One of the prime responsibilities of the Board of Trustees is to provide strong and consistent stewardship of the school’s assets. Your school’s nonprofit (501)(c)(3) status with the Internal Revenue Service and its good name in the community are two examples of non-tangible assets that must be preserved. If your school loses either or both of these assets, its position could weaken drastically, moving you into murky, uncharted waters.

One of second-tier markers of the ISM Stability Markers® is “demand in excess of supply.” While it would be desirable for every grade to be described this way, ISM has always viewed this Marker as critical when it describes the situation at the school’s traditional “entry” grades (e.g., pre-kindergarten, sixth, ninth)—the first grade of the school and the grade(s) where it expands, either through attrition or by design, the number of seats available for new students.

Mrs. Smith, who has been the Administrative Assistant for the School Head for the last 10 years, is overseeing the sign-in table on “Parents Night” for the ninth year. Once again, she will not be paid for this activity. It began innocently in 2001, when the school was much smaller, and she said, “I can help out tonight.” Since then, there has developed an expectation by the Head and the faculty that she will continue to “volunteer” each year for the event.

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.