Two days built solely for Catholic schools and parishes — and for the leaders ready to move from holding on to building forward. You'll leave with the operational tools to grow enrollment, deepen giving, and turn a community that merely attends into a community that invests.
Vitality Is a Decision. This Is Where You Make It.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of good Catholic schools and parishes learned to operate in survival mode. Hold the line on enrollment. Get through the budget. Ask the same faithful families one more time. It is exhausting, it is quiet, and it can go on for years before anyone names it out loud.
But the Church was never handed a mandate to hold on. We were sent. Every school and every parish exists to form disciples and build the Kingdom of God — and that work requires more than good intentions and a balanced budget. It requires operational vitality: the disciplined systems, honest data, and genuine relationships that let a mission grow instead of merely continue.
The ISPD Summit exists for that. Two days, entirely focused on the Catholic school and the Catholic parish — no adapting a corporate playbook, no translating from someone else's sector. Choose from 21 practical sessions across Development, Stewardship, Enrollment Management, Marketing and Communication, Strategic Planning, and Lagniappe — "Something Extra."
You'll go home with proven strategies, working tools, colleagues who understand your reality, and a clear set of next steps you can begin the week you return.
Advancement, enrollment, and communications are not the business side of the mission. They are how the mission survives contact with reality. Sustaining the mission is the mission.
People Don't Invest in Need. They Invest in Vision.
Communities that thrive are not the ones with the most affluent families. They are the ones where people can see what they are building and want to be part of it.
That shift — from attendance to belonging, from belonging to investment — is not an accident, and it is not luck. It is built. It is built in how you invite rather than ask, how you welcome a family on their first tour, how you steward a gift, how you tell the truth about where you're headed and who you need to get there.
Every session at this Summit aims to build it.
What You'll Take Home
Not theory. Not inspiration that fades. Practical work you can begin immediately.
- Grow enrollment — and keep the families you have. Build a retention process, not a retention hope.
- Move donors from giving to investing. Strengthen your annual fund and invite major gifts with confidence and the right language.
- Turn parishioners into partners. Practical stewardship that engages households in prayer, ministry, and giving.
- Decide with data, not instinct. Use demographic and financial reality to make the calls only you can make.
- Get campaign-ready before you launch. Know whether you're ready — and what to do if you're not.
- Tell your mission story so people lean in. Communicate with the clarity that earns attention and investment.
- Leave with a plan, not a notebook. Clear next steps, sized to your team and your calendar.
Built for the People Carrying This Work
Pastors and principals. Presidents and advancement directors. Enrollment and admissions leaders. Stewardship and parish life directors. Communications staff. Board members and trustees who want to be genuine partners rather than polite observers.
Whether you have been in the role for fifteen years or fifteen days, you'll find sessions written for where you actually are — and a room full of people who understand the particular weight of doing this work in a Catholic school or parish.
Come as a team. The institutions that see the most change are the ones that send two or more and go home with a shared plan. Group discounts are available.
Two Days. One Focus.
Solely Catholic schools and parishes. No general-nonprofit sessions to sit through. Every case study, every number, every example comes from a school or a parish like yours.
Practitioners, not theorists. Led by an ISPD team with more than 250 years of combined experience serving Catholic institutions — people who have sat in your chair.
Built to be used Monday. Sessions end with next steps, not takeaways. You'll leave with work already started.
Your Community Is Ready to Invest in Something Worth Building.
Two days in Orlando. Twenty-one sessions. One question worth answering together: what would it look like if your school or parish stopped surviving and started thriving?
Registration starts at $795 and includes all sessions, lunch, refreshments, the evening reception, and conference materials.
