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We use ToucanTech and I am very happy with it. We looked at Salesforce (amongst other systems) and ruled it out because it wasn’t designed for purpose, it looked like being too much hard work to set up, and we were concerned that because school fundraising is such a tiny part of their business that we would never be prioritised for any system enhancements. In contrast, ToucanTech was specifically designed for school fundraising and community engagement and we have always felt like their full priority. Customer service has always been excellent, the interface is simple and mostly intuitive, and I have all the functionality I require. Happy to chat if you would like a more in-depth discussion.
Best wishes
PaulPaul Dennett
Director of Development, Queenwood SchoolHi Andrew
I have a donor stewardship matrix which sets out donor recognition against different levels of gift, and would be happy to share this. We still don’t have a huge number of donors and it might need tweaking, but hopefully it will prove to be reasonably close to the mark. If you can email me your contact details at paul.dennett@queenwood.nsw.edu.au I’ll send that over to you. I’ve not looked into donor boards yet so have nothing helpful to share on that, I’m afraid.
Best wishes
PaulHi Peter
I introduced both of these at Queenwood last year and am happy to share them. Just drop me a line to let me know the best address to email them to.
Best wishes
Paul
Paul Dennett
paul.dennett@queenwood.nsw.edu.au
04 6606 8327Hi Ben
I gather that we had a go with alumna-student mentoring back in 2008, connecting Y11-12 students’ parents to an alumna volunteer. We had about 40 alumnae sign-up but only c.3 students pursue the opportunity, so it petered out, more due to a lack of demand rather than a shortage of willing volunteers. However, I imagine current students will be a bit hungrier for career advice, and also that the arrival of Zoom etc would mean it would be more likely to take hold today, just by making connecting so much easier.
Once we have our new CRM (ToucanTech) up and running we plan on making full use of it’s mentoring functionality, but for alumna-alumna connections. This should avoid some of the complications surrounding the extra levels of safety measures needed when connecting adult-child.
I hope that’s helpful, but Donna Hughes would be very happy to chat with you if you would like any further detail.
Best wishes
Paul
PS let’s catch up over coffee again sometime soon!
Hi Jacqui
Great that you are thinking about scaling this up. A number of the schools I worked with in the UK had their biggest gifts come as bequests from former staff. Anecdotally, it also appears that bringing former staff back for events helps encourage alumni who they taught to come along too… as long as they weren’t the scary teacher who was too quick to hand out detentions!
Best wishes
Paul (Queenwood School)
Hi Merryn,
As we are still in start-up mode, I’ll talk in general terms from my experiences at other organisations and as a consultant. I don’t think there is total agreement about what constitutes best practice, but to me it sounds like you are already pretty much there in terms of what I’d consider to be the best overall structure.
Separate Foundations create extra work and costs (compliance, reporting, administration, auditing) and can also create a risk of misalignment between the priorities of your Board/Executive and those of the Foundation trustees. I’ve had direct experience at a former employer of a multi-million dollar bequest nearly being hijacked and distributed to other organisations by trustees wanting to exercise their independence. So I am 100% behind the decision you took to dissolve yours. In contrast, the School Committee model gives the Board full control over the funds, ensuring alignment with their strategy. It also makes you more nimble, smoothing the way to make changes to the Committee structure and composition, if for example a new appointment doesn’t work out as planned.
I’ve found that issues have been mostly likely to arise where there has been a lack of clarity about the role of those serving on committees. In particular it helps to make a very clear distinction between governance versus fundraising roles (reinforced by explicit Terms of Reference and by strong ongoing Chairing, to prevent drift). It’s quite hard to find individuals who can operate at both levels effectively and simultaneously. I’ve found it much easier to find people comfortable playing an ‘oversight’ role, and more challenging finding those willing to roll-up their sleeves and play an active part in fundraising. Where you have a mixed group, the ‘doers’ can get frustrated with other members who they feel aren’t pulling their weight, and may in turn become less inclined to help. Unfortunately I’ve yet to see the reverse happen, where the doers inspire the others to play a more active role!
Consequently, you may even look to have as many as three ‘committees’ within the school involved in supporting fundraising:
1. The School Board (or a sub-committee) – responsible for strategic oversight and review; consisting primarily or exclusively School Board members
2. A Fundraising Committee (aka Campaign Board etc) – responsible for giving and getting, including peer-to-peer asking and fundraising event organisation; comprising primarily of parents and alumni
3. A Development Advisory Committee – responsible for being a sounding board and source of intelligence for the Director of Development, and for championing fundraising among their peers to help build a culture of philanthropy within the school; comprising a mix of teaching and support staff, plus potentially a couple of students.
