Canada's Fundraising Conference 2026

In the forest, the mycelial network serves as a subterranean intelligence. A vast web of fungal threads connects individual plants into a collaborative ecosystem. This "wood wide web" facilitates reciprocal exchange, ensuring nutrients reach the most vulnerable and allowing the forest to communicate as a single organism. This session adopts a micellar learning model to explore Community Centric Fundraising (CCF).

Moving away from traditional, top-down lectures, this is a circular facilitated conversation designed to mimic ecological interdependence.

Participants are invited to submit questions ahead of time.

These inquiries will be grouped into thematic clusters: themes with the highest volume of questions will receive the most expansive time for discussion, ensuring an adaptive, emergent learning experience where we are all equal in learning and sharing.

In this session, we'll look at benchmarking data showing millions of online interactions for charitable causes to prove which types of interactive content engagements actually prompt list reactivation, more frequent donations, and increased new gifts from your community members. This presentation includes an in-depth case study with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International (SPCAI), demonstrating how interactive content boosted fundraising across channels. You'll leave with tactics you can apply to your own campaigns to improve your digital outreach and align your messaging with the values of your organization.

Epilogue Wills teamed up with Good Works to look at Canada’s Legacy Landscape in 2025, and the result is an insightful report that every fundraiser should read. Join him for the most urgent and actionable highlights.

The way donors engage has changed—and tele-fundraising has changed with it. Today’s most effective fundraising programs place live conversations at the centre, supported by integrated SMS, digital touchpoints, and AI-informed insights that strengthen donor relationships across channels. In this interactive session, we’ll explore how tele-fundraising teams are working today within multichannel environments to create more connected, responsive donor experiences. You’ll see how SMS can thoughtfully support live conversations, how AI is shaping timing and follow-up behind the scenes, and why integration—rather than adding more channels—is the key to better engagement and retention. Using real-world examples, we’ll look at what it takes to align phone, text, and digital outreach into a cohesive donor journey without losing the human voice that makes tele-fundraising effective.

Participants will leave with practical insights on how to:

• Integrate tele-fundraising, SMS, and digital channels into a seamless donor experience
• Use AI-informed tools to support stronger conversations and smarter outreach
• Improve donor retention through timely, relevant multichannel follow-up
• Strengthen tele-fundraising programs in ways that are ethical, sustainable, and donor-centred

Whether you’re new to tele-fundraising, refining an existing calling program or rethinking how your channels work together, this session offers a grounded, practical look at how multichannel fundraising is reshaping tele-fundraising—and how to use it well.