How is your current appeal going (May 2020?)

[Paul Dennett]

I’ve been asked to co-present a session at the IDPE virtual conference in June. The theme for the session is likely to be along the lines of “can we ask at a time like this?”. IDPE is sort of the British version of Educate Plus: the Institute of Development Professionals in Education. A director from a UK school (St Albans) will talk about the successful launch of their new fund, and the organisers are interested in hearing an international perspective.

Our appeal mails over the coming days – now we have our tax-deductible gift fund in place – so I will report on how that goes. However, we are a small girls day school just getting started with fundraising, so I wouldn’t have expected a massive response from an alumnae direct mail appeal even at the best of times. It would therefore be immensely helpful to be able to reference some additional examples from Australia or New Zealand. I know from recent Educate Plus webinars that lots of other schools have been planning appeals, and I would be extremely grateful if anyone would be willing to share with me any ideas, anecdotes or data on how these are going?

Many thanks

Paul

Paul Dennett
Director of Development, Queenwood School
paul.dennett@queenwood.nsw.edu.au
+614 6606 8327

[Paul Dennett]

Thanks to those of you who shared your experiences privately with me.

I promised to provide an update on how our appeal went: we still have a few late gifts coming in, but so far we have response rates for the printed direct mail letter of 0.4% from alumnae and 1.6% from parents, which are clearly modest but not unexpected given the early stage we are at. These are still up some ways on the pilot appeal last year despite the current challenging economic climate. We are also in the process of closing a bigger gift from a current family that was prompted by the appeal, which ought to take us to a total of about $50k. I will be giving a more complete update in an IDPE podcast later in the year, as a follow-up to the session I co-hosted at last month’s ‘IDPE Live’ conference.

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