DEVELOPMENT
FRIENDRAISING
EXTENDING THE DONOR BASE BY INCREASING PARTICIPATION Henry Cosh recalls a financially successful fundraising campaign driven by a desire to make friends and increase participation.
W
hen we set out on a community-wide fundraising campaign in early 2020 at Radley, I must admit that we were a little nervous. For the last 5 years, our development function had been mostly a major gifts operation – with about £1.7m raised each year and an average gift size of £10,000 from a select few high-networth individuals. For this campaign – for bursaries and to fund the extension of the Chapel – we wanted to shift our focus: this was to be all about increasing participation. We had two years and an 805 donor target – a far cry from our annual 170. A tall order! We are incredibly lucky at Radley to have a 7,000-strong alumni community that is passionately loyal to the school. Up until this point, most community engagement came through the Radleian Society’s communications and event programme. Meanwhile, the Foundation only wrote to select groups on an ad-hoc basis, and any regular giving programme was virtually non-existent – so awareness of what we do was low. But there was a great opportunity to build on. It was clear from the outset that any community-wide fundraising campaign would mean engaging with all of our 38 | schoolmanagementplus.com | Summer 2022
alumni, parents, staff and friends in ways we had not done so before.
The campaign basics
The key features of the community-wide campaign were: • Two calendar years – 1st January 2020 – 31st December 2021 • Target of 805 donors (the number of seats in the extended Chapel) • Unpublicised target of £2 million • Two funds – Chapel extension and endowed bursary fund; donors could choose one or both
Building the culture of giving
Where were we to begin? We clearly knew that a soft fundraising message (as opposed to ‘hard asks’) would have to be woven into ever t in o r office i One piece we are really pleased with is the short series ‘Foundation Conversations’. This consisted of recorded Zoom conversations between the Warden (Headmaster) and a mix of donors to, or eneficiarie of, o r f n e place programme. Some were young, some old, some in the UK, some abroad, some alumni, some parents. These conversations were lighthearted discussions about the school, the
Foundation, and what they mean to each of us. We had a few starter questions – ‘Why do you donate to Radley?’ or ‘What has a bursary meant to you?’, for example an t en we let t e conver ation ow naturally. This was then edited down to a 10-minute video and shared to all in the community via email and social media. The best part about the conversations was their authenticity – they weren’t a polished, glossy, lauding of the school and its fundraising. It was just a group of people, chatting away about something important to all of them. And it cost practically nothing. The series also marked, for me as a fundraiser, an unusual way of measuring success. I found myself trawling through Google Analytics, looking at clicks, watch times, bounce rates, all to better understand how our community responded to our content. We better understood their behaviour and it altered what we did next.
Speaking on a level
Getting the soft message right was vital. But we also needed donations! I mentioned authenticity, and this idea was mirrored in our approach to asks. One piece I remember warmly was a short video asking for support for funded places which was to be shared with the whole community. What made it exciting was that this was led by current students and a couple of younger alumni, with just a little creative input (and sense checking!) from o r office e cript, actor , ca era en and editing all came from the students. The result was a two-minute video that I can only describe as ‘jazzy’. With jokes, laughs and just the right amount of chaos, the students effectively communicated the case for support, the importance of the funded places programme and confi entl a e o r al ni for pport t wa rilliant or t e fir t ti e, onor were being solicited without the formal, corporate voice of t e office ettin in t e way. Current students were directly asking former students to chip in and help out. To share this, we decided to avoid email. Following the analytics from the Foundation Conversations series, we had
