Hi, and thank you so much for tuning in to a presentation on everyone whose favorite topic, the annual Fun. I'm Meade Davis, and I'm the director of Advancement Outreach at Randolph School in Huntsville, Alabama. In my role, I actually support a little bit of admissions work and a lot of development work by securing enrollment of top admission prospects and stewarding donors of major gifts to the endowment and improving. Hi. And I'm Jill Gaunt. I've been working in Randolph for 12 years now. I've won many hats throughout the years. I've been the director of Alumni Relations for four years now and added the role of Director of annual giving two years ago. So that. Randolph We have a very small development office. We have five people on our team. Our team consist of a director of institutional advancement, director of Advancement Outreach, which is made Director of Annual Giving and Alumni Relations, which is me, Director of Randolph Community Relations and our Advancement Data Manager to manager who rocks our very cost database. So during our presentation, feel free to ask any questions in the chat, but at the end of our presentation we're going to add a link to resume that we'll have set up for next week. And we encourage you all to join us and ask live questions and chat more about our successful campaign. Like, let's dive in. So a lot of your annual funding campaigns probably look like this. And so we've kind of wanted to give a history of what we've done in our school. So we started probably like most of you, and spent a year focused on the annual fund. It was a year. It was a hodgepodge of solicitations. We did lots of soft ask. We had gentle reminders. Please remember to give because you should basically. And there was nothing really memorable or compelling about the asks or the time frame. And it was just exhausting to do this all year. So it felt very much like we were just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that it stuck. So our director of development at the time desperately needed a one year campaign wasn't working, and she moved us to a 12 week campaign. So instead of chasing our donors all year, we chased them for 12 weeks and this was a little bit better, but it was still just a little too drawn out for us, and we didn't feel like it was really compelling or meaningful. So then we decided to move to a seven week campaign and we could see the light as a team and as a school. We had so much more energy to focus on. The annual Fun Campaign when it was condensed and purposeful so that Callie deserves the credit for transitioning us to a shorter campaign. And we're so thankful that she did. And then when Jill took over as the director of annual giving, she was motivated to shorten our campaign even more. In fact, we physically laughed out loud in a meeting when she suggested we just do it in four weeks. But it ended up being our most successful campaign in the school's history, and it really changed the culture of giving at our school. So as my first year leading the annual Giving campaign, I knew that I wanted to make a statement. With it being our 60th anniversary of the school, we knew it was going to be a year to shine and just be a great year to make a change. So we wanted to build the school spirit and rally together for this special year. The campaign was intended to be loud and proud, and we surely did not want anyone to be able to say that they did not know our annual Fun campaign was happening. So when we decided to do a four week campaign, we knew we needed to secure our high level giving first. So with it being our 60th anniversary, we thought it would be great to kick off the year with the 60th celebration for our founders society level donors of 1959 and above, and that amount is in honor of the year. Our school was founded, so we usually have a reception at the end of the year as part of our stewardship plan, but it really worked out for us to actually kick the year off with that event. So our first four appeals that we did actually occurred before the campaign officially began. As you can see, there's going to be a lot of prep work that we did ahead of time, but it was well worth it and it paid off. So our first appeal, it occurred during the summer before our campaign kicked off as an invitation, inviting all current parents and former founder society members to the 60th celebration and reception and a donation of at least 1959 was required to attend the event. Our next biggest step was to establish a volunteer team or volunteer teams for peer to peer solicitations. We used our parent volunteers to make up six teams and each team had a team leader and about 10 to 12 team members. So each team member chose 5 to 7 families to contact about the annual giving campaign, and they could do that through a phone call, a text, a handwritten note email, a person person conversation, just however they felt comfortable doing that. Right before school started, we met with each team leader and team member to educate them about annual giving and the importance of it and how to message their ask. We also gave each of volunteer a training manual that was created by our former colleague Beth Pauley, that contained helpful information about the campaign and actually had examples in it for the volunteers for their messaging when they did contact their peers. Our second and third appeal was when our Randolph Line chair, who is a parent volunteer, spoke to our parents at back to school nights and followed up with emails to each parent. And in that email also included an online giving link. Then we have our fourth appeal, and that was when we sent out our annual giving brochure and it had a pledge form to all current parents and it was sent out the week before our campaign actually started. And this was helpful for two reasons. One, it gave people the option to give before actually being called by their peers. And it also was an easy way for our volunteers to follow up about the