With its origins in North Philadelphia dating back to the 1840s, St. James School opened its doors in 2011 to educate students in a faith-based environment rooted in transformative loving relationships. Initially adding a grade each year, the school has now grown to serve 85 students in grades 4-8. St. James is the only Episcopal school in the city of Philadelphia and is committed to the idea that school worship, community life, religious formation and study, and social justice come together to nurture the moral and spiritual lives of its students.
Highlights
Staffing Concerns
As St. James School has evolved into a larger and more complex organization, its fundraising efforts have grown to meet emerging needs and the School’s investment in fundraising has kept pace with organizational growth. At the same time, the School’s commitment to a community-based fundraising model has created challenges for effectively resourcing and deploying Advancement staff.
Addressing Infrastructure
As the School aimed to increase its fundraising capacity, it needed to ensure that the appropriate staff, systems, and technology were in place to support philanthropy across the community and at all levels of giving.
Donor Analysis
As part of a comprehensive Development-wide assessment, S&W analyzed the School’s donor file to identify and prioritize prospects for annual, mid-level, major, and planned giving. This enabled the School to strategically allocate resources and tailor its fundraising efforts to align with the opportunities present within its donor base, thereby enhancing overall fundraising effectiveness.
The Challenge
With a community-centered approach to philanthropy and a reliance on Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit program for scholarship funding, the School’s philanthropic revenue model presented unique challenges for effectively resourcing fundraising opportunities.
Working within the constraints of its available resources for fundraising, the School wanted to consistently engage, solicit, and steward donors at all levels of giving while also ensuring that the most critical sources of philanthropic revenue were sustained—and expanded.
The Solution
S&W’s data analytics go beyond static wealth screenings and ratings by taking a holistic and customized approach to prospect identification and prioritization.
With St. James School we began by providing a full donor file analysis to identify the trends and opportunities that made the School’s fundraising initiatives unique.
As part of this process, we partnered directly with the School’s leadership and Advancement staff to interpret the results of the analysis. Their knowledge of the how, why, and when of individual donor engagement and behavior provided crucial insight and nuance into otherwise impersonal data.
With this deeper understanding of their donors’ performance and their goals in hand, S&W conducted prospect identification modeling and targeted philanthropic capacity screening using best in class tools.
By combining this third-party data with the insights gained from our proprietary analysis, our experienced fundraising consultants created customized cohorts of prospects to fill the School’s pipelines for targeted engagement and personalized solicitation.
As a result, the School gained a better understanding of where staff and technology resources could be best deployed to fully address both community-focused and philanthropy needs.
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