Message from the Chair

Join your peers for a three-day, experiential, hands-on leadership seminar.

During this intensive program, you will gain a better understanding of your competencies as a leader and manager; increase and/or hone mission-critical skills and gain new insights and strategies that will work in your shop.

We've built in time for networking, thinking and planning. You'll return to the office mentally invigorated, ready to try new things, burnish best practices and create next practices.

Conference Chair

Karen E. Osborne
President
The Osborne Group

Karen Osborne is president of The Osborne Group, Inc., a full service management and consulting firm specializing in philanthropy, opinion research and organizational management.

Nationally and internationally recognized as an excellent consultant and presenter, she has worked with a wide variety of education, health, advocacy, justice and social service organizations. She's taught at hundreds of conferences and private sessions all over the United States as well as other parts of the world including Asia, Australia, Africa, Canada, Europe and Mexico.

Osborne's teaching is backed by first-hand experience. For 18 of her 34 years in the business, she led outstanding development and institutional advancement offices. Her last institutional position, before joining The Osborne Group, was as vice president for college advancement at Trinity College where she led a successful $100,000,000 campaign. Prior to that, she spent eight years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she helped lead a $200,000,000 campaign.

As a consultant and campaign counsel, she's helped organizations achieve campaigns as large as $500,000,000 and as small as $5,000,000. Several of her training clients are in billion dollar campaigns.

Every year for the past 25 years, Osborne has volunteered for CASE as a conference and online faculty member.

Often quoted in authoritative articles, she has also published articles and book chapters. This fall she is teaching a graduate level course in philanthropy for Johns Hopkins University.

Faculty

Robert G. Dietrich
Associate Vice President, University Advancement
Northeastern University

Robert (Bob) G. Dietrich has over 20 years of professional experience in alumni relations and development. As associate vice president of advancement at Northeastern University, he oversees fundraising strategies for interdisciplinary initiatives and the university's international advancement efforts. He works closely with the Provost and is a senior point of contact for academic deans and development directors at the university's colleges and graduate schools. The university has seen unprecedented growth in new gifts and pledges from $22 million in FY06 to an average of over $40 million in the last three years.

Before coming to Northeastern, Dietrich was associate dean for development and external relations at Harvard Divinity School, one of 10 graduate schools at Harvard University. As the school's chief advancement officer, he led a comprehensive program that included major and principal gifts, planned giving, annual giving, corporate and foundation relations, donor relations, development communications and alumni relations. He also served as director of individual giving at the Harvard School of Public Health. In both capacities at Harvard, he worked with senior administrators and faculty to develop strategic plans and fundraising priorities and for each school.

Dietrich started his advancement career as director of alumni programs at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. During his 16 years at WPI, he served in a number of different capacities including director of the alumni fund, director of special gifts, director of individual giving, and director of development. Working closely with the vice president, president, the Board of Trustees and alumni volunteers, he developed a comprehensive plan for the $150 million "Campaign for WPI" and successfully led the effort that concluded in 2004 having raised $153.7 million.

He has served on the CASE Board of Trustees, where he was the vice-chair of the Committee on the Profession and served as chair of both the Awards Committee and the District Chairs Council. He has also held leadership positions at the district level, including serving as both conference chair and district chair for CASE District I.

He is a recipient of the Carol and Stephen J. Hebert Award for Distinguished Service to CASE District I. A frequent speaker for professional organizations, he has served on the faculty of the CASE Summer Institute for Educational Fundraising as well as other CASE conferences.

Laura Goodwin
Vice President
The Osborne Group

Laura Goodwin brings over 18 years of fundraising experience to the Osborne Group. She joined the firm in 2002, after serving for nearly nine years at Sarah Lawrence College, first as the director of annual giving and later as the director of donor relations and campaign communications.

Since joining The Osborne Group, Goodwin has devoted half of her practice to working with a wide variety of campaigns, and helping small and large organizations build exceptional annual and major giving programs. In the rest of her practice she focuses on creating and delivering training, from one-day workshops to diverse audiences, to comprehensive curriculum used to build capacity enterprise-wide. Skilled at both face-to-face and online training, her sessions are highly interactive and reach all experience levels from newcomers to seasoned professionals to traditional consulting and campaign planning.

Goodwin has led several highly-rated CASE Online Speaker Series webinars in the past, appeared at numerous regional CASE conferences and will be on the faculty of a CASE conference in December.

In her volunteer life, she is the vice chair of the board of Girls Inc. Westchester.

Kristina G. Schaefer
Vice President of Advancement
Simmons College

Kristina G. Schaefer's career in fundraising includes more than two decades of experience serving as an officer or senior manager. She has successfully raised funds on behalf of four institutions of higher learning in Vermont, Texas and Massachusetts, as well as one of the nation's top children's hospitals in Illinois. Along the way, she has accumulated expertise in annual and major gifts, personal solicitation, information services, budget management, and event planning. She has also gained valuable experience working with boards and volunteer organizations. Schaefer joined Simmons College as the vice president of advancement in 1998 and immediately took charge of what became the most successful fundraising initiative in the college's history. Currently, she manages a staff of 42 and a budget of $4.7M.

Prior to coming to Simmons, Schaefer served as vice president for development and director of foundation relations for Children's Memorial Foundation in Chicago. At Rice University in Houston, she was the executive director of development and the campaign director for the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Before joining Rice, she directed the annual fund at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She launched her career at the University of Vermont in Burlington where she worked in the annual fund and major gifts areas.

A frequent speaker for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), she earned the CASE Crystal Apple Award for outstanding teaching.

Schaefer is a graduate of Allegheny College and an active alumna volunteer. She also serves on the parents committee of St. Lawrence University. Her additional community service includes being an active mentor of Conexion, and an active participant in the public school system in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.