Recognizing the pivotal role relationships play in fundraising, especially within the context of smaller schools and organizations, this workshop offers a comprehensive exploration of the intricate interplay between marketing, fundraising, and school communication. It provides a holistic framework designed to benefit all administrators and (school personnel) . Through a captivating blend of interactive activities, facilitated group discussions, and strategic games, participants will depart with a toolkit to supercharge their school's Advancement offices. This enhanced partnership will drive stronger relationships, foster fundraising growth, and yield exceptional marketing outcomes. Get ready to ignite the magic!

Incredible things are possible when your advancement team and volunteers align on the same goals....but it's not always as easy as it sounds. This session will follow the evolution of the role of volunteers in engagement and fundraising goal-setting from the quiet phase of a campaign through the end and towards uncharted horizons. Learn how The Peddie School transformed current and created new volunteer roles to more closely align with their school's priorities during the One Peddie Campaign. This interactive session will also dive into how Peddie utilized CASE's Alumni Engagement Survey to revitalize their culture of engagement and philanthropy and most importantly, it will give participants exercises, prompts and questions they can take back to their own teams to overcome barriers to progress. This workshop is ideal for institutions looking to scale engagement or lay the groundwork for future volunteer-led campaigns.

When Business office and Advancement colleagues have trusting, collaborative partnerships, it impacts the institution’s bottom line in meaningful ways. Schools steward donors more cohesively, are better equipped to make the case for support, and secure larger gifts. If collaboration was easy, there wouldn’t be a need for a CASE workshop! CFOs and Chief Advancement Officers often face competing pressures and challenges that can lead to interdepartmental friction that may diminish fundraising success. As St. Stephen’s gears up for a historic and ambitious comprehensive campaign, Associate Head of School for Finance and Operations Cindy Stadulis and Director of Advancement April Speck-Ewer will share some guiding principles that have helped their teams to forge a strong working relationship. They believe this framework helped St. Stephen’s secure a recent $17 million gift, the largest in the history of the school.

Get ready to embark on a journey into the world of annual fund transformation! Join The Athenian School, The Masters School, and Creosote Affects to learn how to create a personalized, transparent experience for the whole community. Hear two different stories from peers in the field. Each intertwined annual fund messaging with mission and brand to forge stronger connections with supporters and cultivate a vibrant philanthropic culture.

This session highlights the importance of data collection from the collaboration between all three aspects of the Advancement umbrella - Marketing, Admissions and Development that’s honed around a school's mission, strategy, and message.

Dive deeper into your information gathering from the Admissions/Enrollment process to find out about your potential donors, their behavior and truly determine what you can do to achieve your goals. Learn how best to communicate with your donors through your marketing and communications analytics.

Let the humble data not only dazzle and work for you by identifying giving potential within your school community but also engage with prospects and donors in appropriate and highly personal ways.

Set the stage for inspirational giving by being able to better evaluate the role of prospect research within your development program.

Are you ready to take your fundraising to new heights? Join us for an interactive session that utilizes a self-assessment tool, tailored to evaluate your school's fundraising capacity. Hear the full spectrum of a readiness assessment from beginning to end from both the Director of Development side and fundraising counsel side to leverage the best results for your school's fundraising effort.
Evaluate your school using a rubric to determine where you fit on a scale from lacking to thriving. The session is designed for participants to connect and collaborate sharing experiences, challenges, and best practices. Walk away with actionable plans and strategies that align with your school's fundraising goals.

The past three years have tested the resilience of our schools and the generosity of our communities. Despite all the outside factors and challenges, one fundraising tool has stood the test of time: the capital campaign. But as the philanthropic landscape evolves, capital campaign strategies must evolve too. In this session, advancement leaders from across the country will weigh in on their tried-and-true campaign strategies and share innovations and future-looking tactics they are deploying. From AI to creative volunteer leadership structures, to reaching a new generation of donors, this conversation will touch on factors that are impacting capital campaigns at independent schools and how advancement leaders are navigating this evolving era.

Motivating donors and volunteers around a single mission is key to the success of any annual fund. In this session, we'll discuss how to build a culture of deep, purposeful participation within the annual fund's volunteer base and its donors. Learn how to deepen constituent investment by getting beyond the "fluff" and focusing on purpose.

One of the first thing Development Professionals learn about is the Donor Cycle. But what if the current model is lacking a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of donor relations? In this session we will consider donor relations as a journey - where development professionals stop trying to pigeonhole their prospects into a strictly defined part of the cycle or type of philanthropy and instead view prospect management as a constant evolution that encompasses all facets of moves management simultaneously. What if Discovery was a part of every stage of your relationship? What if every meeting was an opportunity for a solicitation and what if cultivation and stewardship were the same initiative? Let's take a deep dive and reimagine what your community park looks like!

As advancement functions and fundraising campaigns become increasingly sophisticated and focused on leadership gifts, intentionally and regularly engaging volunteers and new community members can fall by the wayside. Volunteer engagement can be difficult to measure, and independent schools often struggle to find reliable, concrete ways to evaluate and leverage connectedness. Yet, volunteers have proven over and over again to be invaluable resources, providing their time, talent, ideas, and social ties to help advance a school’s mission and vision, in and out of campaign environments. Importantly, not only does strong volunteer engagement yield more philanthropic support, but they also allow schools to invite more voices in—particularly those from communities served—and work towards a more inclusive philanthropy. A unique opportunity exists to involve our larger school communities more meaningfully in our work by investing in relationships early, moving from transactional requests to transformational collaborations, and bringing more perspectives into decisions around how we effect change.

Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas’ Ad Majorem campaign went public in 2023 with over $100 million raised – and is not done yet. Meaningfully engaging volunteers and the broader community in Jesuit’s largest, most ambitious campaign was and is no small undertaking. Hear directly from Jesuit’s Vice President of Advancement and Executive Director of the Jesuit Dallas Foundation on how the team engaged across constituencies – Board, Campaign Committee, students, alumni, faculty, parents – to develop a comprehensive case for support and phased campaign plan that created a posture for Jesuit to continually innovate and invite new voices in.

Through a conversation between CCS Fundraising and Jesuit Dallas, this session will explore the importance of high-level volunteer engagement, the lifecycle of cultivating volunteers into lead donors and organizational champions, and how to return to your school with new ways to engage volunteers in philanthropy as part of your overall fundraising plan – while applying inclusive principles to volunteerism in meaningful ways. Presenters will feature candid learnings and case studies from CCS’s experience and Jesuit’s extraordinary success in cultivating new voices throughout a multi-year campaign – to bring the community into the school. Attendees can expect to leave this session with the tools and knowledge to adapt their own volunteer engagement strategies to the uniquely evolving independent school landscape.