Outstanding Fundraising Professional: David Palmer

Known for his strategic and principled approach, David Palmer has served with highly effective and talented advancement teams, helping redefine the fundraising potential for several charitable sectors, including professional faculty campaigns, cultural institutions, and university-wide campaigns. He is a talented development professional with a perspective that is expansive and global, inclusive of diverse communities, and driven to turn bold visions into reality.

Since 2007, David has served as Vice-President, Advancement for the University of Toronto, Canada’s largest research-intensive university, with 80,000 students on three campuses and 500,000 alumni in 174 countries worldwide. Building on a very significant track record of success, including an historic $1 billion campaign that concluded in 2003, David will be leading the University’s advancement team in another history-making effort, with the announcement last week of a new $2 billion campaign – a massive but necessary undertaking to help prepare the next generation of global citizens and to address today’s defining global challenges.

From 1999 to 2007, David served as President and Executive Director of the Royal Ontario Museum Board of Governors (originally the ROM Foundation) where he led Renaissance ROM – a transformational campaign that re-defined the Museum’s financial resource base, its public brand, and its position as a major international cultural destination. Recognizing the Museum’s mandate that encompasses both world civilizations and natural history, he made a priority of reaching out to Canada’s Japanese, South Asian, Chinese, Ukrainian, Italian, Greek and other communities locally and nationally. The Renaissance ROM Campaign, unique in Canada for its inclusiveness, generated an enormous sense of pride and engagement among these diverse communities, exemplified by a landmark gift from Michael Lee-Chin to name the Museum’s new building.

David Palmer is a Senior Fellow of Massey College, an executive committee member of the National Council of Foundation Executives, and a director of the Earth Rangers Foundation. He earned his Master of Fine Arts in musicology from Princeton University and began his career as a Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at The University of Western Ontario, his undergraduate alma mater. After his first foray into development and marketing at Orchestra London, David would return to Western to lead a ground-breaking campaign for the University of Western Ontario’s School of Business Administration. These efforts resulted in its being renamed the Richard Ivey School of Business, ushering in a new era in professional-faculty fundraising in Canada and marking him as a rising star in the development profession.

David Palmer was nominated for this award by a committee of his peers. He receives this award on behalf of the teams with whom he has served, and of his family, Bernadette, Alex,
Michael, and Maeve, who join him in thanking the AFP for this wonderful honour.