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María Cano
Director of Communications. Asociación Española de Fundaciones (AEF)
María Cano holds a degree in Information Sciences with postgraduate courses in business communication, protocol, organization of congresses and graduates in the V edition of the Specialization Course in Foundations Management of the AEF. Since 2009, she is part of the Spanish Association of Foundations (AEF) team, which is currently responsible for Communication and leads the organization's image change and the implementation of its positioning strategies. She directs the Dircom Working Group of the organization in which communication directors of some of the most representative foundations in Spain take part. In her professional career, she also highlighted the Communications Directorate in the Victims of Terrorism Association (AVT), as well as her participation in different media such as ABC, TVE and Canal +.
Anke Pätsch
Director of Media and Communications, Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen e.V. (Association of German Foundations)
Management Board Member at the Association of German Foundations (4.000 members), Director International relations, former Director of the Media & Communication department, born in Potsdam 1970, Degree in German, East European studies, editorial studies, German as a foreign language in Berlin, Leipzig, St. Petersburg, Prague; publishing editor in Prague; scholarship holder of the Robert Bosch foundation, Slovakia (1997-98); Project assistant at Wegweiser; Office and Project manager for beta-web (2000/01); cerficated as PR adviser (dapr) and foundation manager (DSA). Deputy leader of a network of communication directors from associations and Foundations at the German Public Relations Association (DPRG). Married to a Galician from Vigo, living with husband and two children in Berlin.
Beate Eckhardt
Director of Swiss Foundations (Association of Swiss Grant-making Foundations)
Beate Eckhardt has been heading Swiss Foundations as Managing Director since 2005. Founded in 2001, Swiss Foundations is the leading membership organisation and voice of Swiss grant-making foundations. As an active network dedicated to innovation, Swiss Foundations promotes and supports the exchange of experiences, transparency and professionalism in the Swiss foundation landscape.
Prior to assuming the management of Swiss Foundations, Beate Eckhardt worked as a freelance communication and project manager, specialized in the fields of education, culture and architecture as well as urban development. Beate Eckhardt studied German linguistics and literature as well as social and economic history at Zurich University. In 2004 she acquired an Executive Master of Science in Communications Management at the University of Lugano and UCLA. In her honorary capacity she serves as board member of the Swiss public-benefit Association (SGG), of the Neumarkt Theatre in Zurich as well as memberof the Zurich Philanthropy Roundtable.
Catherine Lennon
Communications Director at the European Foundation Centre (EFC)
Catherine Lennon has been the Communications Director at the European Foundation Centre (EFC) since 2014. Working with her team, she is responsible for building and executing EFC’s external and internal communications strategy, increasing awareness of the benefits of EFC membership, programmes and services and promoting the work of institutional philanthropy to various stakeholder groups.
Prior to joining EFC Catherine was Communications Director, Europe, Middle East and Africa for Univar, a global multinational chemical distributor. Her almost twenty year of experience in leading communications departments covers several diverse sectors (chemicals, personal care, pharma, food ingredients, hi-tech, telecommunications and management development), encompassing a range of business environments, including membership organisations, SMEs, start-ups and multinationals.
Catherine holds a BA (Honours) degree in French and Social Anthropology from the Queen’s University of Belfast and a post graduate diploma in Export Marketing Management from the Centre d’Etudes en Gestation Internationale (Université Catholique de Louvain). Originally from Northern Ireland, Catherine has lived in Brussels since 1990.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherinelennon
Neill McG. Coleman
Vice President, Global Communications. The Rockefeller Foundation
Neill McG. Coleman joined The Rockefeller Foundation in August 2012. As vice president, global communications, Neill leads the Foundation’s global communications team in New York, Bangkok, and Nairobi. The team has developed a communications strategy that deploys the Foundation’s influence – its brand, reputation, knowledge, networks, and convening power - as a direct tool to achieve impact. Neill sits on the Executive Team and oversees a multi-million dollar grant-making portfolio focused on leveraging the Foundation’s influence to build greater resilience and more inclusive economies.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Neill served as chief external affairs officer at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he helped communicate the Obama Administration’s response to the housing crisis. Before assuming the leadership of HUD’s Office of Public Affairs in 2009, Neill served as assistant commissioner for communications at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development and as director of communications for the New York League of Conservation Voters. He also managed North American communications for the global architecture firm RMJM.
