A college preparatory school in Maryland has found the secret ingredient to ensure effective donor campaigns: students.
Many higher education institutions host a Giving Day. In 2022, an estimated 35 million donors in the United States alone gave $3.1 billion on Giving Tuesday. This is an average gift of $88.57 per person.
How can you maximize your donor’s giving potential and elevate your organization’s giving day? The answer may be simpler than you imagine: incorporate your students.
At Calvert Hall College High School, a private, 9-12, all-boys college preparatory school in Baltimore, Maryland, we host our annual giving day on our Founder’s Day every May. The date has significance to our community and helps us avoid the competition of Giving Tuesday. This top-down initiative was conceptualized by our president 10 years ago and put into action by our 10-person advancement team in 2015.
In 2023, All Day Hall Day, which is 24 hours of celebrating and supporting the Hall, raised $466,167 from 1,422 donors. This is a 480% increase in donations from year one and a 230% increase in donor participation. Our average donation in 2023 was $327.83, a 76% increase since year 1.
The “secret sauce” at Calvert Hall is 24 hours of content and people. Some institutions run their giving days solely through a website and post a few updates on social media throughout the day.
During our 24-hour giving period, there is always someone on campus from midnight to midnight. We kick off our giving day with a midnight livestream broadcast and then offer exclusive video premiers and in-person activities with livestream options.
Each year we create a new “Meet the Team” parody video, so our donors know who is on campus and our advancement roles. In 2023, we created a Brooklyn 99 parody. In other years, we have modeled our videos after The Office and Full House.
The Calvert Hall community thrives on celebrating student success. We offer 40 athletics teams. Last year, our school won 14 team titles, two individual conference titles, along with one team and one individual national title. We offer top-tier academics, including 29 AP courses and 140 AP scholars, and are Catholic League Academic Champions. Calvert Hall also has more than 60 extracurriculars. Our students have been National Speech and Debate runner-ups and Maryland state competition marching band champions, as well as awarded 16 ModelUN honors.
Why am I bragging about our students’ successes in this article? I am bragging because the outstanding student experience is nostalgic for our alumni community, provides proud parents/grandparents an outlet to share and enables our brotherhood of students the chance to lift each other.
This year, for our eighth annual All Day Hall Day, we created, The Ocho Unscripted, hosted by Joe Baker ’76. I also encourage you to view his whiteboard video collection, which is released on the eve of our giving days.
Joe has been a staple at Calvert Hall for more than 40 years and is the chief administrative officer and director of development. He interviewed 42 students in 26, 8-minute segments. These students represented all grade levels, and interests ranging from academics to fine arts to athletics to even personal passions such as a self-taught baker.
This show made up 3 hours and 25 minutes of content with more than 1,000 live views. We created a landing page detailing what time each student would air and a brief description of what their interview would entail. We then cut these interviews into their original 8-minute segments and repackaged them over the summer on our social channels in a campaign we called, “The Ocho Rewind.”
How can you incorporate the “secret sauce” into your next Giving Day campaign? I encourage you to mark 30-45 minutes a week on your calendar to get to know different students and student organizations around your campus. Establish these relationships and take note of the stories you can share with your constituents.
As you create the content you will use for the actual day, identify ways to reuse the content so it does not become a one-and-done promotion. Lastly, families and alumni enjoy promoting students and activities that are near and dear to their hearts. Allow them to help you spread the word and increase your reach.
When we look holistically at our advancement marketing plan, Joe Baker puts it best when he says, “No one asks me how our fall solicitation letters perform. I get calls, texts, and emails year-round asking how All Day Hall Day went and what we have planned for next year.”
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