Never has strong data been more important to our success. Join us during this session for an important announcement and learn about the future of advancement benchmarking, its impact on your school, and the ways we plan to work collaboratively to answer key questions facing our industry over time. With this exciting next step, we guarantee you’ll have more data-driven tools at your disposal than ever before. Don’t miss this session featuring special guest speakers you know and love!
 

A great school is a complex organism, with competing priorities, contrasting strengths and an array of idea champions. Marketing and communications and leadership teams can sometimes struggle to come to agreement on how best to distill the richness of their school into a clear, coherent brand platform. Challenges arise when teams attempt to start with selling points (e.g. programming, facilities, etc.) rather than the school's foundational values and mission. Successful brand development teams start with the "whys" in order to find common ground on the "whats." This session will provide a working model for building team consensus around your school's principles and purpose in order to build a branding program that resonates with both internal and external audiences. This session will include a case study and a workshop activity.

COVID-19 made many traditional stewardship and donor engagement traditions impossible. Gone were the parties, group gatherings, and visits to classrooms. So what’s a small development shop to do?

The team at Pike responded to this challenge by quickly and creatively building new stewardship opportunities to engage donors, shine a bright light on impact, and provide a much-needed sense of community. This included launching the school's first-ever podcast (a four-part series examining how Pike was paving the way for student learning and growth in unprecedented times), offering "live looks" into busy classrooms during the annual day-of-giving, hosting a 2-day symposium about the future of learning (with nationally recognized experts), and more. All on a minimal budget with a three-person Advancement Team.

In this session, Rod, Donna, and Elizabeth will share what it took to reimagine stewardship at Pike in 2020. You’ll hear what they learned, where they succeeded (and a few places they didn’t), and which of the new efforts were so impactful that they’re already including them in post-pandemic stewardship plans.

The session is designed to provide participants with the context and tools they need to gain a clearer picture of the future and to develop an effective strategy for a new era. Tim Fish will share insights on practical ways for heads of school, their boards and advancement teams to approach problem framing and to engage in strategic design that supports long-term sustainability and fund-raising. Practical case studies from a few schools will also be shared.

Whether you are running a highly successful annual fund or just starting out, you can’t create your next Case for Giving without accounting for the last two years of dramatic change. Join us to explore what you should know before reformulating your next Case for Giving. How you define the compelling elements that inspire giving matters, and we're here to help! 

Running a school is like running a state.  What resources do you consume in the present versus conserve for the future? 15 years from now will your school’s choices be more & better, comparable, or fewer & worse?  What actions can you take in the next five years to improve those choices?

The vital signs of general health for individuals — temperature, pulse, blood pressure, respiration, oxygen saturation and blood sugar. The vital signs of institutional sustainability for schools — program revenue, program expense, grants, advancement net, endowment net, operating contribution, and capital maintenance.

Explore with a management consultant in institutional economics 10 dimensions of philanthropy net for deep board/management dialog and discourse.  Investigate student population, market position and meaningful philanthropy.  Analyze and assess near and long-term performance of institutional sustainability.  

Session provides institutional sustainability analytics for more than 1000 schools including: (i) key segments (K-12, primary, secondary, boarding) and (ii) individual schools (via code).  To include your school in the presentation materials, please email wkummel@rational-partners.com by Mar 30 (filed Form 990 with $5M+ program revenue).

Ideally, all fundraising and advancement initiatives support a school's strategic plan. The strategic plan supports the mission of the institution. They are all tethered in a way that helps prioritize energies, organize staff and volunteers effectively. Institutional success becomes clearly defined and prioritized. Passionate enthusiasm is garnered through this critical visioning process. Boards and administrators unite around lofty, purpose driven goals that ask not just what we do, but why we do what we do. Boards and senior executives are more passionate around goals that they help create.

When giving officers receive a portfolio of donors, it can be challenging to create relationships with a large group of individuals while integrating into a new position. Pipeline management can help lighten the load and provide a strategic road map for future fundraising. In this session we will share the steps to implement a fully functional donor pipeline utilizing the donor centric lens of Independent Schools and integrating the donor management processes of a large institution. Integrating these processes in a smaller shop allows the fundraising team to craft donor outreach strategies in conjunction with a large-scale fundraising campaign. This level of pipeline work can help determine which individuals are ready for active solicitation, while engaging and cultivating others through targeted outreach.

You can be a hero to your end users, your colleagues and community through the power of a virtual tour! Learn how to put together an engaging self-directed virtual tour using in-house resources. Uncover how to best utilize your school's assets to create a sustainable production that will make users feel like they are on a campus tour with you. A new way to introduce the end user to your community, a virtual tour is a great way to both acquaint and reacquaint target audiences with your institution. The tour also builds your admissions funnel and engages alumni. In this session, we will share how we put together a cost-effective award-winning virtual tour with minimal resources—you can even make one using just your cell phone—and provide tips and tricks to provide your constituencies with a high-quality interactive experience for a low cost while mining the data provided by the platforms.