Neill is a native of Glasgow, Scotland and has a M.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford. He serves on the board of the Stonewall Community Foundation, the only public foundation focused on the needs of New York’s LGBTQ community.
LECTURE:
Leveraging Influence: How Communications Can Magnify Your Impact
The Rockefeller Foundation has developed an influence approach to communications that deploys the Foundation’s brand, reputation, knowledge, networks, and convening power as direct tools to achieve impact. Through using these influence assets the Foundation has leveraged millions of additional dollars for priority work, catalyzed shifts in public conversations and changed public policy and business practice. In this lecture Neill will use case studies of The Rockefeller Foundation’s work to build greater resilience to illustrate this influence approach in action. Case studies will include: influencing mayors of cities across the globe through a new organization, 100 Resilient Cities; the promotion of a design competition to encourage smarter rebuilding in New York after Superstorm Sandy; the use of a book by the Rockefeller Foundation’s president as a tool to reach new audiences; and partnerships with media organizations like The Guardian.
Jesús Nemesio Arroyo
Director of Communication and Marketing. “la Caixa” Banking Foundation
Jesús Nemesio Arroyo has degrees in Information Science from the Complutense University in Madrid; in Law from the University of Valladolid; and in PDD from the IESE. After beginning his career in journalism at the daily newspaper El Norte de Castilla and the Colpisa News Agency (Vocento), Nemesio Arroyo shifted to the sphere of corporate communications, where he worked on projects related to the Complutense University in Madrid. In 2001 he joined “la Caixa” Foundation as Communication Manager in Madrid and in 2005 he moved to Barcelona and Chief Press Officer. He is currently Corporate Director of Communications and Marketing for the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation, responsible for external communications, advertising and corporate image, marketing, digital and media innovation. The “la Caixa” Banking Foundation is, in terms of its budget, the largest private foundation in Spain, the second largest in the Europe, and the third largest in the world.
Guillermo Nagore
Brand, Communications and Experience Director, Juan March Foundation
Guillermo Nagore joined Fundación Juan March (Madrid) in September 2015 as Director of Brand, Communications and Experience. In his position, he is responsible for creating an integrated system of action and knowledge, and for creating a strategy and an image, endowed with a mission, that could be easily recognizable within the foundation, and externally. Nagore has a degree in Journalism. Most of his career has been dedicated to magazine and newspaper design, primarily in the U.S., serving as a creative consultant for newspapers and magazines around the world and, most notably, as an Art Director for The New York Times. In 2008, he was hired as a Managing Creative Director for SYPartners (New York), an agency that advises CEOs and executive management teams for large companies that look to SYPartners to redefine their vision and purpose and set the strategy to achieve it, build the internal culture required to deliver it and design the brand experiences that truly engage their customers. At SYPartners, Nagore worked for clients such as IBM, Starbucks, Bloomberg, Gannett and American Express.
Suzana Mihalic
Director of Comunications and Corporate Image
A graduate of the University of Maribor, Slovenia. After directing the communications department of the Galician Center for Contemporary Art (CGAC) for four years, she served as Director of Communications at the Barrié Foundation from 1999 to 2006. She later continued to work with the foundation as Communications Advisor, while also collaborating with other public and private institutions such as the Botín Foundation, the Banco Santander Foundation and La Caixa Foundation. She returned to the Barrié Foundation in 2015.
Charles Keidan
Editor Alliance Magazine
Charles Keidan is editor of Alliance, a magazine that specialises in philanthropy and is recognised as a leading source of comment and analysis on the philanthropic sector.
