Welcome. I'm Marion Couzons, Director of Institutional Advancement at Foxcroft School. And I’m Katherine Murphy Donor Relations and Reunion Coordinator at that school. Today, we are going to share with you a program we created last spring. When faced with the restrictions and effects of the COVID 19 pandemic. We are going to talk to you about our goals and objectives at that time that led to our concept and strategy of a program we call Celebration days. While we will then walk you through the mechanics of implementation and share with you some of our teen and intangible outcomes. But first, we want to share with you who we are. Fast growth school is an all girls boarding day school for grades nine through 12 with the occasional post graduate. We are located in Middleburg, Virginia, which is about 43 minutes outside of Washington, D.C. and we were founded in 1914. We have about 160 students and around 2750 solicitors, all alumnae. I want to take you back at this point to the middle of March, when we were chugging along, fundraising wise, we were on target to meet our goals. We had our fundraising schedules set for the end of the year. We knew where we were traveling to. We knew what our stewardship calls needed to be. It was pretty much business as usual. And then it all came to a screeching halt. At Fast Craft, we had just come off of spring break that Monday, March 16th. We were in a faculty meeting when we got the word they all need to go home, and so began the odyssey of work from home. At first we did nothing as we tried to sort of grasp with this new reality. Fundraising went on hold and we started listening to podcasts, which I'm sure many of you did also. There was some hesitancy in those early days, if you remember, about reaching out to people, although ultimately we did realize that it was a good stewardship for us to do a fast craft reunion was going to happen that next month. And so our first order of business was to decide how we were going to handle that. And that became our first step into producing a virtual event. Our challenge was how were we going to do our job, meet our goals, but do it in a sensitive and empathetic manner. And that led to the question What did our donors need at this time? What role could we play as a school? How could we continue to engage them? How could we connect with them? How could we help them feel connected? How could we bring joy to our constituents? I also heard something that resonated with me in terms of fundraising, and we were all sort of trying to be hands off. But as somebody said, who are we to decide if a donor should give now or not? Isn't that something that the donor should decide? Wasn't it our responsibility to give them the opportunity if they wanted to? But first we had to engage them. And the best way to do that was to ask for their stories during this time and give them a forum to share and connect. We came up with the following criteria of what we needed to do, and that was provide meaningful connection. And this was a time of anxiety, concern and isolation for many a time when being able to engage was something that was familiar and felt comfortable with, something that was familiar and felt comfortable giving options for engagement. We wanted to engage as broad a range of our constituents as possible and maybe actually reach out and connect with some who had not engaged with us before and present opportunities to support. So going back to that concept that it's not our decision whether or not they should give it this time, it's theirs. We wanted to try to open the door there and see what was going to happen. And finally, we wanted to strengthen relationships. We wanted our alumnae to feel pride in their school, to realize we would always be there for them and for them to celebrate their friendships and common bonds. These became our goals and objectives, and they also became the barometer by which we would measure our success with this effort. So we knew all around how we could accomplish this. And out of the many thoughts we had, celebration days was born. Celebration Days was a series of days celebrating the hallmarks of Foxcroft experience. So to create them, we asked ourselves who our audience was. And the answer was All of our constituents, our alumnae, our parents, our past parents, and our students too. We looked at what timing made sense. Originally, the thought was perhaps we would do an event a month and span it over four months, which would take us to the end of our fiscal year. And then we also looked at maybe doing a day to day to day right next to each other. And what we finally settled on was doing one a week over a span of four weeks. And doing that gave us enough time to allow our audience to join in. To have those who were joining in spread the word about what we were doing and encourage others to join. It gave us enough time to curate our content and we could vary our mode of delivery and really try to reach as many people as possible. And finally, we looked at what resources did we have? This was probably the easiest question to answer because our only options, given COVID at this time, were digital. So we looked at using a combination of the following to deliver this experience. Social media, email, video of our website. Virtual events such as Classmates and our People. Our People. Our most valuable resource. Their stories were what about what they were doing during that time with a gel that was going to hold this entire effort together? And as to giving, we started with a very, very soft gift. Ask as sort of participate if you wanted to or would like to. And we culminated the entire experience with a day of giving. So how we did this, Katherine's is going to take you through the mechanics and show you how we really implemented this idea thinking. So first we had to think about what stories we wanted to tell. And that actually was pretty easy because we did what we did was start listening to the alarms that the alumnae and the student and the faculty stories that we were hearing. So when the pandemic first hit, we were really inspired by the actions and the spirit of our community. And we continue to hear about the ways in which they were really taking this challenge on as an opportunity to help others, to learn new things, to care for themselves. And so this idea of storytelling and and stories really started to take shape. We wanted to celebrate this