I hope these thoughts are helpful, and look forward to seeing what others experiences have been. Give me a call if you want to delve deeper into any of this – it’s all very much on mind right now as we need to settle on our own way forward!
Best wishes, Paul
Director of Development, Queenwood SchoolHi Jacqui
We used to give the departing Y12s rings, but this year went for a book of poetry with a specially produced, branded binding and inserts. Our alumnae association also gave them keyrings.
Best wishes, PaulThanks 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.
Just as a quick update in case anyone was interested…
…I successfully made the case for including a credit card donation option on our printed donation forms, and tested this in our EOFY hardship appeal. The appeal was primarily print based, with a reminder email also sent to just under half the alumnae. The card option on the printed form has turned out to be the equal most popular way of giving alongside direct bank transfers. We have also received more gifts compared to the previous year’s EOFY appeal, though with so many other variables at play I wouldn’t want to draw any conclusions the effect the new giving option had on that.
Hi Steven
If you have the option, I recommend against creating separately incorporated alumni associations and foundations. My reasoning boils down to:
i. Separate entities increase bureaucracy, meaning volunteers spend time preparing reports and registrations when they could be progressing initiatives to benefit your school. There are also additional financial costs e.g. audit preparation.
ii. Even if you have a great bunch of volunteers right now, there will almost inevitably come a time when cracks appear between the views of the leaders of these entities and the leadership of the school. This can become very time-consuming and stressful to resolve. I have worked in/advised several institutions where this had become a major issue, and where further time and resource was then needed to wind up the independent bodies.
iii. In 25 years I only recall one scenario where an independently incorporated foundation offered a material benefit over what could be achieved by operating fundraising and alumni relations within the school apparatus: a university that found this to be the only way it could sidestep restrictions on the salaries and employment contracts that they wanted to offer their development team. I imagine there must be some further benefits, but I haven’t observed them yet!
I’m also not a fan of charging a fee for membership of an alumni association unless there really is no other way to find the funds to get started. If a school is serious about development, I believe it needs to commit to resourcing it properly. Certainly the data from UK benchmarking shows an incredibly strong relationship between the levels and consistency of investment against fundraising performance. I’ve not seen data on alumni relations but it doesn’t seem too great a leap of imagination to conclude that the impact is similar. If development is recognised as strategically valuable to a school and is expected to return a positive ROI (not necessarily just counted in direct financial terms), it seems logical for the school to directly invest.
Charging for membership of an alumni association creates a barrier to participation in your school community, assuming that those who don’t pay get reduced communication and opportunities to participate, I don’t believe the revenue from membership fees will end up being worth the costs of finding and re-engaging these alumni down the line, nor the missed opportunities along the way to benefit from their advocacy, volunteering and philanthropy.
I’ll be interested to hear alternative experiences and perspectives though, so hope you get some more replies!
Paul
Paul Dennett
Director of Development
Queenwood SchoolI would be interested in this topic too – we have our Centenary approaching.
Thanks
Paul
Paul Dennett, Queenwood SchoolThanks for all your efforts with this Neil – I’ll certainly ask our Principal to help.
Best wishes
PaulGood to see the announcement that “Educate Plus, in partnership with AHISA and ASBA, has submitted a request to the Government for DGR guidelines for tax deductible donations to be altered to provide a ‘Student Hardship’ Fund which could receive tax deductible donations to support families in need and keep their children in their current independent schools.”
Whilst we await the results of that request, I’ve had further legal advice that we can accept tax-deductible donations for fee relief via our Scholarships Fund, through an appropriately worded Bursary charter. We have a draft Charter under review and I will provide an update once we know that is definitely okay legally, and also acceptable to our Governors.
I have also been advised from other sources that – separate to this request – there is lobbying underway to simplify DGR for schools, to unify the separate Scholarships, Capital, and Library Funds into a single DGR Fund. Presumably if the Educate Plus submission is successful, the Hardship Fund would be rolled in too.
Incidentally, I understand that the proposal would also allow for the new unified fund to incorporate provisions equivalent to those of a Necessitous Circumstances Fund (to allow tax-deductible donations to assist, for example, alumni who have fallen on hard times). However, I’m not sure how that would sit with the Education Act 83C requirement that all expenditure be directly related to the school’s normal operations.
