Big Give Christmas Challenge 2022 Case Study

Stephen

Perse

Big Give Christmas Challenge 2022 Case Study

What is the Stephen Perse Foundation, what do we do and why?

The Stephen Perse Foundation is a family of schools and nurseries in Cambridge and Saffron Walden. It includes four nursery settings, two Junior School sites for students aged 4 - 11 and a Senior School in Cambridge for students from ages 11 - 18.

Our Founder, Dr Stephen Perse, was a Cambridge academic and philanthropist who realised the essential role of education as an enabler of social mobility. Perse believed that an outstanding education should be a right, rather than a privilege, accessible to all.

In our schools, in keeping with Dr Perse’s original vision, our mission is to educate and inspire the contributors to tomorrow’s world: intelligent young people with the creativity, compassion, confidence and conviction to question, evaluate and improve society. With excellence and creativity in teaching and learning at the core of our work, we value the positive difference our students can make in the world through:

• Scholarship and the advancement of knowledge and understanding;

• Kindness, courtesy, inclusivity and collaboration;

• Diligence, independence and self-reliance;

• Humility, reflectiveness and the pursuit of self improvement;

• Character, individuality, wellbeing and confidence; and

• Conserving the environment and living sustainably.

Since Stephen Perse died in 1615, the ways in which education is delivered and funded in the UK has evolved and changed multiple times, often very significantly. The Stephen Perse Foundation’s group of schools in Cambridge and Saffron Walden is selective and fee-paying, with bursaries and scholarships available on means and ability tested bases. During 2021/22, the Stephen Perse Foundation provided bursaries and scholarships to 164 students. We are significantly increasing this for the 2023/24 academic year and aim to continue to expand access to our schools based on academic potential and ability to thrive in a selective school environment, regardless of financial background.

Within this context, we recognise the part that we can play in responding to humanitarian crises by offering school places to a number of young people seeking international protection, where we are satisfied that we can meet their needs, potentially transforming lives. We also recognise our community’s desire to contribute to the national effort to provide education, stability and pastoral care at a time of enormous challenge in the lives of so many young people.

It is very important that we live our Foundation values of scholarship, kindness, inclusivity and collaboration, whilst appreciating each individual’s character and experience. We are privileged to already host several students displaced by conflict. They bring a wealth of experience with them of different ways of learning, cultural and sporting skills and, of course, the richness of their friendships with their new peers. In return, we hope to provide them with a nurturing environment in which to continue their studies; rebuild their confidence, should they need this; achieve their academic potential and, most importantly, enjoy their childhood and teenage years and young adulthood.

• Raise £18,000 for Ukrainian student bursaries

• Live and promote our Foundation’s vision and values

• Encourage our community contacts - parents, staff, students - to support with gifts and activities

• Grow our donor numbers and gift sizes amongst this year’s target audience of current student families, staff and particular major donors

• Increase giving from recent donors (e.g. last year’s Big Give donors)

What were the Stephen Perse Foundation’s Big Give Christmas Challenge Goals? our donor numbers and gift sizes Grow

• Build relationships that also encourage additional engagement with our schools, such as providing work experience places.

Raise

Build relationships

What did we achieve in CC22?

• Raised £23,140 (including gift aid and off-line donations during and immediately after CC22 completed, as a result of the CC22 publicity) - £5,140 and 28.5% above target.

• 172 online donations, from 171 unique donors.

• 62 repeat donors.

• 110 new donors.

• Increased average (mean) online gift by 68.4% to £129.50 (including gift aid), from £76.90 in 2021.

• Increased average (mode) online gift by 500% to £62.50 (with gift aid) from £12.50 in 2021.

• Our largest single gift was £1,875 in 2022, compared to £1,250 in 2021 (both including gift aid).

Challenge

To make CC22 a success for our family of schools, we put in a great deal of advance work and preparation, summarised below. We:

• Prepared a short, compelling narrative about why our community wishes to support able Ukrainian students with bursary places at our schools, linking to our vision and values.

• Used that narrative to prepare our Big Give Christmas Challenge application.

• Engaged our Charitable Foundation Director with the guardian of our first Ukrainian student to identify matching donors to support our Big Give Christmas Challenge application and engage with major donors from the previous year to encourage them to ask their contacts to give during CC22.

• Used the narrative to create a landing page on our own website with background information about why and how we were taking part in the Big Give Christmas Challenge, with links to our Big Give page and giving link. This allowed us to promote CC22 in advance of the CC22 giving link being live without people feeling that they were going repeatedly to the CC22 giving page before it was possible to make a donation, which helped with messaging and building up to the launch day and live online giving week.

• Used the narrative, images and main film to create our CC22 giving page on the Big Give website to use during the live period of the challenge week.

• Designed screen content about our CC22 to be displayed across all the Foundation settings’ information screens in the week before and the week of CC22.

• Designed special email footers to be used across all Foundation email accounts during CC22 live week.

