Welcoming a new Head of School can be an exciting opportunity for any community! Nicole Girvan and Heather Pool will give you behind-the-scenes tips and share their map to help you leverage the leadership change to re-engage with donors. The search process and onboarding season felt treacherous and scary, especially for a “small shop” like The Logan School for Creative Learning, but once they knew where they were heading, the journey was positive and productive. As they built trust, there was room to create places for belonging for those who hadn’t been engaged or seen.
Nicole Girvan will share her experience building trust, leading with vulnerability, and setting the stage for success. As a transracially adopted woman of color in a predominantly white community---Nicole found ways to initiate spaces for others to feel a sense of belonging instead of waiting for the "welcome wagon.” Nicole and Heather opened the doors for others to share vulnerability and cultivate relationships. Heather Pool will share a scaffold and ideal timeline for connecting and reconnecting with your school’s donors. They found ways, with limited resources, to provide opportunities for authentic connection and help the community grow through transition.

Volunteers bring a wealth of knowledge to an institution, but volunteer management is not without challenges. Using Phillips Exeter Academy’s Alumni Thought Lab program as a guide, this session will demonstrate how to efficiently leverage volunteer resources to drive alumni engagement without placing unnecessary strain on staff or institutional resources.

The Alumni Thought Lab is a virtual event series that enables alumni to come together to discuss global issues or topics that are relevant to alumni and society. This series strives to foster engagement and build community through productive dialogue and the thoughtful exploration of ideas.

This event series is planned and executed for alumni by alumni, with support from the alumni relations office.

Hear how Oakwood has utilized a dual fund approach to annual fundraising. While maintaining our traditional Annual Fund campaign, we have also built a philanthropic culture around supporting our annual gala, The Special Event. We will share useful tips on how this singular event has driven significant revenue growth and doubled our endowment in 10 years.

We face a lot of challenges as we compete for the attention of our constituents. How is it possible to cut through the noise to not only capture constituents’ attention, but engage them in a way that causes them to take action? This session will explore how easy it can be to elevate your school’s engagement with a few simple steps to amplify your message. We'll share how our team uses personal outreach, events, print materials, digital communication, and social media to create epic experiences.

Presentation High School was ready to let go of the complicated, old-school fundraising practices their community had relied on for decades. Their advancement team needed a simple yet elegant way to increase their fundraising capacity without all the clutter that comes with traditional models. Responsive Fundraising’s Three Lanes approach was exactly what they were looking for: a framework that could bend and flex as they matured their fundraising effort. In this session, Presentation’s President, Holly Elkins, and Chief Advancement Officer, Danna Davis, along with Responsive Founder, Jason Lewis, will share how the Three Lanes have afforded Presentation’s team clarity of purpose and clear performance indicators with an intuitive, relationship-centered approach to increasing fundraising capacity.

The Three Lanes approach is not a rigid prescriptive plan; rather, it is a below-the-surface understanding of how effective fundraising really works. In addition to providing a framework for planning and evaluating the program’s overall performance, the Three Lanes approach addresses common roadblocks that organizations encounter in their efforts to create a place where fundraising can thrive. All participants in this session will leave with an understanding of this approach, ideas for implementing it with an existing team, and metrics you can start tracking immediately.

Creating a motivated and excited community of donors doesn’t have to be difficult.

Though your constituents contain a wide group of ages, genders, ethnicities, and relationships to your institution, not every initiative needs to appeal to them all. That’s why you need a set of strategies as diverse as your base. Join us and learn how Proctor Academy built their calendar of events and initiatives to appeal to specific donor-groups. With four major events and appeals, both in-person and online, from an Annual Golf Tournament to their 1848 Giving Challenge, Proctor was able to meet and exceed their participation and annual fund goals and you can too.

With a new outlook on fundraising and engagement your school is a mindset shift away from replicating the success seen by Proctor Academy.

Have you ever been part of a project or initiative that has changed in scope in the midst of planning due to changing needs of program, evolving economic circumstances, long range ambitions of your institution and/or all of the above? The need for the Marksman Athletic Complex at St. Mark's was born out of a devastating tornado that damaged most of the campus and leveled the school's primary athletic facility months before the pandemic. Replacing and enhancing this core facility represented the largest project in school history. The team at St. Mark's set out to secure required funding for the project in a short time frame, highlight the importance of annual giving, lay the groundwork for a comprehensive campaign and highlight the role of athletics as part of a robust curriculum. Learn and discuss how the execution of a monumental endeavor in the life of one school can apply to any team striving to achieve critical success when the goalpost is moving.

Grandparents are a key constituency for independent schools, and yet they are rarely on our campuses. In an effort to engage our grandparents near and far as we emerged from the pandemic, our school revamped our Grand Day programming and the communications sent to grandparents throughout the year. These changes in our grandparent engagement strategy, have led to an increase in grandparent philanthropic giving. Join this session, to learn how to leverage existing programs to engage your grandparent population not just on Grand Day, but throughout the school year!