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This is a sample preliminary agenda for the August 5-8, 2025 Summer Institute; times and curriculum content are subject to change. A final agenda will be made available to participants in advance of the program.
The program begins with a welcome reception and dinner starting at 5:30pm on Tuesday, August 5 and concludes with lunch on Friday, August 8.
4:30 p.m. | Registration, The Canopy Hotel, Baltimore, MD
5:30 p.m. | Welcome Reception & Dinner with Amir Pasic, Eugene R. Tempel Deal of the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy
Keynote Presentation & Discussion
Meet your fellow Summer Institute participants and JHMPI faculty for a special reception and keynote dinner presentation.
8:00 a.m. | Shuttle to The Johns Hopkins Hospital
8:30 a.m. | Welcome Breakfast & Introduction to JHMPI
9:30 a.m. | Leadership & Cultivating a Culture of Philanthropy, the “Hopkins Way”
Drawing upon decades of experience at Hopkins, JHMPI co-directors Michelle Glennon and Michael Hibler will introduce the four pillars that comprise the “Hopkins Way” of medical development: grateful patient fundraising, communication, analytics, and research. They will explore how these pillars come together to support a robust culture of philanthropy and provide the essential fuel that powers fundraising success in support of the mission of Johns Hopkins Medicine to care, teach, and discover. Throughout the Summer Institute program, these pillars will be explored in-depth in dedicated sessions.
11:00 a.m. | Grateful Patient Fundraising: The Development Perspective
In this first of two dedicated sessions on grateful patient fundraising, JHMPI co-directors Michelle Glennon and Michael Hibler will unpack the development perspective on grateful patient fundraising, with a focus on research, ethics, and the methods to engage four key constituencies – donor, physician, gift officer, and institutional leadership – in a culture of philanthropy. This session will discuss challenges, opportunities, and institutional factors that impact how to operationalize a grateful patient fundraising to help participants assess their own work or adopt new practices that have proven successful at Johns Hopkins.
12:15 p.m. | Lunch
1:15 p.m. | Grateful Patient Fundraising: The Physician Perspective
A unique feature of the JHMPI Summer Institute is the intentional involvement of physicians in teaching, discussions, and informal interactions. In the second of two grateful patient fundraising sessions, participants will hear directly from two Johns Hopkins Medicine physicians: a world-renowned senior faculty leader and a junior faculty member from a different clinical department, both of whom have strong rapport with development colleagues, in ways distinct to their career stage, discipline, and experience.
2:30 p.m. | Leadership Through Constant Change
While there is no magic wand to give you more hours in the day, additional resources, or stakeholders who are easily influenced, there are practical techniques you can apply in any context to increase your own impact and resilience.
3:45 p.m. | JHMPI Alumni Session
Presented by past JHMPI Summer Institute participants, this session will explore how program alumni integrated concepts and strategies honed at the Summer Institute into their work, and introduce you to the wide network of leaders in our alumni community who are shaping the future of medical development in both practice and research.
4:45 p.m. | Day 2 Wrap-up
5:00 p.m. | Shuttle to The Canopy Hotel
6:00 p.m. | Dinner, Ouzo Bay Restaurant
7:45 a.m. | Shuttle to The Johns Hopkins Hospital
8:00 a.m. | Group photo at the Dome
8:30 a.m. | Breakfast & Reflection Check-in
9:15 a.m. | Data, Analytics, and Metrics: Nuts and Bolts Strategies to Support Fundraising
A good grateful patient data analytics model can answer the questions an institution asks about patients and donors, goals and metrics, and budgets and resources. It often begins with descriptive data (what has happened) but then evolves to provide both predictive (what will happen) and prescriptive (what should happen) answers. This session describes how the Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine uses data and metrics to answer organizational questions and how we continue to grow an analytics model to address evolving questions. You will be challenged to assess your own development enterprise data practices and begin identifying new or improved strategies to meet your organizations’ needs.
