We are either brave or mad
The agency that we are working with on our giving week told me this week that we are the only people who haven’t postponed their summer fundraising campaign. All the other schools and universities they work with are postponing until at least September.
Does everyone else know something we don’t? Are we just really lucky that the timing of ours has worked out? Well in part we are. This time last year I had just finished recruiting the callers for our telephone campaign and I think it is safe to say that a telephone campaign at the moment would be almost impossible. There are a lot less logisitics involved in a giving week and crucially it is online!
Our giving week has certainly started to change into more than just a fundraising campaign. When I first discussed the idea with my Manager and Director 12 months ago the concept of a giving week was to engage a younger cohort of alumni into supporting the school. I had looked at the demographics of regular givers and only 10% were under 40 where as 40% of the people that had attended one of our events were under 40. The numbers spoke for themselves.
Although our primary aim is still to engage our younger alumni and hopefully convert a few of them into donors, our giving week is also an opportunity to bring together our school at time when they are physically apart. Our pupils are all at home and lessons have moved online, and I know that many of them are missing their friends and normal school life. I have been planning content about our different boarding houses since the beginning of the year, so it is a chance to share some fantastic stories and get our pupils involved in a way that the usual timetable would never have allowed.
I think for now I am going to say we are brave not mad, in just over six weeks time we will know!