Cranbrook School
48% Growth in Online Giving: A Cranbrook School Giving Day Story
Cranbrook School's second Giving Day with Hubbub raised £61,401 online from 473 donors on 25 to 26 March 2026, a 48% increase on the £41,383 raised the year before, and achieved all 9 of its donor challenges for the second year running.
“We first tried running a Giving Day in-house in 2024, but it wasn't particularly successful. We needed more guidance on how to plan the campaign and encourage our community to get involved, which led us to partner with Hubbub in 2025. Their support gave us a clearer structure and practical advice that we could put into action. A good example was their recommendation to send more frequent emails during the campaign. We followed that advice in 2026 and maintained strong open rates with very few unsubscribes, helping us feel more confident about asking for support. Having now achieved all nine challenges in both years with Hubbub, with online giving increasing by 48% in 2026, we can see how far we've come since that first attempt. I'd happily recommend them to another school, particularly a small team trying to make a Giving Day work alongside its other responsibilities.”
At a glance
473 unique donors gave online in 2026, up from 460 in 2025, and online giving rose to £61,401, a 48% increase on the £41,383 raised online the year before. Cranbrook, a state boarding school, achieved all 9 of its donor challenges for the second year running, including specific challenges to beat both its donor numbers and its total raised from 2025.
The growth story
Cranbrook ran its first Giving Day internally in 2024, before partnering with Hubbub for the first time in 2025. That first year with Hubbub gave the school a strong platform: 9 of 9 challenges achieved, home page conversion of 30% against a 20% benchmark, and 84% of online donors providing a phone number for future contact.
2026 built directly on that foundation. Donor numbers grew again, and online giving grew far faster than donor numbers did, rising 48% year on year on a donor base that grew by just 3%. That combination points to donors giving more generously, more confidently, and at higher average values than in the school’s first year with Hubbub.
Conversion also improved: 37% of home page visitors completed their gift in 2026, up from 30% in 2025, comfortably ahead of the 20% industry benchmark both years.
What they were fundraising for
In 2025, donors could support Building our Future, Fuelling our Ambition, or Preserving our History, raising £22,601, £13,497 and £5,285 respectively from a combined 460 online donors.
For 2026, two of the three funds were refreshed as Connecting our Future and Curiosity in Action, while Preserving our History carried over unchanged. The renewed framing paid off: Curiosity in Action became the clear favourite, drawing 290 gifts worth £39,086, ahead of Connecting our Future (156 gifts, £16,804) and Preserving our History (67 gifts, £5,511).
Who gave
Current parents and guardians remained Cranbrook’s largest and most generous donor group in both years. In 2026 they contributed 272 gifts worth £39,359, followed by Old Cranbrookians (79 gifts, £9,385), grandparents and extended family (57 gifts, £6,631), and donors with multiple relationships to the school (40 gifts, £2,210). Current staff, pupils, former staff, and trustees and governors all gave too, reflecting a genuinely whole-community campaign.
The number of donors giving £500 or more nearly doubled year on year, from 15 in 2025 to 28 in 2026, a clear sign of a strengthening major donor pipeline for the school to build on.
Gift size and timing
£100 was the most common gift in 2025, followed by £25. In 2026, that pattern flipped slightly, with £25 becoming marginally more popular than £100, prompting a recommendation to review the platform’s default giving levels ahead of the next campaign to encourage donors back toward higher amounts.
The Power Hour remained a standout tactic in 2026, driving 66 donations in a single hour, the single most successful moment of the campaign.
Learning and applying: email strategy
One of the clearest examples of Cranbrook’s year-on-year progress is in its email strategy. After 2025, the recommendation was to increase email cadence to four sends per day during the campaign itself. In 2026, that recommendation was put into practice, with structured 8am, noon, 4pm and 8pm sends across both days, each maintaining strong open rates of 46% to 54% and unsubscribe rates under 1%, well within best-practice benchmarks. 83% of visitors arrived via email in 2026, underlining how central this channel remains to Cranbrook’s Giving Day success.
Highlights
- 9 of 9 challenges achieved for the second consecutive year, including specific challenges to beat 2025’s donor numbers and total raised
- Strong donor engagement: 71% of donors chose to appear on the Donor Wall, with 36% leaving a personal message
- Growing major donor base: £500+ donors nearly doubled, from 15 in 2025 to 28 in 2026
- A recommendation acted on: the shift to four email sends per day, first suggested after 2025, delivered strong results in 2026 without compromising unsubscribe rates
Looking ahead
Cranbrook is now planning its fourth Giving Day for spring 2027, its third in partnership with Hubbub, continuing an annual rhythm that began internally in 2024 and has grown in scale and sophistication each year since.
The priorities heading into 2027 build directly on this year’s findings: rolling out regular stewardship communications for new and lapsed donors, including gifts-at-work examples to build trust ahead of renewal; consideration of a small, targeted telephone campaign to convert the 83% of donors who shared a phone number into regular givers; and formally transitioning the growing group of £500+ donors into Cranbrook’s major donor pipeline.
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