Building a Holistic Private School Fundraising Strategy

Private and independent schools are complex, highly diverse organizations. So are their fundraising needs. 

Between dealing with overhead costs, launching new student programs, and making capacity investments, there’s always something that needs support. Schools have to be incredibly adaptive and responsive to sustain growth over time.

For educational institutions, a holistic fundraising strategy will work best to help you reach your goals. Why? And how can you begin improving your current fundraising practices to support your school in the long run? Let’s take a look.

How Private School Fundraising Works

What stands out about private schools’ funding needs? By understanding the landscape and why a holistic approach will be most effective, you’ll be better equipped to lay out the right strategy for your unique school.

First, consider tuition and the critical role it plays in funding for most schools. The average private school relies on tuition for around 84% of its overall budget. For many schools, this reliance on tuition is dangerously high. 

Relying too much on a single revenue source leaves any organization open to risk. If tuition drops for any reason, the impacts on a school’s operations are unnecessarily amplified. A holistic and well-diversified fundraising strategy directly combats this risk by creating a variety of fundraising channels that a school can rely on to bolster its total mix of funding sources.

Many schools, especially larger ones, structure their overall fundraising efforts within an advancement or development department rather than treating it haphazardly on an as-needed basis. This provides the infrastructure for more intentional and sustained fundraising methods. Universities and other large institutions take this approach, as well, but yours can (and should) be scaled to your needs.

Then, as fundraising kicks off and support begins to increase from various channels, the incoming funds are sorted and allocated to various purposes. Fundraising campaigns may be conducted for very specific purposes, or a donor may give a large gift for a specific purpose, meaning these gifts are restricted. Unrestricted gifts raised from individual donors, annual giving campaigns, planned gifts, and more can be used for general operating purposes or put into an unrestricted endowment.

Key Outcomes of an Effective School Development Strategy

What does a robust private school fundraising strategy need to accomplish? Consider these objectives:

• Diversifying revenue streams
• Supporting immediate capital goals, if a campaign is underway or in the works
• Generating sustained pipelines of restricted and unrestricted funding

These are broad objectives, so effective strategies will be fairly far-ranging. But by accomplishing them, a school positions itself to thrive in the long run. Diverse revenue streams that help fund immediate goals and maintain full pipelines for long-term fundraising will fuel stability and growth in ways that an ad hoc or overly narrow approach can’t.

Building this kind of fundraising framework represents a sizable (but important) investment of time and resources. If your school needs to seriously upgrade its fundraising operations, keep in mind that you can start small. As long as you roughly follow the steps below and adapt them to your unique circumstances, you’ll be on the right path.

Improving your Private School Fundraising Strategy: 9 Steps

1. Understand the tiers of a school fundraising strategy.

First, think about the different components of a robust development approach and how they fit into one another. Consider the various ongoing and annual fundraising tasks that schools commonly conduct. Here’s a sample timeline from Graham-Pelton’s school fundraising guide to illustrate them:

• In this timeline, we see that annual campaigns occur each year to raise general unrestricted funding. 
• During this 10-year sample period, a capital campaign occurs halfway through—this major undertaking will raise an especially large amount of money to fund a package of specific capital investments. 
• Throughout the period, special fundraising events also occur, either standalone or related to annual or capital campaigns. 
• Over the whole process, the school’s advancement team secures gifts and commitments from individual major donors on an ongoing basis. During the capital campaign, their efforts will shift to support the campaign’s goals.

This sample timeline is relatively full, and every school’s mix of fundraising activities will look different. The main takeaway is that they occur in harmony, tackling short-term and long-term needs and shifting to support one another as needed.

2. Audit your current activities and fundraising programs.

Take a close look at your school’s current fundraising operations. Which of the different tiers discussed above do you currently conduct or prioritize?

We’ll more closely review the performance of different activities below, but for now, analyze the topline numbers of your development program:

• How much do you raise a year on average?
• What is your total annual operating budget?
• Are your fundraising activities currently meeting your needs?
• What are your current revenue sources, and how much of your budget does each account for?

Use this information to get a big-picture understanding of your current state and reveal immediate gaps, like over reliance on a single revenue stream or frequency of budget shortfalls.

3. Determine any major campaign priorities.

Now begin thinking through the “layers” of your school’s fundraising priorities, starting with the biggest campaigns you might anticipate, capital campaigns.