compassion and the resilience of our community. We also wanted to give the rest of our community who we hadn't heard from an opportunity to engage with us. So at first we attempted to fit these stories into our core values respect, integrity, kindness and service. But it wasn't until we really took a step back and truly listened to what we were hearing from our community that we landed on the overarching themes of service, learning and wellness, which are three hallmarks of the experience we wanted at the end of these days. Also to provide a culminating opportunity for everyone to come together as a school, to celebrate what makes our communities so special, to feel connected, and of course, to give them an opportunity to make a gift this fall if they were in place to do so. So we decided to conclude the campaign with a day of celebration and giving, which I'll talk a little bit more about later. Another important factor to all of this is because this campaign was taking place over a four week timeline. We knew it was really important to make sure that our branding was consistent so that our community understood that this was a cohesive campaign. So we developed these icons for each of the days that we overlaid on top of social media posts and emails to help the viewer association. Here are a few examples of some of our social media posts and emails. You'll notice we used a limited branded color palette we use. We created a hashtag Celebrate Foxcroft, and we created a branded landing page on our website that we could continue to link to that not only describe the campaign, but also was a vehicle through which we could reshare. Some of the stories you'll notice as well. On the top of that email is a banner that is an iconic picture for any alumni parent, student, That's the driveway up to campus. So we continued to use that banner on all of our email communications for the campaign. I'm going to talk a little bit about launching this campaign before we get into the details of each of the days. We purposely left a limited lead time. We wanted this to feel fresh and exciting and new, so we didn't send the save the date announcement out until about six days before our first day of celebration. So on April 15th, we had a save the date in our alumnae newsletter and we reached out to our class representatives directly. We sent them an email saying, When you see this, save the date, come along. Could you send out an email to your classmates? Make sure they saw it. We asked them to, of course, participate in celebration days, but also to reshare. We posted a social media post they felt inclined to do. Then on the 17th, we've made this a point to reach out to our reunion alumnae. And this is because, as Marianne said, this was meant to be a reunion weekend. So we wanted to make sure that these alumnae in particular were aware of this opportunity to engage with the school and to engage with one another. Finally, on the 19th of April, we announced to the entire community that we were having celebration days. We did that first with social media and we did that on both the alumnae and school accounts. We also sent an email introducing celebration days. We let everyone know what to expect. We gave them a detailed description of each day and when they were able to tell them when to how to participate, they could do that either by emailing us or tagging us on social media to let us know what they were up to around the themes of learning, wellness and service. We continued to make these calls for engagement throughout the celebration based campaign, and we closely monitored the alumnae in school, social media and email accounts. When we learned of a story that was in need of telling a member of our advancement team, we contacted that constituent to see if, first of all, they were willing to have their story told publicly and if they were willing to give us a little bit more detail in a short interview or just a via email. And then that team member would then write a brief article on that alarm that faculty member and student parent. And those stories will be sure shared out over the course of celebration days. We also reached out directly to our faculty, to our staff, and to our students to hear more about their inspiring moments of service, learning and wellness. One key factor here we made sure to ask for pictures. This was a very visual campaign, so we wanted to make sure we had a picture accompanying each of our stories and we're very pleased. Every constituent that we reached out to was happy to participate. So that was some immediate positive feedback after the launch over a span of four weeks beginning on April 21st. We celebrated a day of service, a day of learning and a day of wellness, culminating, like I said, in our day, in celebration. Giving each of these days was celebrated on Tuesday or Wednesday, which gave us enough time to publicize the upcoming day and to send a recap once the day had passed. So this is an example of our communications schedule for the day of service, and we repeated the same communication schedule for each of the three days. We changed things up for the celebration day, a day of giving, which I'll talk about afterwards. So the first thing that we did was the day before our day of service and sent out a reminder saying Tomorrow's day of service, please follow us on social media. We made a call for participation, a reminder about the future celebration days and a call for support. And as Marianne mentioned, this was kind of a soft ask along the lines of if you are in a position to help the school meet our funding goals during these challenging times, etc., etc.. We also echoed all of this messaging on social media. Then the day of service arrived and we sent out an email in the morning. Today is a day of service with a link to the celebration landing page. Again, a call for participation and support. And this included some story teasers. These were stories that we had heard gathered ahead of time via social media posts or students or faculty. For example, we had an alumni post in the alumnae Facebook page that she was selling masks. So we've reached out to her ahead of time and written a piece on her. We knew one of our students had brought her horse to a senior living facility to brighten their day and a local paper had written a piece. So we knew purpose some of that information and had that article ready. And of course, like