Previously, he directed the Pears Foundation for almost a decade working closely with British philanthropist Trevor Pears to develop the vision of the foundation, lead the foundations’ strategic partnerships and run its day-to-day work. During his tenure, Pears Foundation grew into one of the UK’s largest foundations and also became known for its reflective approach and commitment to good philanthropic practice – something which continues to this day.
In 2013-14, he took a sabbatical at Stanford University’s Centre on Philanthropy and Civil Society and the Centre for Giving and Philanthropy at Cass Business School. At Stanford, he co-taught a political science and ethics class, in which students distributed $100,000 (of real money) to charitable causes. At Cass, he published a study on philanthropy education in Europe which mapped the countries, institutions and disciplines in which philanthropy is taught and analysed the future development of the field. The research has been credited with contributing to a rising tide of academic interest in philanthropy and a stimulus to further teaching and research.
In a personal capacity, together with his partner, Dr Rebecca Steinfeld, he lead the UK-wide effort to open the institution of civil partnerships to all.
Miguel Castro
Global Media Partnerships. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Miguel joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2012 to help define and manage the foundation’s strategic media and communications partnerships and its grant-making global portfolio. His work includes developing joint projects with media organizations, international broadcasters, digital/social media platforms and documentary. Prior to this, Miguel was special projects manager at the Media Program of the Open Society Foundations where he joined in 2004. He helped manage a diverse portfolio of media grants in conflict, post-conflict and closed societies globally, including significant work in support of independent media in Latin America. He coordinated as well the launch of mediapolicy.org (now defunct) in 2011.
In recent years he has developed philanthropic partnerships with media organizations in dozens of countries, including ground-breaking projects with Al Jazeera, BBC World Service, Le Monde, El Pais and the Financial Times, among many others.
A journalist by training and education, Miguel has worked as a radio, print, and ENG reporter, and was press secretary to a senior public official in Galicia, running speech writing, media relations and policy development. He has also worked as a professional photographer in the United States, managing the daily operations of a 20-strong photographer’s team in the Bay Area.
He focuses currently on improving media and communications measurement and impact analysis and is working with institutions such as the Media Impact Project at USC Annenberg-California and the Center for Social Media Research at Peking University. He speaks at numerous conferences and events and is currently Visiting Professor of Digital Media and Advocacy Communications at IE’s School of Human Sciences and Technology.
Sebastián Cebrián Gil
General Manager Dircom
Sebastián Cebrián Gil was born in Barcelona. He attended the General Manager Program (PDG) in Executive Education at the IESE Business School (University of Navarra) in 2014. He holds a Ph.D and B.A. in Journalism and Corporate Communication (first class with distinction in doctoral thesis) from the Complutense University of Madrid; a Master in Socio-economic information from the APIE (Asociación de Periodistas de Información Económica); and a Master in Corporate Digital Communication 2.0 from the UAH (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares.). From 1989 to 1998 he was deputy director, editor-in-chief and editor at Tecnipublicaciones España, Wolters Kluwer while working with Grupo IP; El Mundo (daily newspaper); Claro (daily newspaper); El Independiente (daily newspaper) y SER (television).
From 1999 to 2008 Cebrián Gil was Communications Director of all Carrefour Group Spain and also of Fremap. Since 2009 he has been the General Manager of Dircom (Asociación de Directivos de Comunicación) www.dircom.org, which represents more than 900 communication managers from Spain’s leading companies and institutions, as well as general managers and members of the main communication consulting firms. He is also a member of its Executive Committee.
Under Cebrián Gil’s leadership, Dircom has doubled its number of members and its revenue, while creating regional delegations throughout all of Spain’s Autonomous Communities. He has also brought the organization to the World Public Relations forum (http://www.worldprforum.com/es/), which is the most important public relations event in the world and was held in September 2014 in Madrid with more than 800 communication managers from 65 countries. He was awarded the Korazza Prize for Executive of the Year in 2011 for his dedication, achievement, dynamic leadership, prestige, reputation and initiative in the management and development of Dircom.
He was coordinator of the book Casos de comunicación, IESE/Dircom, 2012.