• Created a series of short films from a day of filming planned footage - working with students, staff and Anton, the guardian of our first Ukrainian student. In doing this we had to consider privacy for all our students and additional implications for certain Ukrainian students, so we worked with guardian Anton, rather than picking out any particular Ukrainian student on screen because of the public nature of the campaign. We aimed to encourage and support student engagement in a meaningful way without inadvertently dividing the student body into ‘helpers’ and ‘beneficiaries’, showing that we all benefit from the diverse community enabled through our bursary and scholarship programmes. We gave each student with photo permissions who took part in the filming (some helped behind the scenes and didn’t want to be photographed) a photo as a memento of their ‘film set’ experience. We worked with a videographer to produce the main film and some of the short edits, but then also created some additional short edits ourselves on an amateur basis to keep costs down. We produced our main film (in high resolution and in 720pp for social media, such as Instagram); a thank you film; a ‘short ask’ film and and also two impact films. You can see the shorter of the impact films here, which was used as part of our thank you emails to all donors who gave email communications permissions. The other was slightly more detailed and longer - this was specifically made to share with major donors. In both, Anton talked about the hugely positive impact of the bursary place granted to our first Ukrainian student.

• Identified activities and communications across our schools where we could promote the Big Give in the week prior and during CC22 week and communicated with Heads of School and all staff about these, asking for their support.

How did we plan and prepare before the Christmas

week went live?

• Designed a CC22 promotional page to be included in programmes for school and nursery productions across the Foundation’s settings during the week before and week of CC22.This was particularly successfully used at several performances of the Addams Family musical in the week prior to CC22, raising awareness of the forthcoming launch and resulting in a wonderful photograph of the cast for social media and the Principal’s newsletter.

• Designed and distributed CC22 promotional boards to each of the Foundation settings, to be used in publicity photos across our schools and nurseries to provide opportunities to involve all the students and staff in contributing to our social media activity.

• Worked with staff and students to help them maximise the publicity and gifts that they would generate from their productions and events.

• Planned the text and images/film links for social media posts in the fortnight before CC22, whilst CC22 was live and after it was concluded. The frequency of posts built up as CC22’s live week approached, peaked during the week with at least daily posts across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, and then reduced down to the concluding post.

• Prepared a press release to be distributed early in the live giving week.

• Planned our CC22 email campaign: messages were sent out a month before to governors, parents, staff and students; then a tailored message was sent updating on NCA bursary programme success to CC21 donors; further messages followed to our audiences one week before, at noon on launch day, mid-way, with 24 hours to go, then on completion with a big thank you. Parent emails were signed by the Foundation Principal to show how important CC22 was to our organisation, the Principal also signed some of the staff and student emails, but we also deliberately had the Development Manager sign some messages for students and staff. This was to build the profile of Development within the Foundation’s schools, building awareness about how philanthropic giving helps to support students and their peers when they are at our schools, thus encouraging them to be donors in future, supporting younger generations of students. Our email campaign shared our vision and values for the Foundation’s schools and Ukrainian bursaries, asked for financial support and asked recipients to spread the word about CC22 to their networks, so encouraging wider giving.

• When we received contact details for our Anonymous Champion, we emailed to thank them for their support and encourage them to contact us with any questions they had about our work.

During the Christmas Challenge

During the CC22 live week, we:

• Sent out emails according to the planned scheduleupdating figures to reflect real time progress during the week.

• Posted social media according to scheduleupdating figures to reflect real time progress and using best images submitted by staff and students from across the school activities and events.

• Sent out our press release, which generated online news coverage on web and Twitter feeds from a local journalist at CamNews just prior to the weekend.

• Supported events and activities across our school and nursery sites: including the Staff Panto (which held a retiring collection for CC22), Nativity plays across several sites, a nursery photo call for the babies and toddlers in our nurseries, and a fantastic Quiz Night organised by our Year 11 and Sixth Form

Charity Committee members, supported by staff from PE, History and other departments and parents and community members.

• Tracked donations and began thanking donors with email communications permissions personally by email, including a link to a short film with Anton, the guardian of our first Ukrainian student, Viktor, explaining the hugely positive impact that such bursary places have for young people like Viktor.

• Kept talking to major donors from 2021 to encourage them to give again in 2022.

• Encouraged our matching fund pledgers to work their networks, encouraging their contacts to give.

• Reminded our parents, staff and students to encourage their contacts to support us too.

• Asked our donors, social media followers and contacts at key organisations to nominate us for the Supporters’ Choice award.

Next steps

• Build the donor relationships that began with the Christmas Challenges in 2021 and 2022, in order to sustain and increase giving, both financial and in-kind (such as providing work experience, university and job-seeking interview practice, giving career talks).

• Re-engage alumni, now the Development team is rebuilding after the lifting of pandemic restrictions, with communications, events and activities during 2023 and 2024, so that we can directly engage alumni as well as parents, staff and current students in future Christmas Challenge and other fundraising activities, greatly refreshing and expanding our active supporter group.

• Work with our growing number of Ukrainian students (some on bursary and some on fees places) and those on other bursaries (such as our NCA 6th Form places) to ensure that they continue to feel a completely integrated part of the Stephen Perse community and, where appropriate, build a bank of images and testimony about their time with us to track its effectiveness and use in future fundraising and donor stewardship.

• Look at how we could best use our parent communications systems and data to be able to send HTML emails with embedded pictures and videos to increase email engagement and actions (this year we could send text with links and attachments, but not directly embed images and videos).

• Build time and communications into future work plans to approach more organisations and individual contacts in advance about supporting us with Supporters’ Choice nominations, to increase our nominations and also our exposure to others’ social media audiences.

• Begin planning how we will use the success and lessons learned from the Christmas Challenge to inform our fundraising online and offline in 2023 and 2024!