspirational?

12:42.67
AROB: You and I host another podcast called "Holy Donors" - a great show. If you haven't listened to it, go check it out. Holy Donors is on all podcasting platforms. We highlight different Catholic philanthropists throughout history, tell their story, and determine whether they are Holy Donors based on our set of rubrics and metrics. Our first season that we recorded a couple years ago is about a very inspirational man, Danny Thomas, who founded St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. A lot of people don't know his story and how that hospital was founded on very Catholic principles. We did the research and tell the story in the Holy Donors podcast.

This last year we turned that first season into a book. The first volume of our future Holy Donors book series is on Danny Thomas. What do we call that?

13:39.33
Host: "A Hopeful Cause."

13:40.60
AROB: "A Hopeful Cause," that's right. Everybody that comes will get a copy of the book to take home with them and read at their leisure.

13:50.34
Host: Excellent. And how about one more bonus?

13:53.01
AROB: When we're at these workshops, it gets really busy and you're hearing a lot of content. You're going to have a lot of great ideas. After the workshop, everybody who attends is eligible to sign up for a free one-on-one virtual consultation with a Petrus consultant. After the conference is over and you get home, you can unpack everything that you talked about at the workshop and really dive into how you can apply these ideas effectively in your organization.

14:29.60
Host: I love that. You absorb everything during the sessions - it's kind of a fire hose sometimes. You have some time to think about it on the trip home, get back to your office, think "How could I apply that to my office?" And then you get that session with a consultant to talk through it, what they've seen in other organizations, and put it into action. I think that's going to be really valuable for people.

14:49.78
AROB: Most definitely, for sure.

14:51.27
Host: Great. So that's $59 and you get the full day of sessions, the meals, and all those bonuses - the Basic Training recording, the Holy Donors book, and the consultation. To sign up right now, registration is open for the New Orleans and Notre Dame sites, and you can get on the waitlist for Denver. You can go to petrusdevelopment.com/raise. You'll find all the details of the exact locations there, all the details of the schedule, and get yourself registered.

15:20.88
AROB: That sounds fantastic. Easy to get to and easy to register - hope that you'll be there. Bring members of your team. If you've got board members or volunteers, if you're thinking about a capital campaign, you've got some campaign committee members, bring them all, sign them up. We'd love to see teams go through these workshops. That's when you can really put those plans in place, discuss ideas, and make a good plan for returning home.

15:50.21
Host: So get that inspiration and get some new ideas, kind of fill your cup and be ready for the year to come. With these one-day workshops, it's not a huge commitment in your calendar or your pocketbook. It's petrusdevelopment.com/raise, $59 per person, and we hope we'll see you there. Let's run down the dates one more time: New Orleans, May 15th, 2025; Notre Dame, June 5th; and then Denver, probably in September, but dates will be announced in the near future.

16:20.01
AROB: There you go.

16:21.69
Host: Excellent. Well, I'm excited to see these happen and see all the people getting pumped up with their fundraising and taking them to the next level.

16:30.54
AROB: Yeah, it'll be great. I can't wait.

16:33.30
Host: All right. Thank you, Andrew.