Randolph line instead of making like kind of like a call to ask. So we kicked off our four week loud and proud campaign with an email announcement to our community and we announced our goal of 60% parent participation by the end of four weeks. When that was sent out, our volunteers also began contacting the families that they had chosen. So during those four weeks, we kind of followed a similar pattern in our weekly campaign format. So I started each week by sending the volunteers an email with their overall campaign updates and stats. It wasn't it wasn't personalized. It was just kind of a where we were where we stood at the campaign at the time. On Tuesdays, we handed out giveaways in a car line to the students and parents that went along with each weekly theme that we had. So week one, we handed out these cool little armbands to our students and it says the Randolph line supports me. And that went along with our theme of Let's Band Together. The second week we have these cool little fans. We don't know what's hot in the South in September, but these were when, along with our campaign theme of parent participation is Hot. And that was our second week. Our third week we handed out everyone got these cool enough tattoos, and that went along with our campaign theme of, Yeah, you might leave your mark. And then the fourth week, everyone got these red sunglasses for the theme of the future is Bright on Wednesdays. Those were our social media days, and we added a new poster, social media each that each Wednesday with a giving link. And then on Thursday, we updated our electronic campus signs, and we held up signs in our car line with parents option numbers. And it was just a great to see people in car. A lot of people got excited in the mornings just seeing us there and waving and was just a great way for kids to start the day. On Fridays we were again in the car line and they also sent out. That was a time where I sent out emails to each volunteer giving them updates on each family that they chose. So it was very individualized emails, and it said whether their family had given or not getting in or if they had declined to. Yeah. Which is kind of an update during the weekly volunteers are during the week. The volunteers had informed me of any pledges that they received or any other updates. And it was a lot of work to send out that many emails in one day, but it all paid off in the end. At the end of week two, we announced a board challenge. Our board was very committed to our bold campaign and they graciously agreed to donate an additional $60,000 if we reached our 60% parent participation. At the end of four weeks. Also, during our second week, we said this our Wednesday social media campaign on giving back in honor of a teacher in this video that we're about to show. You'll see it tug at the hearts. And it was so meaningful and it paid off. I'm the person I am today and the student I am today because of him. It still may not be my favorite class, but she helps me get through it. She really cares about us as students and individuals. She understand when I need help, she really makes me feel like she cares about me. It makes it feel like you really matter and it really just makes you want to succeed. He knows you on a personal level. You really can get to know him. It's more like she's a friend than a teacher. She was my mom's favorite teacher. She's probably one of the best teachers I ever had. When I was going through a tough time, she really stood by me and helped me through it. She's really happy and ready to teach us every day when we walk in the classroom. He's easy going. He's fun. He's great to be around. She was energetic, joyful and always caring. She's passionate, invested in our learning. She is awesome. I want to be where I am today. Thank you so much. Thanks for teaching me. Thank you for really helping me get a great start. So week three, we are still following our weekly format and focused on each theme of leaving your mark and having parents share on social media why they give and families seeing and hearing the reasons their peers get back. It encouraged so many families to participate, actually for the first time, and there were many aha moments for families once they heard why their peers were actually giving and participating in our annual online campaign during the fourth and final week of our campaign. We revealed our new mascot. We released parts of the mascot as the percentage went up each week and showed more and more of the mascot in our car line. There is so much excitement in our line as parents drive by with their parent, with their students, and they saw the mascot being revealed each week. This is definitely a great year to try a four week campaign because we have so much excitement around the 60th anniversary. We ended the campaign with a full day student celebration and celebrated with a 60th birthday party for our school. There's a lot of excitement and school proud throughout our community, and after the successful campaign, we knew that there was no way we could turn back. So our steps, how did we do? We did not track parent participation week by week in the past, but we did start tracking it in the 1920 school year. We ended our four week campaign with 64% parent participation and we ended the full fiscal year with 69% parent participation. You can see that early giving. It actually sets our school up because we know how much we have to be able to budget. And we had total giving of that year of $636,000. Our previous year we had actually ended the fiscal year with 63% parent participation with a total of 557,000. So we felt like we're in the groove and we couldn't wait to see what the next year would look like and so this is where we really started to change the culture of giving at Randolph, finishing our campaign in four weeks rather than spending all year on it, really freed up the rest of the year for us to focus on getting to know our donors and thanking them in a