Horizontal growth comes from having more donors.
Vertical growth comes from increasing the generosity of the donors.
Increasing the retention of donors helps to grow the donor base.
Many factors create donor loss.
Competition is typically the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.
However, it is the largest single cause.
Often the donor politely says something like, "Money is tight and we have cut back.
" Rarely does the development officer ask if they have stopped giving to charity.
Usually the donor is shifting their donations to other charities.
The total giving maybe less but it is rarely proportionally less for everyone.
Often someone is actually receiving more.
One of the emerging trends in giving is for donors to look for high impact results from their gifts.
As an easy example, feeding the hungry is a low impact process.
Helping someone overcome their barriers to employment, learn money management, and understand good dietary practices is high impact.
The outcome is a person who is self-sufficient, financially independent, and healthy.
Parochial schools have the potential to be high impact change agents.
Is the focus of your fundraising the impact the school has? Do your donors understand the impact at the personal, emotional, and global level that is necessary to retain them and increase their generosity? Next Step:
- Define the outcomes your school is striving for
- Translate the outcomes to simple, personal, and emotionally compelling images of global impact
- Promote the impact in newsletters, the website, and during one-on-one communication with everyone (staff, parents, referral sources, donors, and all others)
It will help to retain current donors.
It will help to engage donors more deeply.
It will make fundraising more successful and easier.
It will increase sustainability.
As the impact becomes more widely understood, it will increase enrollment.
Christian schools have always been high impact change agents.