Hi. Thanks for coming to this key session. The key of maximizing giving these students. My name is Danielle Hladky. I am the director of communications and marketing at Calvert Hall College High School, a all Boys College Preparatory school located in Baltimore, Maryland. I have been at Howard Hall for eight years now, but have been in the education realm for the past 20. I like to consider myself a brand curator, marketing, visionary and wordsmith. So with that, let's dive into how students can help maximize your giving day. Today, I'm going to share with you how Calvert Hall has successfully laid out our Giving day, which we call all day hall day, and what it looks like to get students involved in a memorable way that transcends not only your giving day, but for months to come. Joe Baker, he is a graduate of the Class of 1976 from Calvert Hall. He also is our chief administrative officer, as well as our director of Advanced Art. And he has been quoted many times for telling constituents, as well as donors, community members, anyone that asks, no one asks me how our false solicitation letters perform. I get calls, texts and emails year round asking how all day holiday went and what we have planned for next year. So a lot is at stake when it comes to our giving day in the sense that our community really rallies behind us and people expect it to be bigger and better every year. So this past year, we just celebrated our eighth annual day of Giving. So just to run through some of the numbers, we were able to raise $466,167 this year, which was an increase of 480% from when we started back in year one. Our average donation has increased 76% to $327. I'm sorry, 320? Yeah, $327.83. Our social media engagements over 100,000 for the day are video views are over 36,000 for the day. We had over 7500 posted to 7600 people. Visit our unique landing page that we built out for our giving day. We offer numerous live streams, which when I walk you through the schedule and make a little bit more sense. But we also had over 2700 people view those and we had 1422 donors who supported Calvert Hall this year for our Day of Giving, which is an increase of 230%. So when it comes to our day, what is our secret sauce? We start to plan early to make sure that we know what events are happening and how we want to position everybody that's involved. And it also takes building relationships to make sure that our alumni, our students, our faculty and staff all want to participate. But one of the biggest things that's in our secret sauce is that it's 24 hours of content. And people I know some days of giving people will promote it beforehand and they'll promote it the day up, but it's pretty much just email, solicitation and social media. There's no true soup and nuts about it, if you will. So with us, we make sure we have people on campus all 24 hours. We have events that spanned all 24 hours. It's basically one of those big telethons that you used to see on TV, except for we're promoting events that aren't necessarily prompting people to give that we're providing content the entire 24 hours. This right here is our advancement team. So you'll see our president brother John Cain on the far left, as well as Joe Baker, who standing up right next to our Cardinal Bird and the rest of our team. So all of us play an intricate role during the day, whether it be helping out with events, sponsorships, being on the camera or in front of the camera, being behind the camera, we all play a role. So what I wanted to do was show you guys some of the videos that we used to push out into the community. All of these videos are based on a different television show. Brooklyn Nine-Nine was this year. We did Full House last year. We've also done The Office when we had our COVID day of giving back in 2020. So one of the big things that were 2021 rather, was that Year's Day of giving. So one of the big things that we do with these pushes is we want people to know who we are. The past eight years since Brother John and Joe Baker have come into our office, is making sure the community feels comfortable and knows what our roles are within our community so that way they can put a name to a face in addition to giving to an amazing community because the Calvert Hall, we have fantastic buildings, we have amazing facilities, but at the end of the day, it really comes down to the people. So we really want to make sure that they know who we are. So let me just give you a quick rundown of what one of our videos looks like. So we put a video out like that a few days before all day holiday just to start getting people talking about the event and getting hyped about it. And we also put those on our unique landing pages. So when people go to check the schedule to make their donations, they also get to see us. One of the big things for us too, is participation over money. A lot of institutions we've found will set a dollar amount like we want to raise $250,000. We want to raise $500,000 again, we're really big a coward haul about making it about the people. So, for instance, this year our goal was 1350 donors to recognize the 1350 students, faculty, staff and coaches that make up the current Calvert Hall community within our building. We had done it before where we were trying to honor in the early days we'd set a participation goal of 500, and then once we started getting the ball rolling and we've gotten to the part of where we are, the dollars follow the participation, as we saw earlier, with raising over $460,000. One of the things we do is on the left hand side of your screen, we send out emails to all of the parents saying, in honor of your son being a member of, in this case, the Class of 2025, please consider making a gift today, an all day holiday. We're not prompting them to make a certain amount of gift again. We're just prompting them to make a gift. We also have Grandparents day here at Calvert Hall, which is earlier in the year. So we're able to collect all of our grandparents information. So we then email all the grandparents, asking them to make a gift in honor of their grandson. We'll email sports teams, will email our extracurricular clubs, and ask the parents of those who students are involved to