Has your school already been considering a capital campaign to fund needed renovations or expansions? If not, do you anticipate needing to fund those kinds of improvements within the next several years? 

Either way, it’s a good idea to plan ahead. Knowing that you’ll conduct a capital campaign within the timeframe of this new iteration of your fundraising strategy allows you to make improvements and set goals with that big project in mind from the start.

Remember that many nonprofits take the opportunity of a capital campaign to invest in their fundraising infrastructure, both to support the immediate campaign and to sustain more advanced fundraising work once the campaign ends. These investments might include starting an endowment, creating a planned giving program, upgrading their technology, and more. If you want to tackle any of these improvements for your school, building them into your upcoming capital campaign strategy and fundraising goal can be a smart move.

4. Review your annual fundraising performance.

After your longer-term capital goals, consider your shorter-term fundraising needs. How effectively does your school raise unrestricted annual funding each year? How much of your operating budget does annual fundraising make up?

If you over-rely on tuition as a revenue stream and/or encounter budget shortfalls, your annual fundraising capabilities could likely use improvement. 

Take a look at your current annual fundraising practices and start thinking about ways to take them to the next level. These may include improving your communications or record-keeping processes, hosting new types of events, and building in extras like matching gift appeals, recurring donation programs, and other new revenue streams.

5. Review your development performance.

Does your school currently solicit major gifts, either as an ongoing activity or as part of any big campaigns you conduct? If not, take steps to start an intentional development process.

Major gift fundraising should include processes to support the entire lifecycle:

• Prospect identification and research
• Relationship cultivation
• Customized gift solicitations
• Ongoing donor stewardship and retention

Building a continuous pipeline and maintaining strong relationships with your most impactful donors is particularly important for schools. Students are only with you for a short time, but your relationships with their families can last much longer. 

If you’ll be conducting a capital campaign, the feasibility study process will help you more deeply analyze your development practices and pipeline to identify improvements, but you can also do this at any time.

6. Prioritize areas for improvement or investment.

Looking back through everything you’ve uncovered so far, make a list of all the improvements you want to make to your fundraising operations. 

Try to prioritize these improvements. Consider their urgency, potential time frames, and whether they might be combined into the burst of investment that would come with an upcoming capital campaign. 

This is a step where the help of a fundraising expert with experience in independent school environments may be particularly helpful. Schools revamping their fundraising practices likely don’t yet have the staff and strategic know-how to confidently prioritize these improvements or implement them later.

7. Lay out a strategic plan and timeline.

Take your prioritized list of fundraising improvements and combine them into a more thorough strategy and timeline. This will serve as your roadmap for implementing the changes, planning for upcoming objectives, and keeping it all running smoothly over time.

Of course, logistics can get tricky here, so organization and delegation are key, as you might encounter all kinds of overlapping timeframes and responsibilities as you dig into your strategy. Committee structures within a dedicated development office will serve you best. Additionally, a robust fundraising CRM and an organized prospect portfolio system for major donor fundraising will be essential as the scope of your activities grows. 

8. Plan any standalone events and mini-campaigns.

Looking at your big-picture strategy, find the spots where you’ll need to plan (annual or capital) campaign events or supplement slow periods with standalone mini-campaigns. For schools, these might include:

• Annual events like fall festivals, holiday fundraisers, and end-of-year parties
• Read-a-thons (maybe held over summer break)
• Other types of pledge-based peer-to-peer fundraisers
• One-off bake sales, car washes, talent shows, etc.

You’ll be able to plan the nitty-gritty as these events and campaigns approach, but for now, pinpoint when you’ll conduct different lower-tier fundraising events like these and define their strategic purposes. 

9. Start implementing, analyzing, and adjusting.

Put your plan into action by working through your prioritized list and timeline of initiatives. Depending on the scope of your strategy, you may want to work with an expert to fine-tune and kick off your strategy.

Once the plan is underway, don’t forget to continuously monitor performance. Keep track of how your different campaigns are going, your donor pipelines, and progress towards goals. Relate them back to your big-picture plan and overarching financial needs/budget. 

Then, actively use what you learn to make adjustments in real time as needed. If you find that one year’s annual fundraising results fall short, you can immediately plan improvements for next year or host a special event in a few months to help supplement it.