Lisa Rau, PhD

Founder & Chairman
Fionta

Dr. Lisa Rau is a founder and Chairman of Fionta (renamed from Confluence in March 2017). Fionta, founded 24 years ago, has supported over 1,500 associations and other nonprofits in implementing Salesforce, designing web sites and portals, and now, leveraging Artificial Intelligence. Her firm has executed transformation technology projects for many well respected groups including the Ronald McDonald House Charities, the Harlem Children’s Zone and the NAACP. Fionta, headquartered in Washington, DC, was created from scratch and bootstrapped with no external funding – growing profitably to over 80 staff across the country. Lisa served as CEO of the firm until 2018 and is the majority owner.  

Lisa is a well-known technology champion – a thought leader, instructor, speaker and trainer in the association and nonprofit technology field. She has been an instructor with a number of nonprofit-focused programs, including Tidewater Community College’s Academy for Nonprofit Excellence, the Center for Nonprofit Advancement’s Learning and Leadership Institute – and the Masters in Nonprofit Management program through Antioch University in Los Angeles. She served two terms / six years on the Board of Directors of the YWCA of the NCA. She also has served as a peer reviewer for the Maryland Nonprofits’ Standards of Excellence program, evaluating nonprofits on their maturity in all eight areas of nonprofit administration. 

Prior to founding Fionta, from 1993-2001, Lisa was a senior executive at a commercial information technology services firm where she had profit and loss responsibility for technology services contracts of over $35M in annual revenue, managing a staff of over 300.

Lisa spent 8 years attending the University of California at Berkeley, starting in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department where she received a B.S. in Computer Science. She went on to receive a M.S. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley before starting a research career at General Electric’s Corporate Research and Development Center. While leading a group of groundbreaking researchers in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence at GE CRD, she subsequently completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Exeter. She was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Visiting Professorship award – under which she taught Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pennsylvania’s Computer Science Department.