Your Case for Support is one of the core elements of any fund-raising campaign, whether it is for annual, capital, or major gifts. This marketing tool communicates with donors and prospects, and begins the process of matching their values and interests with your school’s mission and guiding principles. Donors give and continue to give when they know that their gifts will make a difference and that their gifts are used as intended.

ISM surveyed a random sample of Development Directors from our I&P subscriber schools; 157 responded (139 full-time and 18 part-time).1 This article reports on the responses of the 139 full-time Directors. Based on this survey, this article focuses on their satisfaction with their compensation and the competition that private-independent schools face in hiring and retaining Development Directors.

As the School Head or Director of Development of a small private-independent school, you must ensure that you provide your donors with the services and opportunities that will maximize their giving potential. If you’ve built donor-centered programs based on ISM’s Comprehensive Development Model, and you are prepared to listen to your donors and to respond to their charitable needs, then you are ready for gift planning. This is the process of designing gift strategies that fit their personal financial and philanthropic circumstances.

Aegis Academy, I&P’s fictional coed, K-12 day school, has carefully prepared for a capital campaign. The school has been successfully cultivating donors for years. The Board’s feasibility study advised a $20 million goal. The top donors have been identified and it is estimated that the top gift will come in at 20% of the campaign total, $4 million.

Of the administrative offices at most private-independent day schools, the Development Office gets the most attention from your school’s Trustees. They tend to view this office as the (imagined or actual) source of all soft revenue—they know the dollar figure well and often (mistakenly) regard it as the most inviting source for alleviating tuition pressures on a parent body. As a result, Boards tend to scrutinize Development Office performance in ways that go well beyond the attention given comparable offices on your campus. The School Head may want, first, to consider the twin errors into which many Trustees fall when engaging in such scrutiny, and, second, to reorganize the Development Office functionally—not necessarily structurally – to conform more closely to the implications of the pertinent ISM Stability Marker™.1

The central philanthropic duty of Board members—each member’s personal involvement in giving to the school and securing resources from others—is often unclear to Trustees, particularly those members who are new to the Board. ISM frequently hears comments like the following.

In December 2006, new federal rules went into effect concerning the sharing of electronic documents during the discovery phase of litigation. In brief, the rules require parties involved in federal lawsuits to produce “electronically stored information” prior to trial. While sharing of electronic documents prior to trial has become commonplace in recent years, the new rules codify the practice, as well as require that the documents be provided in a timely and efficient manner.

Strategic plans focus on the viability-related issues implicit in school finance, governance, and management. To meet ISM’s criteria for strategic plans, the planning document items must (1) display cost estimates, (2) indicate projected revenue sources, (3) be sequenced by year of expected implementation, and (4) be charged to a responsible person or entity.

A donor-centered approach to development focuses on relationship management—the process by which schools identify, cultivate, solicit, recognize, and steward donors and prospects to establish and nurture relationships and to raise funds and other resources. This approach puts new responsibility on those who are most accountable for defining and selling the school’s vision and strategic direction.

In a previous article, ISM stated that the goal of a Parent Education Plan (PEP) is to move today’s parents from a "contract" mentality to a "sense of community" mentality. It is important to understand the precise meaning of the phrase “sense of community” before attempting to implement an effective PEP. Though possessing several programmatic elements, a strong PEP focuses on augmenting and facilitating a healthy parent culture. This culture (more than the various programmatic elements) will draw parents into a closer orbit around your school.