He is the author of the management book Supera tu cima (www.superatucima.es (Lid Editorial) in December 2012.
He holds an honorary doctorate from the European Business School.
Cebrián Gil is athletic (basketball, cycling, hiking, marathon runner), dynamic, healthy and extroverted.
Sarah Murray
Contributor to the Financial Times and the Economist Group
As a journalist and author, Sarah Murray has been writing about business and society, philanthropy and social innovation for more than 20 years. A former Financial Timesstaff member and regular contributor for the FT, the Economist Group and Stanford Social Innovation Review, her work covers topics from foundations and non-profitsto microfinance, social enterprise and impact investing. Sarah is senior editor of two books on philanthropy and social investment: The prize-winning The Power of Impact Investing by Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Margot Brandenburg, and New York Times bestseller Giving 2.0by Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen.Sarah is a case writer on philanthropic innovationfor Stanford Graduate School of Business and writes research reports for foundations and non-profits. She is also author of two books, Making an Exit: From the Magnificent to the Macabre, How We Dignify the Dead (St Martin’s Press) and Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat (St Martin’s Press)
LINK: http://sarahmurray.info/
Gonzalo Fanjul
Policy Director at ISGlobal and co-founder of the Fundación porCausa
Gonzalo Fanjul is Policy Director at ISGlobal and co-founder of the Fundación porCausa (investigative journalism against poverty), He is a research associate at CIECODE, the principle author of Report Card 12 for Innocenti-UNICEF on childhood poverty in industrialized nations, and research associate specializing in global migration at the Center for Global Development.
He completed his university education in 1995, having studied economics and development. During that period he also contributed to the development of the Proyecto Acogida, an organization dedicated to assisting recovering drug users. After working in Cuzco (Perú) with a local rural development organization, he joined the Oxfam Intermón team, where for more than a decade he led the Research Area and headed various teams for Oxfam International. He studied at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University for one year, during which he pursued postgraduate studies and worked with Lant Pritchett in researching global migrations and development, eventually developing into the think-tank +Social that focuses on reforming migration models.
Fanjul has designed and directed research campaigns such as Comercio con Justicia and CRECE for Oxfam International, which have extended to more than 50 countries since 2002. During this same period he has written for various publications, specializing on global migrations, development aid, global health, international commerce, the agricultural food market, Spanish foreign policy and childhood poverty.
He frequently contributes to print and other media, and he is the author and co-editor of the El Pais blog 3.500 Millones, which was awarded the FAO Prize in 2012.
Anna Nylander
Digital and Community Manager UN-Water
Anna Nylander is the Digital & Community Manager at UN-Water, that coordinates the UN’s work on water and sanitation.
Since joining UN-Water in 2010, she has worn many hats and still do. Her work range from maintaining relationships with thousands of community members; creating content for social media and monitoring these networks; to developing the global campaigns #WorldToiletDay and #WorldWaterDay. Always with the objective to cater agile ideas.
She is very passionate about her work, especially the symbiosis between the digital world and the real community members behind it. With a MSc Environmental Engineering, MSc Water Ecosystems and Journalist degree, and many years in the water sector – for her, this is the perfect job.
Beyond water, campaigns, and toilets - she is also a sports fanatic and a mum of two super–kids.
Alejandro Romero
CEO and founder Alto Data Analytics
Before founding Alto Data Analytics in 2012, Alejandro was Vice President of Viacom for southern Europe, Turkey, the Middle East and Africa. Previous to Viacom, Alejandro was in charge of business development at Yahoo! for Southern Europe, an extension of his role at the Vodafone Group, where he forged strategic partnerships with global companies such as Microsoft and Google. Prior to Vodafone, Alejandro was a manager at Alcatel-Lucent. Throughout his career, Alejandro has successfully helped companies form their digital strategies in more than 20 markets worldwide.
Alejandro earned a Master of Science in Engineering (M.Sc. Eng.) with a focus in Electronics and Automation from UMA University (Spain) and an MBA from Henley Business School (UK).