#givingweek

Our Giving Week is starting to come together. The campaign video is finished and the proofs came back from the mailing house yesterday. I am buzzing with the excitement of it all. This is certainly the part of the campaign I love the most. 

We have continually needed to adapt this campaign to the rapidly changing circumstances of the time.  It was announced last week that none of our pupils will be returning to campus this term. This is really. hard for teaching staff and pupils and a huge amount of time and energy had gone into making preparations for  possible return. 

This has given the need for a virtual end of term celebration. (In steps our giving week)We now have a week of celebrations with 36 hours of fundraising in the middle of it, rounded off by an end of term assembly. This has meant that we now have more involvement from the Comms team and the Head as well as involvement from our pupils. In a normal jam packed summer term staff and pupil involvement in the campaign would have been minimal but now we will everyone’s attention. 

The prefects are organising a virtual inter-house competition which we are incorporating into our giving week and we have now got help from the comms team in producing content for the campaign which is great. 

The agency that we are working with on our giving week told me this week that we are the only people who haven’t postponed their summer fundraising campaign. All the other schools and universities they work with are postponing until at least September. 

Does everyone else know something we don’t? Are we just really lucky that the timing of ours has worked out? Well in part we are. This time last year I had just finished recruiting the callers for our telephone campaign and I think it is safe to say that a telephone campaign at the moment would be almost impossible. There are a lot less logisitics involved in a giving week and crucially it is online!

Our giving week has certainly started to change into more than just a fundraising campaign. When I first discussed the idea with my Manager and Director 12 months ago the concept of a giving week was to engage a younger cohort of alumni into supporting the school. I had looked at the demographics of regular givers and only 10% were under 40 where as 40% of the people that had attended one of our events were under 40. The numbers spoke for themselves. 

Although our primary aim is still to engage our younger alumni and hopefully convert a few of them into donors, our giving week is also an opportunity to bring together our school at time when they are physically apart. Our pupils are all at home and lessons have moved online, and I know that many of them are missing their friends and normal school life. I have been planning content about our different boarding houses since the beginning of the year, so it is a chance to share some fantastic stories and get our pupils involved in a way that the usual timetable would never have allowed. 

New Year is often a time for reflection as well as looking forward. In the run-up to Christmas and since coming back into the office I have been working on our annual report. At every organisation I have worked for, the annual report/annual accounts are a fantastic tool to shout about what your organisation is doing well as well as talking about your plans for the future. Here the annual report is a fairly meaty affair. It focuses on five stories written by a guest editor. The theme this year is ‘sustainability’ which I think rather conveniently reflects the main aim I have for our regular giving programme.

Regular giving on its own doesn’t always raise huge sums of money. Particularly when compared to our very successful major donor programme. A regular giving programme does, however, have the potential to provide a sustainable source of income to your organisation. Currently, our regular givers collectively donate the equivalent of four full bursaries a year, their impact is significant and provides a stable and sustainable source of income to the school. 

Looking forward to 2020 we are embracing a brand new kind of fundraising, our first giving week. Next week, I have the first planning meeting with the agency we are working with, and so I have been looking at what we want to achieve. The main focus for us is new donors. Although our regular giving programme is established, there is definitely room to grow, only 25% of our active records have ever given, only 11% have ever given regularly and only 2% are current active regular givers.