Georgetown Day School (GDS) was founded 75 years ago as the first integrated school in Washington, DC and its longstanding commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is grounded in that history. GDS’s Advancement operation reflects that commitment and considers diversity, equity, and inclusion in all of its practices. From choosing its words and photos intentionally, to recruiting, engaging, and uplifting its volunteers and staff, to celebrating its diverse community at every turn, GDS is leading the way. Join GDS Advancement leaders Lynn McNair and Lindsey Jacobson with CCS Fundraising executive, Allyson Reaves, in a discussion about not only supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion, but weaving into the fabric of your advancement operation and institution.

The last 18 months have been difficult for everyone but there are strategies that we have learned that we will want to put in our advancement plans as we prepare for the new normal. How will we engage with our alumni and will travel be what it was before the pandemic? How will we solicit our alumni and parents for major gifts? Will our events be virtual or in-person and how did the pandemic change our way of thinking?

Established in 2021, the CASE Opportunity and Inclusion Center (OIC) exists to provide a body of work and services to assist advancement professionals enhance their proficiencies in serving more diverse university communities. In this session, schools will learn about the DEIB tools and resources that CASE and the OIC can offer in addition to DEIB strategies for advancement professional growth and organizational change.

Times are changing at a whirlwind pace. The way we engage with prospective donors, alumni and families is rapidly shifting. For too long, advancement teams have focused almost exclusively on the giving funnel—nurturing prospect relationships from engagement through gift. Keeping constituents engaged through this journey is critical, but it’s no longer enough to sustain our catholic schools. To meet our advancement and fundraising goals nowadays, we have to nurture donors for the entirety of their education journey digitally and face to face.

The Ellis School’s social media campaign, which makes students the marketing voice of the school, drove up website sessions 133%. And it’s finding more right-fit families, the most elusive catch in the admissions world.

So what’s holding your school back from making a true leap into social? Maybe you’re thinking: Is it worth my time? Do we have enough social followers to make a noticeable impact? Will our investment even pay off?

This session highlights the key elements you need to launch and track an effective social media marketing campaign.

Learn how to:

• Build a brand that attracts the students you want most
• Let your students be the marketing voice of your school
• Include your curriculum in your storytelling
• Use video to target prospective students — not just parents
• Deploy stories across channels and audiences strategically
• Leverage both paid and organic social media

The lessons learned from the Ellis School team — which created nearly 40 profiles to share across channels and increased social media clicks 238% shortly after campaign launch — could apply to your school.
 

Robert Cottle, VP of Advancement at Fairfield College Preparatory School, knew that his team could improve donor participation and build relationships in pursuit of a more sustainable future for the institution. Teaming up with EverTrue, Fairfield Prep created a new position in their Advancement organization: the Donor Experience Officer (DXO).

Powered by data insights and a clear strategy, a Donor Experience Officer has begun working to deliver high-volume, personalized outreach to more donors. By using a cadence-based approach, their Donor Experience program is strategically targeting donors with giving and affinity indicators to book meetings and have continued, intentional conversations throughout the year. The goal is to reinforce relationships through multiple touchpoints that are scalable, rather than relying on an annual solicitation or reactive stewardship.

Tune in to learn the ins-and-outs of this exciting program and what’s next for Fairfield Prep!

How do we authentically honor and commit to our equity goals while raising the most money for our institutions possible? What questions do we need to ask to get us there? In this session, we will explore the relationship between Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Development work in our school, recognizing the benefits of the strong partnership. As the Development Director and DEIB Director from The Spence School, a NYC K-12 girl’s school, we will share our approaches and some of the ways the partnership has benefited our school. We will then offer an approach and an equity framework that we can use as tools to examine how we approach fundraising, volunteering, parent and alumnae programming, office culture, hiring and talent development and so much more. Join us if you are interested in deepening your practices, and bring your ideas. We will have time to plan concrete steps to make your advancement program more inclusive!

Every non-profit organization, school or institution put forth a monumental effort during an extremely difficult year and a half. To successfully connect with our constituents and inspire support, we have had to be nimble, courageous, creative, collaborative, gracious, and grateful. What will the new reality hold? How can we meaningfully engage our communities, virtually and in-person, locally and beyond? Join this session to hear a few innovative hybrid approaches that have been working for communications, events, and raising support, and to brainstorm what might be possible for your team to accomplish in the year to come.

Join Cara Giacomini, VP of Data, Research, and Technology (CASE) and Hilary LaMonte, SVP, Data and Analysis for School Leadership (NAIS) to discuss the future of advancement data and benchmarking. Bring your questions, your ideas, and your curiosity as we talk about the next big step in measuring and analyzing our progress toward our goals. This session will be a mix of formal and informal discussion and is designed as a follow up to this morning’s Key Session. 

Are you looking for a meaningful and authentic way to engage your community's leaders and closest friends to unearth new major gifts? This session on the strategic planning interview will allow you to experience for yourself the value of asking and being asked the right questions. Participants will partner with another attendee and participate in a questioning process that helps to engage donors and future donors in a productive way. We will experience the process together by taking on both the role of questioner and listener and sharing the experience of being in those roles. We will also discuss the details of how to get an appointment for the interview, questions to ask, and next steps. This is ideal for major gifts officers and heads of school and is also useful for those just starting out at a school and want to get to know the community better.