Creating a Community for Compliance

Sarah Thomas
Director of Donor Services
NC State University

I started in this industry about seven years ago and was always hungry for information. I was fortunate to have a fantastic mentor, Lynne Becker. She urged me to attend conferences and webinars, set up calls with other universities, read all the IRS regulations and tax laws tied to charitable giving, and read listservs. In 2017, I was recruited to become the first Director of Donor Services at NC State University. Our team was responsible for the compliance side of gift agreements, endowment reporting, naming opportunities, and distinguished professorships. Kristy Wasilewski, the Assistant Director of Donor Services, and I not only built the team from three people to seven, but also had to build strong relationships with our partners and create new policies, procedures, and resources.

After a few years, I felt that something was missing for training for my staff. I was sending them to conferences, but typically there was maybe one session focused on compliance. Mostly they were coming back with a bit of knowledge of how other fields work, but I was still having to set up calls with other universities not only for benchmarking efforts, but also to teach them. Over the past ten years, compliance has started to expand and grow, but it lacks a place for collaboration.

In 2020, we all retreated to our homes due to COVID-19. Suddenly, our office had to change our processes overnight. I was interested in learning how other people in our discipline were preparing their shops for remote work, and how this was changing their processes and impacting their donors. I wanted to create a space where we could deep-dive into the current topical matters in compliance. My vision was to host a call—unscripted and via Zoom—where everyone could talk about what they were going through and learn from each other. I wanted to create a think tank type of call during which everyone could share how they were tackling issues such as amendments, fund audits, donor confidentiality, and preferential language. Paige Amick, Compliance Officer/Associate Director of Gift Acceptance and Administration at the University of New Hampshire, gave me the idea to call it Hot Topics in Donor Relations and Gift Compliance.

I sent out a link for our first call in April 2020 and posted it on AASP Connect and the ADRP listserv, thinking that I would get maybe ten people to sign up. Instead, I had more than 50 people sign up for our first call, which focused on how people were preparing their compliance shops to go remote.

We were unable to record the first call due to the lack of memory on my desktop. However, I ultimately decided to keep the calls unrecorded because as we started to dive in, people began to discuss their compliance efforts in-depth, which required confidentiality. When these conversations are recorded, people tend to not want to talk. By the third call, I started to recruit panelists to assist me in hosting.

To date, we have had 17 calls featuring more than 50 panelists. More than 600 people have attended, with anywhere from 50 to 150 people attending a typical call. It is our wonderful panelists and their experience on the topic that make these calls unique, and I cannot thank them enough.

Calls are typically the first Friday of the month unless there is a holiday. We do not meet in December. There are three ways that you can join our call:

1. Sign up via this form. This will ensure that you will get updates on the call, a calendar invite, and emails. (Note: If you are not on a Google email platform, you will receive an email invite update every time I update the list. This is a Google flaw.)
2. Look for updates on my LinkedIn account, AASP Connect, and MyADRP. The link will be located on these platforms monthly with the topic.
3. Save the link, registration, and passcode below. In this case, you will need to track the dates of the call independently. To register, go here. This is free and is just a video call. NC State now requires a passcode, which is 458387. If you register and use the link, it might not ask you for the password.