way we felt was appropriate. So parents used to give to Randolph because they felt like they had to and because we were bugging them all year if they even decided to give it all but they wanted. They just wanted us to stop asking them for money. It was always kind of a feeling of we this year made it feel really good to give to Randolph. People give to people, and we truly believed that. And we spent the year building relationships with our donors so that they would feel really good about their giving. Our campaign was heavily focused on parent participation, but we didn't want to overlook the dollar amount either. So as John mentioned, we reached out to anyone who'd ever been a founder society member, as well as all our current parents, and invited them to join the Founder's Society in honor of our 60th year. This was really successful. We had an awesome party. We gave a View-Master with all pitched old pictures from around campus. This is going to be a monster if you have not given these to donors. This is a really good idea. We'll drop the link in the chat because I can't remember right now. But you can make these little slides, custom slides, really fun donors loves getting things. We use our entire advancement team later in the year to do a porch drop box to our founders society members. We took them in 60th Anniversary Wine, which was a big hit. We gave volunteers and certain donors ornaments for Christmas time. So we did these ornaments and we also sent personalized New Year cards to every single donor. Another big change we made this year was we implemented a 24 hour turnaround on getting thank you notes out after receiving a gift. So our data advancement data manager was so helpful in this, she would see a gift, She would process it. She would immediately put all the information we needed on our desks and we would have a rule that we would write a thank you and give it back to her that day. So donors were getting their thank you letters quicker, and we think that was really helpful as well. We sent end of the year statements to all donors as well, and we assigned the donors is manage prospects. And we actually had the opportunity to manage them. We called, we sent emails, we sent letters, we took them to lunch coffee, we sent birthday cards called them on their birthdays. It really gave us the time to do this. We were on fire and we were so looking forward to the year ahead. What could go wrong? Right? So we were feeling so good about the new model and we were ready to have a four week campaign every year. And I can't believe we're going to show this video, but we're going to do it. These were our plans for the year, for the year ahead. Every morning, hands go up and they say and they say and then this. As you can relate to, was our reality. Don't forget to wash your hands. Where is your mandate to job need anything from the grocery store now? All right. I'll be back. Did you wash your hands? All right, guys, we've got to ration these. You only get one a day, and it's only for emergencies. Your mask. Where is your bag? Wash your hands once a year. A pineapple? Yeah. 15. You just figured that out. And off the cuff. How long these been? They smell fine. It. You're probably good. All right? Yeah. See you later. Oh, I got a 1:00. Don't forget your mask. All right, guys, Thanks for the meaningful circle. Back in a couple of days. Bye. Did you say happy birthday twice while you're washing your hands? So March 13th changed everything for us as it did for the rest of the world. Here on the screen are all our at home workspaces. And you can see we're smiling in this view because zooming was fun at first. You know, we thought we would just shut down for a couple of weeks, be back to work again, and then suddenly we were zooming every day. It wasn't as much fun, and we realized that this thing was not going to end very soon. So we had to develop some new norms. And so what did we do? We decided to call donors every day. We could do that from our houses. So we continued to call donors every day just to check in. We got together and established a radar relief fund, and that provided support to enough community members who were financially affected by the pandemic. We committed everyone on our team committed to mailing five handwritten notes every single day, and then we kept a shared spreadsheet of these just so we can make sure that we were all writing to the same people. And we had all this zooms. We had so many zoom funds in those days. We're still having so many Zoom calls. We never do really well now. So like many of you, we really started to worry about fundraising and we found ourselves questioning everything we had done every day. We were committed to this four week campaign and then all of a sudden we weren't sure that that was the right choice anymore. So we found ourselves asking some questions every single day. Is it insensitive to ask for money? Can we even do at the end of time campaign? If we do, is it a four week campaign? When can we do it? How can we do it? Well, we use our volunteers like we've always done. And as we were contemplating all of these questions, we were also preparing to safely welcome our students back on campus. So we jumped in and we helped our amazing communications department film this video. Hey, everybody, School starts in just a few weeks and our faculty and staff are busy getting ready to welcome you back. No, I know it's been a while since many of you have been on campus. So let me show you what's been going on. Our facilities team has been working hard to make sure there are signs to help students remember to keep those masks up and arrow pointing in the right direction. As you move through the buildings. You'll also find lots of hand sanitizer around campus in place of water fountains. We have these new machines that you can fill up your water containers without touching in any level of learning access to. And a good working knowledge of our technology tools