I said, we we shared these messages over social media as well. So some of the images from our reflected examples of service and those were shared over both the school account and on the accounts. Then we had a follow up email go out, which celebrated the close of the day of service and it shared some of the community submissions. It linked to the landing page. Send reminder for the next celebration day and had a call for support. And again, this messaging was in social media. You'll notice that we waited a day to send the follow up email. And so this was the we had time to compile those community submissions we had received and to be able to share them out. Now, we didn't write articles on each of these submissions for the follow up email because that turnaround would have been way too tight. But members of our team did follow up on some of the submissions and write pieces on them to share out later in our community quilt, which I'll talk about. So here are a couple examples of some of our communications. These are all from the day of learning. On the left is an example of a question that we posted on our Instagram story to ask people what they were up to, what they were reading. In the center is a social media post of one of the stories we collected ahead of time that we were able to share out on a day of learning. This one was a video of a parent explaining how to make the best baguette. And on the right is an example of our follow up email. You'll see those little pictures for the story. The submission kind recap there. So on the day of celebration and giving the we wanted to be able to share stories that celebrated this school and the unique foxcroft experience as well as donor stories, and provide an opportunity to connect, to celebrate what makes our community so special. We also wanted to give everyone a chance to make a gift to remember. This was May. Usually we have a spring giving day, so while we wanted to be sensitive, we also felt it was important to ask and let our constituents decide what was best for them. So the day before this day of celebration and giving someone email, tomorrow is a day of celebration and giving a call for participation or asking our community members to tell us what does that mean to you? And in this time we did a more direct ask because it was a day of giving and we echoed this messaging on social media. Now, I'm going to get into the communication strategy a little bit. And it was like I mentioned, different than the previous three days, and that was for a reason. This was our finale. This was our culminating day. We wanted there to be a bit more of a flurry of stories and outreach and outreach to draw attention in to the day and to engage as many people as possible. So as you can see, we were working through working with three different avenues of communication. We had our email, we had our social media accounts and our alumnae social media accounts, and you'll see we repurposed some stories across several different avenues with emails and social media posts hitting approximately every 1 to 2 hours, with a few exceptions, to diversify our content. And depending on the subject of the article, not all of the stories were shared on all of the avenues, but these stories were ones that highlighted the Foxcroft experience, the community and the donors that keep our schools strong. So here are a few examples of the kind of communications we sent out on our day of celebration and giving. On the left is an Instagram post of a donor story, one of our alumnae who spoke about why she felt it was important to contribute to our annual fund and alongside it, a call for support and direction to view her whole article in the link in our bio. And on the right is an example of the format that we use for each of the emails to see. Each of these emails included a short blurb from the article, a link to the full article, a quote from the article. And it also had an ask that was specific to the content of the story. So, for example, Vicki Vicki's piece discussed how she was witnessing her daughter Tess become her best self at Foxcroft. So the ask was if you are able, we invite you to support girls becoming your best selves with a gift in Foxtrot Circle, which is our annual fund. At the end of the day, our social committee of the Alumnae Council also decided they would like to host a Foxcroft trivia happy hour that was just for alumnae and it was a really fun way to bring those days together. So going into these celebration days, this whole campaigning, we knew that we would be collecting and sharing a lot of inspiring and important stories in a very short period of time. So we knew we had to have a place where we could collect these stories and reshare them. We also wanted to have a place where those stories that we'd written based off of community submissions throughout the course of the days of celebration, where those could be shared as well. And we kind of wanted to stitch together, weave together all of these remarkable moments of service learning, wellness and school pride that we've collected from our community and have a somewhat of a community quilt, if you will, where we could showcase all of this work. So we shared out this culminating quilt in our follow of email from Celebration days and Giving. So we shared an email with a with the link to the quilt. We thanked everyone for participating and giving. Let them know you're still accepting gifts in honor of the day and celebration and giving. And we echoed that messaging in our social media posts as well. This is just to give you an example of what the social media or what the community quilt looks like. You can access it online if you like, but you'll see that for each of the days, it had its own section and each section was made up of nine different stories, quotes, images. You'll notice at the bottom left we included a giving button that as soon as you open the landing page, that is one of the blocks that you can see can't go through all of the stories that I wanted to highlight, six of them for you, just to give you some ideas of what you might be able to do at your own school. So on the left we actually repurposed a faculty blog by our assistant head of school for Academics, and we wrote an article based off of her blog in the Center. We this is just some feel good fun. We had our trainers from the barn send us really cute pictures of one of the beloved