Staffing a start-up Advancement Office in an International School
"I know: let's just have the Admissions Director do fundraising."
Writing this on my phone on an airplane, so please excuse any typos!
Many non-profit international schools were founded decades ago (often by embassies) with the intention of providing a decent imitation of a very good US public school. The dedicated professionals who trained for that environment did so to provide the best learning outcomes possible; fundraising was simply not a part of the education, experience, or expectations of these administrators and teachers. But these schools have now evolved to more closely resemble US non-profit private schools, and fundraising is very much a part of how those schools compete.
A primary reason why many of these schools were founded in the first place was because there was nobody else providing this education for the children of diplomats, international corporate executives, and missionaries. As we all know, that landscape has changed drastically and continues to do so. Over the last twenty years, the number of for-profit international schools has skyrocketed. Being “non-profit” does not remove the school from the realities of the marketplace; they cannot ignore these competitors. These for-profit schools have an instant competitive edge that comes with the scalability of being one of perhaps hundreds of schools, with centralized administration, marketing, and planning. They could even plan to run at a loss to drive out their competitors. The non-profit school, meanwhile, must maintain its own independent (and expensive) administrative functions. In fact, these non-profit schools are in the position of needing to substantially up their administrative game simply to deal with the competition they face. “Non-profit” cannot mean, “Non-professional.”
But there is potentially good news: while for-profit schools may have the advantage of scalability that non-profits don’t have, many non-profits have an advantage not available to the for-profits: fundraising.
Let’s imagine, then, that the Board and Head of a non-profit school decide that it is their duty to launch a professional fundraising program. There then follows much discussion about how much they should invest in this project, eventually resulting in hand-wringing about the push back they’ll receive from the community for hiring non student-facing people (for an unknown return on investment). Finally, they settle for the wording of the following job description (I’ve changed a few words, but this is an actual job posting that was recently sent to me):
The Director of Community Relations leads the Community Relations department. This department has three Communication Officers, a Marketing & Communications Manager, an Admissions Manager and an Assistant Admissions Manager. You manage our brand and reputation, admissions and enrollment, alumni relations and Marketing & Communication. You also do fundraising and community engagement.
The last sentence seems almost apologetic. In addition, there’s nothing else in the rest of the lengthy job description that explains what fundraising is at this school or why it’s important. In fact, the word, “fundraising” doesn’t even appear again. What I imagine started life as a bold, Board-driven initiative that would eventually help the school achieve its aspirations now appears to have been timidly reduced to one word found buried in a, “Perhaps shorter to list what this person doesn’t do,” job description.
In my opinion, hiring one person (or worse, tacking the role of fundraising onto the job description of someone else) is like starting a football team with just the coach and no players, thinking we’ll add capacity if we get any wins. And volunteers alone aren’t the answer: they still need to be trained, coordinated, supported, and led by a team of full-time professionals.
It’s not that I don’t understand the pressures on the Board and the Head: to do this properly, we’re talking about new, additional costs that at face value have nothing to do with learning. How do we justify this to a faculty (not to mention parents, of course) that says we need more Learning Support teachers, and other “student-facing” personnel? But from a holistic business viewpoint, we must justify it because if we allow ourselves to be dissuaded, we are giving up one of the most powerful competitive advantages that we have as a non-profit school (not to mention our best option for securing the financial future of the school, which (after hiring the Head) is the main responsibility of the Board of Trustees).
So, if one person isn’t enough, what should a start-up Advancement Office look like? The good news is that as far as head count goes, that job posting above isn’t too far off the mark. Perhaps, given the euphemisms rampant in Advancement (including the word, “Advancement”), Communications Officer in that job description actually means Fundraiser, in which case, great, we’re there.
Before I give numbers and job titles, let’s please start by being clear that fundraising doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it is the desired end result if everything else that is incidental to an Advancement program is done well. Today, advancement professionals are the people in schools who are quite often responsible for most (if not all) of the following:
brand and reputation management;
visual identity;
public relations;
marketing;
internal & external communications;
crisis communications;
website development;
publications;
data privacy;
admission and enrollment management;
alumni relations (website, magazines, reunions, volunteer management);
volunteer recruitment and management;
events (because we still hold events for our major donors);
competitive analysis, etc.
Finally, if all goes well…
Fundraising (Annual Fund, Major Gifts, Capital Campaigns, Planned Giving).
At this point, I hope you’re looking at that list and thinking, “That’s not a one person job,” (or even a three person job.) You’re probably also thinking that many of the items on the list are already being done at your school: Admissions and marketing, for example. And some others on perhaps a part time basis: Alumni relations and events. While I can live without Admissions being a part of the Advancement Office, and despite what your current set-up may be, I advise bringing everything else under the umbrella of Advancement, under an Advancement Director. It says that we are clear about what the end result of all these efforts must be.
While there is much cross over in job execution, here are the job titles I’d look for in a start-up Advancement program, with their primary focus:
Director of Advancement (planning, training, major gifts)
Director of Giving (Annual Fund)
Data (research, analysis, and entry)
Alumni Coordinator
Director of Communications & Marketing
E-comms coordinator (web, video/audio production, social media)
Graphic Designer
If you remove 4-7, you’ll see that we need a bare minimum of three people whose primary (hopefully, sole) focus is fundraising*. This is even if we’re just starting out on our journey to become a fundraising school; this is the minimum number we need to “start our football team.” Anything less and I don’t believe that we’ll get the traction we need to move the needle, even with passionate volunteers.
As you can see from this post (and my others), the role of a start-up Advancement Director at an international school is broad, and yet very specific: we must raise money, but we must also train others with diverse interests and motivations in a multi-cultural setting, all while guiding marketing, communications, and any number of other responsibilities. Where do we find these people? I’ll give some ideas in my next post.
*The Alumni Coordinator is not there to ask for money… she’s there to build our relationship with the Alumni community; she will understand fundraising, but her focus is on building an effective and sustainable relationship with Alumni volunteers and the broader Alumni community.