Live From the International Fundraising Congress

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

The International Fundraising Congress (IFC), hosted by The Resource Alliance, is taking place this week in the Netherlands. Erica Waasdorp, president of A Direct Solutionand the U.S. ambassador for the IFC, will be reporting live for FundRaising Success from the conference. Her first post appeared yesterday in Today in Fundraising, and her future reports will run here as guest posts on my blog.

Tuesday, Oct. 15
This morning, I volunteered along with several other IFC country ambassadors to find people arriving at Schiphol airport and direct them to the buses leaving for the conference center.

The IFC has clearly done this before. Everything goes like clockwork. Signs are posted at the three arrival sites, people are on the lookout, and delegates seem happy to see our smiling faces welcoming them. (Or was it the chocolates we had waiting for them?)

The first people I ran into this morning had just arrived from Kenya and India. One had come before, and one was a newcomer.

After check-in at the hotel, which went well, I found out that the total tally of attendees for this conference comes to about 900 people. I should confirm that, unlike most other conferences, this is an all-inclusive conference. The whole hotel is totally IFC-focused, so networking is truly the name of the game.

Master classes started in the afternoon and will conclude tomorrow morning. Subjects range from "The Joy of Storytelling" by Sean Triner, to "Online video — From Storytelling to Best Practices — How Any Size Organisation Can Make Video Work for Fundraising" by Michael Hoffman and Rob Patmore, to "Finding and Keeping Supporters On and Offline Together, All Integrated … and Raising Piles of Money Doing It!" with Maia Kahlke-Mikkelsen and Stephen Pidgeon.

There are also many new speakers to enjoy, all aimed at making us all better fundraisers, no matter which country we live and work in.