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School Fundraising: How To Add Impact To Your Campaigns

For generations, schools have engaged in ad hoc fundraising activities in order to boost their coffers. This good tradition is usually epitomised by the summer fair and its stalls of grubbily iced fairy cakes, Santa's grotto at Christmas and the obligatory school leaver's tea towel for year six parents. However, over the past couple of decades, school fundraising has become more professional, more streamlined, and more capable of raising serious cash to further the school's developmental goals.

The school fundraiser gets serious

Schools in the state, independent and proprietary sectors have now woken up to the potential of fundraising as a serious strategic asset. The key to doing this is to mobilise the extended network of people with a vested interest in the school doing well: not just current parents and pupils, but alumni, local businesses, retired teachers, local politicians and community groups. In fact, the wider this net can be cast, the more chance a school has to raise its profile as a community asset, and the more ambitious it can be with its fundraising goals.

So in place of a few hundred pounds raised through non-uniform days and cake sales, it is now fairly common for schools to organise regular 10k runs, comedy events, theatre festivals and lucrative school reunions.

The results of this increasingly serious fundraising culture speaks for itself: in 2003, according to the IoF (Institute of Fundraising), schools across the UK raised an additional £50 million from voluntary fundraising efforts. By 2014, this had shot up to an impressive £130 million. The latest figures, from 2015, show an estimated £150 million raised through fundraising – an increase of more than 15% from the previous year. This equates to an average of more than £18 of voluntary income raised per child, per year, in every school in the UK.

How has the sector responded?

Clearly, fundraising at this level requires systematic organisation of a kind previously unknown in school fundraising. How has the sector reacted to the requirements of development fundraising in terms of organisation and infrastructure? Two factors have been critical:

The first important trend has been the growing professionalisation of school fundraising. In many ways this mirrors the development of fundraising as a profession across the Third Sector, but in the case of schools it has developed very quickly. School fundraisers now have their own professional organisation in the Institute of Development Professionals in Education (IDPE), which offers advice, networking support and other resources for school fundraisers. In addition, aspiring school fundraisers will now be able to take advantage of a professional accreditation in schools fundraising offered as a joint venture between the IoF and IDPE.

The second factor is the availability of high-quality CRM software packages for charities. In school fundraising, every contact counts. A CRM helps school fundraisers build and sustain relationships with a wider network of supporters than was possible through an informal contact list. Through Contact Relationship Management software, schools can stay in touch with former parents and pupils, manage relationships with local businesses and philanthropists, and organise large-scale events. Crucially, a CRM allows schools to focus on the most effective forms of fundraising for their sector, by enabling them to focus fundraising campaigns on the most active donors, and reporting on the most successful fundraising events.

It is an exciting time to be involved in school fundraising, one of the most diverse, dynamic and effective areas of community fundraising activity at the moment. To add more impact to your school campaigns, have a chat with our team about SubscriberCRM, and how it can be a valuable tool for community fundraisers.