10:30 a.m. | Purposeful Onboarding for Major Gift Officer Retention and Success
The average tenure of major gift fundraisers in healthcare and higher education remains troublingly too short. The need to develop relationships with patients, alumni, and friends to build pipelines and caseloads that will produce major gifts and lead to recurring philanthropy is as vital as ever to academic medical centers and healthcare systems. However, institutional urgency to raise new philanthropic funds puts pressure on leadership to prioritize near-term fundraising results. As a result, this can lead to recently hired major gift officers, regardless of the number of years they have been in the field, feeling acute pressure to solicit and close major gifts almost as soon as they begin their new role. What is often not prioritized is purposeful, learning-based onboarding to educate fundraisers about the department, school, service line, disease area, and programs, for which they are fundraising. Without the ability to speak as a content expert to donors, many who are patients with considerable knowledge about their diagnosis, disease, and therapies, the fundraiser cannot be the best representative of their institution. This could lead a donor to lose confidence in the institution, its commitment to informed philanthropic conversations and relationship building, and diminish their interest in making a major gift. Development programs that invest time and resources in creating onboarding programs that educate fundraisers, allow time for them to build important internal partnerships and become increasingly knowledgeable and conversant in their area, should expect to see in the mid- (12-18 months) and long-term (18-36 months) a greater ROI, happier and more productive staff, and increased retention.
11:30 a.m. | Lunch
12:15 p.m. | Tours of The Johns Hopkins Hospital
1:00 p.m. | Transformative Stewardship & Proposal Development Strategies
In today’s healthcare fundraising landscape, where wealthy prospects are approached for support by multiple institutions all at once, a creative and customized approach can make the difference between closing the gift or watching it slip through your fingers. In this interactive session, JHMPI faculty will share tried and true methods to help your proposals and stewardship pieces stand out from the rest of the field. Uncover strategies to make the impact of philanthropy tangible and meaningful; learn to craft compelling narratives tailored to your individual donors; and find inspiration in real-world examples of compelling proposals and show-stopping stewardship that will attract philanthropic investment and promote lasting relationships between your donors and institutions.
2:45 p.m. | Mini Sessions
Participants will rotate through four brief sessions that provide an overview of how the topic is handled at the Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine, followed by Q&A. Past topic have included: budget and financial models, gift officer workplans, operational plans, health system expansion and integration, strategic plans, campaigns, board engagement.
3:45 p.m. | Leadership in the Medical Development Context
Many of the characteristics of effective leadership hold true in medical development, but there are some unique challenges in this space. In this session we will overview some of the emerging leadership trends and give participants the opportunity to identify key focus areas for their own unique leadership journey.
4:45 p.m. | Day 3 Wrap-up
5:00 p.m. | Shuttle to The Canopy Hotel
6:00 p.m. | Dinner On-Your-Own
Enjoy dinner around Baltimore on-your-own, or opt-in to a special interest group dinner (topics to be announced) organized by JHMPI. (Note: attendees pay their own way at special interest dinners.)
8:00 a.m. | Shuttle to The Johns Hopkins Hospital
8:30 a.m. | Breakfast & Final Reflection Check-in
9:15 a.m. | Future-proofing Your Institution: Leadership on Emerging Issues
How do global forces like hybrid work, shrinking budgets, or DEI flashpoints shape medical development? How are leaders preparing to navigate forces like concierge medicine, data security, or AI that is reshaping medicine? In this session, JHMPI faculty offer how they lead through these and other emerging issues, providing insight from their respective vantage points as executives within the Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Participants will be invited to collectively examine and problem solve for how these forces are, or may prove to be, disruptive to their organizations and how they do business. Additionally, we will explore strategies to provide leadership through uncertainty.
11:15 a.m. | Ask the JHMPI Faculty
In this final dialogue, we will reflect on our learning and invite questions and discussion.
12:00 p.m. | Program Wrap-up and Evaluations
12:15 p.m. | Summer Institute “Graduation” Celebration Lunch
Program concludes at 1:15 p.m.
