Making the case for investment

Who it is for

Most of the people who come to us about a first Giving Day do not hold the budget. They are an annual giving manager, a development officer, or a one-person development office, and the decision sits with somebody who will hear about it for ten minutes between two other items on an agenda. The research is done, the case is obvious from the inside, and none of that helps if the argument arrives as a forwarded supplier brochure.

This is those ten minutes, written out. It started life as a real briefing for one school, which is why it answers the questions an SLT actually asks - what it costs, what it asks of the school, and what happens if it goes wrong - rather than the questions a supplier would prefer to be asked.

What to change before you send it

Every school-specific line has been replaced by a placeholder in square brackets. Search the deck for [ and you will find all of them.

The argument, in full

The whole briefing is below, so you can read it before you download anything and decide whether it is the argument you want to make.

What we are proposing

A Giving Day in [MONTH YEAR]. A single 36 hour campaign, with a clear start and a clear end, asking the whole community to give. Two causes, both of them already priorities, both with a natural audience.

The purpose is not only the money. It is to find out who our supporters are, which we will know far better afterwards than we do now, and it launches [THE FOUNDATION] publicly rather than letting it start quietly and hoping people notice.

Why a Giving Day, and why now

We are starting from a low base, and a Giving Day is the fastest way to build a donor base from one, because it gives the whole community a single reason and a single moment to start.

It is finite. 36 hours is something a school can rally around, and an open-ended appeal is not - it quietly never ends. Match funding, a visible total and a deadline do more than any amount of asking politely over a year. And it builds the habit: the first Giving Day matters less for what it raises than for the second one it makes possible.

Roughly 400 Giving Days have been run in UK education over the last eleven years. This is a well-established format, not an experiment.

What a first Giving Day typically achieves

These are ranges from comparable schools, not a forecast for any particular one. A school's own result depends most on how many people it can actually contact, which is the work between agreeing the day and running it. Source: Hubbub, across nearly 400 Giving Days for more than 200 institutions.

What we would be asking the community to fund

Two causes, one campaign. A donor chooses which to support, which converts better than a single institutional appeal. Pick one that is your clearest ask, the thing alumni and parents already understand, and one that speaks to a different group - current families, pupils themselves, people who have never thought of themselves as donors.

What this asks of the school

A date in the calendar, protected, and agreed far enough ahead that it does not collide with everything else. Permission to contact the community properly, and the data work to make that possible, which is the single biggest determinant of the result. A conversation with whoever might fund a match or challenge pot, because a challenge fund of even a modest size changes the campaign when every gift is then worth double. Visible backing from the SLT and the Head, because pupils, staff and parents take their cue from whether the school is obviously behind it.

And your time, stated honestly. The deck asks you to put a real number of days on it, concentrated around the campaign, rather than let it be assumed to be free.

What it would cost

The cost slide is a table with four lines: the platform fee, consultancy support across the year, the total, and the commission alternative, where the platform costs nothing unless the campaign raises money. Card processing is passed through at cost. Ask your supplier for both the fixed price and the break-even point against it, and put both in, so the decision is visible rather than taken on trust.

What could go wrong

Not being able to contact enough people is the most likely failure and the most fixable, which is why the data work starts early. No match funding is survivable - the campaign works, it just works less well, and you would know in time to plan around it. Landing badly with parents is managed by asking for a cause the community already believes in and being clear that giving is entirely optional. The real risk is that it rests on one part-time person, and the briefing says so out loud, which is usually the sentence that earns the support the campaign needs.

What we are asking the SLT to agree

Four things: the day in principle with a date protected, the budget, an approach about a match or challenge fund, and the data and consent work needed to contact the community. The last slide closes on the number to judge it by - how many people give for the first time, because those are the people everything after this is built on.