make gifts in honor of their son participating in those clubs. Additionally, this is a screenshot of a smaller or smaller portion of our landing page, so it has the count down during the day to know how close we are till the end, how much we've raised to how many gifts. But if you notice, when you make a gift, you can do it in honor or in memory of someone. So a lot of times you'll see, like here someone was a gift was made in honor of the class of 2026. Someone was making a gift in honor of someone from 1952. Then we're also having someone who was giving in honor of their nephew, who's class of 2027, and they have the ability to upload photos and videos too. So that way people are able to see and honor those as well. Here's our full schedule. So we kick off at midnight and we go till the following midnight. We have kind of fine tuned our schedule in the sense that our midnight show is always with Joe Baker and we call it Live with Joe Baker, 76, with a special guest. So this year was our golf team and then a few of our alums who had recently played for Drew for Forester, which was fantastic because their golf team ended up winning the AMA conference championship just a few days later. After this turkey ball one or two. We have the longest standing Catholic rivalry football game on Thanksgiving Day in the nation, so we play another school in the area every year. Sometimes we played empty big stadium or the Ravens play most recently because of NFL conflicts. On Thanksgiving Day. We've been playing at Towson University, which is one of our Maryland college and universities in the area. So that game is filmed and it is live streamed. It is live on our Channel two ABC affiliate as well, as I mentioned, live streamed. So we have full rights to that. So this is the first time the game premieres since Thanksgiving Day. Every year we do something called 100 nights with our graduating seniors, families, friends. They can come in and do little video bits for their graduating senior. We rent out one of the local movie theaters and you get to actually watch the live premiere of that event so they could just sit there with popcorn and soda with their family and friends and watch a tribute to the entire class. So this was the first time we had premiered that outside of the movie theater. We have an alumni that comes back and does livestream with us here in our baseball stadium, as well as livestreamed for those who cannot make it. We do an in-person bagels with Baker in Zoom so people across the country can tie in to see Mr. Baker. This year we did a student 3v3 basketball tournament to get more students involved and we'll go through them, will take photos and videos and be putting those up on Instagram. We've also done soccer tournaments in the past. We do a cookout with our president, brother John Kane. We also have a group of individuals who have been doing a podcast this year, so three students. So they came on with an alum who does a local radio station or is on a local radio station in the area. Water pipes have been the fan. So they did a live version of their podcast. We had another livestream with some of our alumni who are also on our faculty. We knocked off a big rival in the area to be named the number two seed in our lacrosse conference championships. So we did a replay of that. We also have an alum who is wonderful and he reads a bedtime story every year. So he actually read my children's favorite this year, Curious George Makes Pancakes. So we live stream and premiere that at 7:00 and then at 8:00. This year was a big deal since this was the eighth annual all day holiday. We did something called the Ocho Unscripted. So Joe Baker met with 27 or 26 different groups of students, each for 8 minutes, minutes to learn about their Calvert Hall experience, whether it be athletics, clubs and activities, academics, what they're doing in the greater community. So that way everyone could kind of get a feel of what is going on. So that actually took us up until about 1120 that night, which was great, gave us a 30 minute downtime before we did the final countdown live at 1150, which was Brother John and Joe standing in front of one of our live boards, being able to walk people through where we are, how far we've come that day, and to give another thanks to everybody. So now that you kind of got a feel of what we do for our giving day, how can you have students help tell your story at Calvert Hall? Our community thrives on celebrating student success. So, for instance, we have 40 athletic teams, 17 sports, and this past year, the 2022, 20, 23 school year, we had 14 team and two individual conference titles and we had one team in one individual national title. We have top tier academics, so the Catholic League academic champions this year we also are on a show called it's Academic, which runs in the area. Kind of pairing up some of the top academic schools in the country. So that's in the area that's televised. And then we have 60 plus extracurriculars. So we had this past year, we were the speech and debate national runners up. We were the Maryland State competition marching band champions. And our model, U.N. won 16 different awards over the course of the year. Right here, you can see our competition marching band marching down Main Street, USA at Disney to help close out their 50th year celebration. So take a moment and think about the clubs and activities, the sports, the academics, what is your story and what are you trying to tell on your day of giving? And how can you welcome the community back in? So then that way they can be a part of the success and feel as if they're helping. So what we did with the show unscripted is we took all of those successes that you saw in the previous page, and then we broke it down on a landing page so people could see the actual show lineup. So for instance, at 8:00, we kicked off with Sebastian Gorski, who is one of our all state trumpeters, and he actually did the call that you hear during the Kentucky Derby. And then for 8 minutes and 34 seconds, he talked to Joe Baker about his experience here and what his time has been like. And we have a freshman artist who did the Christmas card this year. So he talked about what it was