JCA at AASP 2025: The Recap
Holly Parrish
Principal Consultant
It felt like a whirlwind week at the aasp Summit at the beautiful Peppermill Resort in Reno, NV. While the buzz at last year’s conference seemed to be about big change, this year’s buzz seemed less about change and more about streamlining and being more strategic.
In line with that, JCA spent our week encouraging clients and new friends to “Rule their Data”. (We might have also tried to rule the slot machines…but that only worked out for one of us.)
On Wednesday, JCA hosted a panel of some of our favorite aasp folks from University of Arizona Foundation, The Legal Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy and St. Olaf College to talk through collaboration strategies that worked in their organizations. We hit on how to maximize meetings, how to create the right environment for discussion and objection and how to begin aligning teams around using our CRMs as strategic information tools vs. archives of data.
On Thursday, the JCA team shared Three Data Horror Stories and How we Survived Them. Rashida Brown and Holly Parrish had fun reliving some truly nightmarish data dilemmas while sharing a practical step-by-step framework to tackle complex data challenges. A few brave souls even shared some of their own horrors with attendees. Trauma bonding for everyone! Playing on our theme of ruling our data, Liz Murray shared a strategic approach to data governance aimed at making sure our colleagues aren’t sharing new horror stories next year.
If you missed out on our session, and you still want tools to help rule your data, you can grab some data governance artifact templates JCA made available during the presentation.
Another conference highlight for our team was Dr. Taylor Mauriello’s keynote on Leading through Change in an Uncertain World. Dr. Mauriello was funny and relatable (we will all remember the Euro trip baby vomiting story). More importantly, Dr. Mauriello honed in on how change resistance is rooted in resisting the loss of security, belonging, fairness, status and freedom – a great lesson as we all work to streamline and optimize our operations.
If you want to have a little post-Reno fun, check out our “Data Personality Quiz” to see what kind of data ruler you are. We promise it will result in some cheeky revelations! See you next year in Milwaukee!