The Woodmark Forum: Held annually since 1991, exclusively for chief development officers.
Woodmark Summit: Held annually since 1997, primarily focused on helping members create and sustain strong and vibrant major-gift cultures in support of their children’s hospital. In recent years, more emphasis has been placed on how specialties within development programs support major-gift philanthropy. This has resulted in formation of cohort groups to accelerate best-practices exchange in such specialty areas as annual giving, corporate giving, marketing and communications, prospect research, and donor stewardship, among others.
Legacy Advancement: Woodmark-member hospitals in 2013 launched a special initiative to transform legacy gift-giving. Specific goals include: 1) significantly increasing the number of donor legacy notifications to each hospital; 2) grow the community of professional advisers (attorneys, tax accountants, certified financial planners, etc.) that are passionate about children’s hospitals and engage them in charitable gift planning in support of member hospitals; 3) share knowledge and best practices about legacy giving among development staff of member hospitals; and 4) under take comprehensive benchmarking of members’ legacy-giving programs to foster growth and success.
Transformational Giving: Building on an impressive history of transformational gift development, hospital members now are exploring how to foster institutional cultures and staff preparedness to develop more transformational gift ideas. A goal of this work is to create training curriculum for hospital executives, physicians and board members as well as for development staff. In recent years, Woodmark has produced the following educational programs that have engaged transformational donors to inform them of the impact of transformational giving on children’s health: the North American Philanthropy Forum, the Aspen Children’s Forum (in partnership with the Aspen Institute), and the Campaign Summit.