barn cats left doing different stretches and giving quote unquote, relaxation techniques to our students during these stressful times. So we really did have our whole school participating in this. On the right is that story I mentioned that our alum, Hattie, had shared in the alumnae Facebook group and we had reached out to her and got this beautiful picture and wrote a piece on her efforts. On the left, you'll see this is an article you wrote about one of our alumnae who had really motivated her class to give. This was the See Our reunion weekend. So we did want to highlight reunion giving with one of reunion giving campaign up through the through March. So we wanted to make sure we closed that out strong in the center is one of our students who submitted a video of her explaining static electricity for one of her assignments. And we repurposed that and share that out with everyone with her permission. And on the right, you'll see this is courageous conversations is kind of a cornerstone event for us. We host about four times a year. It's an event in which alumnae and students get together to discuss really importance of challenging topics. And this time we focused on mental health for a day of wellness. We recorded the event and then wrote a piece based off of that. So this was a lot of work, but it really engaged every segment of our community and we felt it was a real success because we did meet our objectives that we set out at the beginning. Q Catherine, I want to just go over for a second our outcomes. We do have specific numbers that are associated with what our engagement levels were and obviously what we raised, etc., and I'm happy to share those with you all if you would like them. But all of us are coming from different schools and we have different levels of digital engagement. And so what may seem like a big outcome to us could be very small to you all. So instead of focusing on those numbers, I really wanted to just focus on sort of more general observations about our success. The first thing we found that there was an increased level of engagement across all social media platforms. The first day was the least amount of engagement, and by the time we hit the day of giving our engagement had grown proportionately each day. The second thing is that this effort enabled us to cultivate and sort a new group of individuals, which, if you remember back we talked about with this, opened the door to people who hadn't been engaged before. I don't know if you've seen this in your schools, but we now have alum who had not been connected to the school, but being able to sign on to a digital event or being able to share their stories was something that really engage them and connected them to this effort. The third outcome is it allowed us to open the door on giving, which was, as you remember, one of our goals. We knew we needed to continue fundraising. That's our mission. That's what in our advancement offices we need to do. And the celebration enabled us to take a temperature reading of where people's tolerance was at this time for talking about and participating in giving. And I think it dampened some of the fear, anxiety and concern that we as development professionals have about engaging with people on a topic such as money at a time when there are a lot of things happening in different families that are out of their control. And then the quilt, the quilt created for us a flexible format. This is a framework that we now can add stories to. We can add videos to. You know, Catherine, I showed you the the examples of all the opportunities we have, and this was something that we could repurpose and we did repurpose it. We put it in our magazine and we put it on our Web site. And lastly, this allowed our alumnae to open conversations, which each year with each other at a time that they were feeling anxiety, loneliness, and we could do it in a way that one allowed them to engage to. We could provide a safe space because they were all united by a common bond. We could provide a safe space for them to have deeper conversations, conversations about their emotional well-being, about activities, some of their concerns, some of their frustrations. And that was a way that people started to come back and realize what an important role the school played in their lives. Another thing that you don't really think about, but when we look back is this was a month after we were told to go work remote, and so it challenged us to work more efficiently and effectively as a remote team. So the work and the coordination of this effort helped us learn what we needed to do to communicate as a team. It acknowledged that we could work well and that be productive remotely and and it engaged our entire team. Everybody had a role in this. And lastly, it opened our eyes to looking for other creative and effective ways for reaching out to our love and the digital platform. Finally, reunited pride in the school during this time that has carried through and carried forward to today. It gave us a chance to bring people together in celebration of who we are, and it allowed us to reaffirm our values and educate our alumnae on the school. Today, while also really cementing for everyone our commitment to our mission, which is to give voice to girls and give them the confidence and ability to share that voice with the world. So out of the stories that our alumnae shared and the engagement that they shared, we had a theme emerge. Our founder, who has many, many wonderful quotes, used the words that could give the world great women. And the stories that we saw over celebration days were the stories of great women. They were the stories of of people doing extraordinary things and really inspiring others and providing levels of connection and comfort at this time. So we took that theme and we've moved it forward to this year, and we continue to celebrate the stories of our great women and inspire them then to connect back to the school and with each other. So we are grateful for you to be here. Thank you so much. And we have put up on the slides our contact information. Please reach out. There hopefully are parts of this that you may be able to adapt to your school and we are happy to talk with you, work through this and we'd love to hear how you might be using some of this. So again, thank you.

Celebration Days

COVID-19 pandemic

engagement

digital platforms

community

donors