8th International Summit on Fundraising Held in San Francisco in 2017

June 1, 2017

AFP was proud to host the 8th International Fundraising Summit of Fundraising Associations on Friday 28 April, prior to its International Conference in San Francisco, California. The summit, held at the San Francisco Red Cross premises, brought together 25 CEOs and Board members of 11 national fundraising associations from around the world. With representation from Brazil to Australia and France to Kenya, and China to Spain the broad diversity of the world’s professional fundraising community came together to reflect upon and address common opportunities, challenges and solutions.

The Summit enabled national leaders to share the challenges they faced within their countries and to learn specifically from the challenges faced by fundraising and addressed by the Institute of Fundraising(IoF) in the UK over the last three years and the applied learning from this by the Fundraising Institute of Australia. The meeting also took time to review and revise the “International Statement of Ethical Principles in Fundraising”, previously approved at the Summit in October 2006 by 24 countries.

As Summit Chair, Daryl Upsall FInstF, commented, “Whether it is the challenge of fundraising being recognised as a real profession in emerging markets; the challenge of finding the next generation of fundraising leaders or addressing the challenges posed my overzealous legislation and regulatory control when fundraising is attacked in the media, we need and must work together to build strong and robust culture of professional fundraising and philanthropy based on high ethical standards around the world”

Such was the enthusiasm for every closer cooperation it was agreed to establish more frequent “virtual summits via video conferencing to allow for wider participation; to create a platform for knowledge sharing and the UK IoF agreed to host a similar Summit around its National Fundraising Conference in June 2018.