I was asked recently if I could name ten trends I thought were unfolding out there in independent schools. It was a fun exercise.  So here’s my first crack at those 10 thoughts on what’s happening.

1. Independent schools are figuring out – ever so slowly but ever so surely – that stewardship and donor relations deserve concrete programmatic attention and expertise.  Development office duties, and job titles, increasingly reflect this growing awareness that how you treat existing donors in the months and years after they make a gift is as productive, if not more so, than designing cultivation strategies for new donors.

2. Increasing numbers of institutions are interested not only in their constituents’ inclination to support a particular campaign purpose, but in the actual philanthropic capacity of their donor base, regardless of campaign goals.  Wealth screening, new models for assessing fundraising outcomes, and newly gained information on what kinds of staffing and programs actually lead to giving results – all serve to make analysis of overall capacity an attractive avenue of pursuit.

3. The invigorated focus on marketing, driven mostly by issues surrounding enrollment management, is playing out in the development arena in interesting ways.  Schools are learning (finally!) that clear, simple, substantive messages are critical tools in campaign communications – not tag lines, per se – but “this campaign is about leading change rather than responding to it” OR “this campaign is about faculty – about what brings them and keeps them at the top of their game” OR “this campaign is about the arts, about the inner soul of the creative spirit and the new studios that will allow that spirit to flourish.”    Thus – campaign (and even annual fund) communications are punchier, less long-winded, and closer in message to a single driving force – usually mission-related.

4. Annual funds are hungering for distinctive identities, distinctive “grab” rationales.  It’s been a long time since “the gap between tuition and what it costs to run the school” would fly as a fundraising argument.  Too many folks coming out of the recession are saying “balance your own bloody budget.”  Hence, annual funds with new names, more focus on designated allocations for giving, more emphasis on the distinctiveness of the school, etc.

5. The “fad” of adding major gift officers to school development staffs over the last two decades – modeled after gift officer job descriptions from higher ed – has encountered some hurdles.  That is, the volume of potential donors is so much smaller in most schools than in colleges and universities that the gift officer model can’t quite transfer as is.  The school arena (thankfully) has begun to adjust those college models – so that gift officers’ roles are not just managing portfolios of major gift prospects – chasing, courting, soliciting, closing and moving on to the next prospect – but rather working in tandem with annual fund and campaign staff to help personalize the treatment of a small number of donors in the school’s routine quest for their support.  So, in the end, adding a major gift officer to a school’s staff is transforming the annual fund and the public phases of campaigns, as well as securing additional “major” gifts.

6. The deep expertise and hands-on experience needed to run increasingly sophisticated development shops – even in small schools – is more and more desirable, and not any easier to find.  Schools are struggling with weighing the value of seniority in non-profit fundraising against familiarity with / background in independent schools, weighing the value of pure fundraising experience against communications and/or benefit fundraising, weighing youth and hunger for exceeding dollar goals against the risk of transient professionals with less than robust devotion to the institution itself.

7. Governing boards are growing in sophistication about finance, economic modeling, and even marketing and outreach.  Unfortunately, their experience and understanding of best practice fundraising for schools has not grown at the same rate.  The schools that are making headway here – bringing the standards of philanthropic leadership on the board up a few notches – are LIGHTYEARS ahead of others – and their fundraising results are proving it.  Education of board members about their responsibilities related to philanthropy is a substantial part of what chief development officers and heads of school are craving.

8. Social networking and highly interactive communication technologies are transforming alumni/ae and parent relations programming, and even some direct fundraising programs.  The schools that are wielding this tool strategically – pushing the envelope rather than getting on the train late – will keep their constituents in the loop – where other institutions will lose them because of dated communications vehicles.

9. Fundraising overseas and in multi-national communities is no longer a losing battle. Schools with constituents from non-western cultures are learning how to make headway in securing gift support from those cultures, and are proactively taking advantage of the “westernizing” of the affluent in other nations, especially in China and South East Asia.

10. Data are king. More schools are putting greater emphasis on acquiring donor information, managing prospect movement, and analyzing fundraising results in data-driven ways.  HOWEVER, the most sophisticated outfits that try to collect schools data in an effort to develop “benchmarks” for giving, staffing, budgets, etc., are expensive or require complicated gathering/sharing of information.  What we THINK is happening is that schools are figuring out that they HAVE to bear the burden of wading through complex data submissions, because that is the only way to get truly reliable analyses back.  But, many schools are anxious that data collecting entities – CAE, regional associations, even specialized consortia like JRPO – really don’t understand what apples, oranges and grapes are actually out there; don’t understand what data would truly be meaningful (as opposed to just interesting); and don’t understand how to ask for the data in a way that exposes and clarifies all the variables.  They fear that other areas of data manipulation – finance, compensation, enrollment, etc. – are being used as the models for the compilation of development data, and worry that true fundraising expertise is not at the table in designing these data gathering efforts.