like to be a freshman, to not only do the Christmas card, but what it's like to be a fifth generation Holman here at Calvert Hall. So we gave a little teaser as to what everything was about, and then we broke it down through the hours. As you can tell, we got a little cut off. But if you'd like to see more about what our entire segment looked like, I'd be happy to share that with you. We also filmed on different locations around campus, so that way it wasn't all static in hindsight, if we were to do the old show again, if you see in the middle photo right here, we have Joe Baker sitting with one of our students who is a phenomenal baker. We did a handful of our segment sitting here at the couch with the Cardinal Bird behind them. In hindsight, I would have liked to change some things out in that little middle area that you see with the flowers. So that way, as people were watching, it could also be another way to kind of be a what changed in the photo. And you could turn that maybe perhaps even into a little contest if you wanted to, in addition to 24 hours of giving and 24 hours of people being on campus and 24 hours of content, we also focus on 24 hours of social media. So does that mean we're posting something every minute of every second? But it does mean that we're using our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube channels to help push out our story. We use Twitter the most. This year we did 49 tweets, mostly to promote the show. So as you see here, although he's the fastest four, fastest indoor 400 meter freshman in the country, we're still able to keep around for we're still able to keep him around for a full 8 minutes segment of the show. Damien Ferguson So what we were doing is right before every segment started, we were pushing one out on Twitter so that way more people would be in tuned to want to switch over to watch it, because we also recognize that if we say we have 26 different groups, but we don't say who and when, people might not have wanted to tune in. Another way that we're able to engage families through all of this is we emailed all the parents and grandparents of these individuals and said, Hey, this is the time that your son, grandson will be on air. And we also told the students that the student that had the largest live watch time would receive a gift card to our Cardinal shop, which has apparel and merchandise. So they were very excited about that. The highest viewed segment that we had was 35 and our lowest was 19 during the live segment. But we have seen over a thousand views. 922 of them were live and then the other portions were afterwards are archived versions. We do have plans to re-use this content, which I'll get into in a moment. Our most effective way of using social media was our Instagram stories, and we were tagging to different people's profiles and we were also trying to showcase what it looked like here during the day. So we actually had some people on campus watching the little cardinal bedtime story and what it looked like to be here during at midnight for the kickoff show. So that way people could kind of experience it throughout the course of the day and everything had a link back to our giving site as well so people could watch the day as well as make sure they were donating. So here's my key takeaways from today's webinar. Begin planning early. Think about 2 to 3 months of in advance of what you could use for pretend preplanned content. Does it mean you have to script it all up? It doesn't mean you have to have it all together, but start coming up with what your plans are going to be, especially if this is your first time using a calendar to kind of slow you through build relationships. Mark 3245 minutes a week on your calendar to get to know different students and student organizations. That photo you saw of all of us as a part of our team, we do much more than just work in the advanced office. Mr. Baker also teaches the math class. I teach a marketing class, and I'm also the head of our communications club. Jeff In our office, coach is an assistant varsity soccer coach. Meghan oversees our Asian Student association. Jeff used to help with our I'm sorry, Doug used to help with our cybersecurity team. Nicole oversees our parents club, so we're all involved in different ways that are helping students. And by doing so, we're creating those relationships and fostering them so they're willing to help us when we reach out about different things, like promotion. Try to make sure you're promoting your events for two five weeks prior to your day of giving. We do a mailing that goes out that especially a loyalty mailing like you've given the past eight years, make this year ninth, you've given three years consecutively. Make this your fourth. Then we also do little videos that I have shown that try to help tie people back so that they're getting excited not just about giving, but about the entire day. Content is king, and as we all know, especially with creating the show, it's not the easiest to get those 26 groups together to do eight minute segments and then put them all together. So rather than only having that live once for all day holiday, we're going to be cutting up those segments and using them instead of one full piece will be doing two segments each week called the Ocho Rewind so people can go back to watch those two student segments. And then lastly, engage families. Families love to help promote their favorite students. Even neighbors loved to promote their favorite neighborhood kid. So let them help you spread the word and increase your reach by letting them know what's happening. We don't want them drinking from a fire hose because it can be a lot. But pick one or two things that you want for that specific audience to promote. Thank you so much for spending your time with me and if you have any questions, you can find me on LinkedIn as Danielle Lackey or you can email me at Ladki Dee at Calvert Hall Dotcom. Thank you so much for your time. I hope you guys is giving. These are extremely successful and I look forward to seeing all the great things you guys can do in the future. Thank you.

Giving Day

All Day Hall Day

fundraising

donations

social media engagement

video views