will be key. Our tech team is preparing the laptops for students in third through eighth grades. They're also doing virtual sessions with teachers in individual socially distanced training with students Before school starts, we'll share a guide for parents with an overview of the tools available to your student troubleshooting tips and frequently asked questions. While teachers are reimagining their classroom spaces, voluntary athletic practices and workouts have given us some practice managing students on campus. Upon arriving on campus, students answer a series of screening questions and have their temperatures checked. When band students came to be fitted for instruments, the same procedures were followed and faculty members set up plexiglass barriers. As you can see, the process is quick, yet thorough and pleasant. Masks will be required for students, faculty and staff and all campus visitors, including parents, tutors, technicians and service providers. Well, here's the thing about masks. They come off your face, not your personality. And our school is full of fun personalities and we can't wait to see yours soon. School will look and feel a little different, but you can count on the same warmth and support to be here. Well, practice. Our patients will strengthen our abilities to adapt. We can and we will get through this together. So in the meantime, remain hopeful and go writers. Our communications department shared that video on social media and it got over 15,000 views and it's still our most played video to date. The responses to the video were so positive and they were so upbeat. People laughed and they loved it. And what we realized as a team is that people are really stressed right now and people need to laugh. We also realize that we're a strong community bonded by our love for the school and so despite the challenges we face, everyone was really excited about the opportunity to be back on campus, however that looks. But we were all craving normal and we decided that maybe launching the Randolph Fun Campaign at the start of the school would feel familiar and normal. Well, we knew that the parents were very thankful for what our faculty and administration had done to get us back on campus safely for learning and just some normalcy. So the vibe among parents was good and the parents were happy. And with that being the case, we decided to launch our next four week campaign just two weeks after school started. We were aware that the mood around campus and within our community and we were ready to pivot and make a change at the drop of a hat if needed. We, with our successful campaign in the past year, we knew that our goal was 60%, but we wanted to go bigger and bolder and set a new goal of 70% parent participation in four weeks in the middle of a pandemic. So what? Are we crazy? Yes. Yeah, Yeah, we were. We were definitely up for the challenge. So we also knew that we could not ask our volunteers to do the peer to peer solicitation like we had in the past. It seemed a bit insensitive to put that on our volunteers, and we knew that this year would be very difficult. So we decided we had already established a Randolph Fun chair who is a parent volunteer, and he was actually still willing to help out in quite a big part of our campaign. So we developed our 2021 annual giving campaign around emails and social media and the Carlyn presence and a mail brochure, funny videos and a text a thon, and we threw together the very last minute. So instead of our army of volunteers that we had, we still had our volunteers. But instead of having them pick the families to contact for annual fun campaign reasons, we asked our volunteers to still pick those families that they would have, but to contact them throughout the year to just build relationships. So we know how important this was. Having these relationships, and we knew that it would pay off. Later, before we launched the campaign, we had talked with a few a few of our board members and they actually wanted to help. So we had them call our founders society members to encourage them to renew their gifts from last year. And actually many of them gave more than they had in the previous years. So we were very, very grateful for that. Another change we use to our advantage was to include a full list of donors in our weekly bulletin. Our weekly bulletin is emailed to all parents each Sunday evening, so we had a list of all the donors and then we had a link to give online underneath the the list. And it just kind of helped to be able to see your name on that list. There was your name not on the list. I think it I think that paid off our office was very aware of the sensitivity of the world's challenges and we were ready to pour our hearts out. At the time we realized how much we love our school community and truly just appreciated every teacher, staff member, parent and student. And we reflect a long time on all of this and started the year with this heartfelt appeal to our faculty at in-service. So I'm going to show you the video that we put together and then we actually later shared this with our parents as a social media push, I think is during a week two campaign, part of our campaign, I give to Randolph year after year as a way to say thank you for the opportunities. Shawn and I are beginning our 12th year as a part of the Randolph community. Today. I'm proud to lead the efforts to raise money for the school for the Randolph Fund. Each and every opportunities my kids have, whether in the classroom, on the athletic field or virtually at home during these crazy times is given to them because of the tremendous support from our whole community. As a parent myself, I know that the strength of an educational community depends on all of us contributing time, talent and treasure wherever possible to sustain and build this incredible school environment. In so many ways, Randolph has raised me teaching me to value lifelong learning, and that schools where teachers