Why IIP

The best advice in this field doesn't come from a stage. It comes from a peer.

I learned that at Johns Hopkins.

From 2013 to 2016 I served as Associate Dean for Development at the Carey Business School, and of all the things that impressed me there — and there were many — the one that stayed with me wasn't a gift or a campaign. It was how deliberately Hopkins built community among its leaders. Every academic unit had a development chief, and once a year, in late summer, the university gathered all of us at an offsite a couple of hours from campus. Nothing fancy. We dined together, worked through our goals, and went around the room — each of us naming, out loud, the real opportunities and obstacles in front of our unit.

Hopkins also took part, with Stanford, in a program — already established before I arrived — that brought together emerging advancement leaders from Columbia, Hopkins, Stanford, and Duke for a year of workshops on how to manage and raise money better. Peers, across institutions, teaching each other. I'm still in touch with people from that cohort today; they remain a professional resource, and many have become longtime friends.

I left Hopkins understanding something simple: leaders get better in the company of other leaders.

When I became Chief Development Officer of the White House Historical Association, I immediately realized what I'd given up by leaving Hopkins. I no longer had a community of peers, or any cadence of coming together as a group. A CDO's job is uniquely lonely. You carry numbers no one else in your building fully understands, and the people who would understand are sitting in the same chair across town, just as isolated as you are.

I wasn't the only one who felt it. Rob Spiller, an Associate Vice President I'd worked alongside at Hopkins, had also come to Washington — to become Chief Development Officer and Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian — and over a meal we realized we missed the same thing. We went right away to peers like Joe Bondi, the Chief Development Officer at Mount Vernon, and set out to build it. I hosted the first gathering as a breakfast at WHHA's Decatur House. By invitation only, it grew to include many of the best CDOs in the city — the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, and more.

Then the pandemic hit, and that room proved its worth overnight.

When we were all sent home, the group convened — now over video — and started trading ideas, not theory but what was actually working when everything we'd planned for the year had evaporated. We even gathered on Zoom with one of the nation's most respected philanthropists, David Rubenstein, to hear how he saw the moment. And the ideas that came out of that room moved real money. One was a way to let our top donors extend their pledges by adding years to the back end — a bridge that helped lift us through some of the worst financial challenges of the pandemic. Another, which I first heard from a fellow member who had raised more than a million dollars with it, was a direct-mail video card. I modified it our own way at WHHA, built a system around it — by 2024 we could trace more than $30 million back to the video card idea.

None of those ideas came from a conference. They came from peers who trusted each other enough to share what was working.

That is the conviction behind the Innovations in Philanthropy Summit.

I believe the best advice in this field transfers between peers. I believe most CDOs don't have a peer set to test ideas against. And I believe the broad conferences — genuinely valuable for early-career professionals still building their foundation — are so wide that, for an experienced leader, much of any given program isn't worth the time. And time is the most precious thing a senior fundraiser owns.

I also believe the moment makes this more urgent, not less. As more of our work moves through screens and AI, we are quietly being pushed apart — even as those tools help us do and learn more. But human beings still take their most important signals from other human beings. We trust people. As the work grows more digital, a small, curated, in-person room of peers becomes rarer and far more valuable. That's why we teach the hardest questions about AI inside the room rather than over a webinar — IIP is both the briefing on what's coming and the human antidote to what it's doing to us.

There's one more reason this room exists. Three groups shape the future of philanthropy — the nonprofit CEOs who set direction, the CDOs who build the relationships, and the philanthropists who give — and they almost never sit down together to compare what they're actually seeing. The need has only grown: today, boards of directors expect their CEOs to be fundraisers in a way they never were before, which puts even more weight on conversations these three groups still aren't having. Take donor-advised funds. A financial advisor recommends one; the donor takes the tax benefit years in advance; and then the charity is left wondering who to thank, how to follow up, and how to build a relationship with money that's already been given. The donor, the CEO, and the fundraiser are each living a different side of the same story — and rarely hearing the others'. IIP puts them at one table, off the record, so they finally do.

That's why we built it. Not as another conference, but as the room I spent a career wishing existed: a community of peers at the highest level of this work, convened with intention. Like the group we started in Washington, IIP is by invitation only — we curate it just as carefully as we did then, because the trust that lets people share what's really working depends on who's in the room. Get that right, and the best ideas do what they've always done best — move from one trusted person to the next.

— Rhett Wilson Founder, Teapot Mountain Advisory · Chair, Innovations in Philanthropy Summit