care and have the autonomy to adapt their curriculum to meet individual student needs really do exist. I give to Randolph every year because this place has made such a difference on who I am and what I value about education. And our son has received countless opportunities to develop a love of learning, build relationships with teachers and friends, and engage in arts and athletic programs that he loves. We cannot wait for our incoming kindergartner to have those same types of experiences. While pandemic is not the easiest time to give. We know it will eventually end. When it does, we hope our participation in the Randolph summit will help enable future writers to have these same incredible experiences to make a difference. So this became our campaign slogan. Together we make a difference, and we wanted our community to feel school proud and rally together, but also didn't want it to seem too heavy. So as we mentioned earlier, laughter and lighthearted humor was what people craved during this time of uncertainty. And after realizing how many people enjoy a welcome back video to campus and after many, many hours of brainstorming, we realized that our whole campaign was right there in front of us. We wanted to make people happy and make people laugh and what makes people happy and laughs, but watching other people dance. So we decided to be bold and take a big risk and develop our campaign around a dance video. Yes, Yes, a dance video. And now all we needed was to convince our amazing faculty and staff to help us out. And to our surprise, everyone was actually willing to play a part. Our communications office was on board, and they actually helped us bring our campaign to life. So when we started the campaign off, I sent a video through email to all parents. The first week of school introducing our campaign goals and our challenge and our goal was to have 70% parent participation at the end of a four week campaign, which would have been the highest participation rate in our schools history. But let me remind you, this was also in the middle of a pandemic where we. Crazy. Yes. Again, but probably. But we also wanted to show our love for our school. And our plan was to release that full dance video if we reached our goal. So when the campaign started, we send out emails, we shared posts on social media. Once again, we were in our car line holding up the parent participation signs, and it was just so good to see people's faces just in the car line. We are not having anyone on our campus as visitors have just the car line presence, I think really, really helped us as we hit milestones throughout the campaign. We released these really fun teaser videos at our communications office, had put together. And and the people and. So the last week of our campaign, we were, you know, getting closer to our goal, but we weren't quite there yet. And we decided to meet and I decided to have a few volunteers help us and start a text design for that one last push to the end. And we texted many of our families who had not given. And to our surprise, we got great results at the end of those four weeks. We exceeded our goal at 11 a.m. on that last day and at noon we released this dance video to the world and I'm sure that you probably saw it just in case you didn't hear it. Is. Oh, wow. Thank you very. Again mean that the people know how you never want to go. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. You oh, you never want to go oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh yeah. You never want to go in oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Our students and families raved about this video and they still talk about it today. It was so great to have life back on campus. So we're very excited to have exceeded our goal of 70% parent participation by ending the campaign with 74% higher participation. And we're currently right now at 76% percent participation with a giving total of over 600,000. This total is also more than we have ever received in this short of a period of time. Our biggest stat that I want to share though, is that our community has rallied together like never before and our Raider pride is still going strong. So our next big question is what is 24? And like you couldn't break us. But a few things I hope you take away from our presentation is don't be afraid to take a risk, be creative and think outside of the box, Be bold, be loud, and be proud of your community. Always expect the unexpected. Although we probably could have never expected a pandemic, but be ready to have a backup plan and ready to pivot at any time if necessary. And remember, strong relationships are key. So do not underestimate the power of stewardship, but most importantly, have fun and enjoy doing it. And just some final thoughts. All this focus on stewardship really did pay off, and our donors started calling us for once and what can we do to help? What do you need on campus to support your teachers and students this year and every year? And it's important to note here that our last capital campaign ended in 2008, and our last major gift for a special project on campus was in 2016. However, in the middle of a pandemic, and in addition to the success of the Randolph Fun Campaign, we also managed to secure almost $300,000 for these three new special projects around campus. These two playgrounds and an outdoor science center. And we absolutely attribute this success to our year long focus on stewardship rather than a year long focus on the annual fun. So if you're frustrated, your one year long annual fun campaign and you want to try something new, just do it. We encourage you to commit to shortening it, even if you transition to the short end and don't jump into four weeks immediately like we did. Be proud, Be loud. Like Jill mentioned, be flexible and just go for it. So thank you so much.

fundraising campaign

shorter campaign

challenges

stewardship

parent participation

COVID-19

engagement

success