Advancement & Enrollment Management

Strategic Plan for Advancement & Enrollment Management

A focused plan for the two functions that decide whether a Catholic school grows — and a month-by-month calendar to run it.

Sometimes a school does not need a five-year plan for the whole institution. It needs the advancement office to work, and it needs enrollment to stop slipping.

This is the process for that. Six to eight months, focused on the two functions that determine whether a Catholic school grows, and delivered either to a single school or to a group of schools together in partnership with a diocesan Office of Catholic Schools.

Development here does not mean money. It means the meaningful involvement of people in your mission and vision for the future — which is what makes annual funds sustainable and re-enrollment something families never seriously question.

6–8

months, start to finished plan

5

ranked Challenges drive the whole plan

12

months of dated calendar, June through May

1 or many

one school, or a diocesan cohort together

You leave with next year already scheduled

Most consulting engagements end with a plan. This one ends with a plan and a calendar — twelve months, June through May, with dated commitments in every one of them.

June: audit every fundraiser you run. July: finalize the annual fund case, segments, and touchpoints. August: launch new-family onboarding. September: thirty-day check-ins with every new family. October: the archdiocesan admissions process opens. November: iGiveCatholic cultivation. December: Giving Tuesday, and re-enrollment portals finalized. January: the re-enrollment campaign with real incentives. March: stewardship updates and thank-yous. May: evaluate, report a year in review, and set next year’s calendar.

That last line is the point. The calendar is built to be rewritten every May, which is how a plan becomes a practice instead of a document.

How the Process Runs

1. Assessment and education

We begin by assessing your present advancement, marketing, and enrollment efforts — and by teaching. A series of workshops on Catholic school development gives your leadership a shared vocabulary before any planning starts.

Work centers on the Operational Vitality domain: your constituent records and database health, your Top 10 Selling Points, the financial leaders in your community and how they are involved, and an honest look at what is actually working.

A development Executive Committee forms, supported by a Development Core Team. These are the people who will own the plan after we leave, so they are involved in writing it from the beginning.

We also communicate the approach to your wider leadership groups — faculty and staff, boards and councils, key parents and alumni — because a plan nobody has heard of is a plan nobody implements.

Every constituency is asked one question: how likely are you to recommend this school to your family, friends, and colleagues?

It is a short survey and a revealing one. It measures advocacy rather than satisfaction — whether your people are willing to put their own name behind an invitation. For a school whose enrollment depends on word of mouth, that is the number that matters.

The Executive Committee conducts a full SWOT of the school’s development and advancement work — present strengths, present weaknesses, future opportunities, and future threats, stated plainly.

From that come the Challenges, each written as a question the school must answer. Not “improve the annual fund” but “how can we build a sustainable, year-round annual fund supported by clean, usable data — while consolidating fragmented fundraisers into a program families can rally around?”

A well-written Challenge already contains half its own answer.

A dozen or more Challenges typically surface. The Executive Committee ranks them, and five become the plan.

Each of the five receives a set of specific strategic solutions — not principles, but actions with owners. Focus on doing a few things well rather than many things partially; the rest can be layered in future years.

The written plan closes with formal recommendations grouped by function — advancement, enrollment management, and operational vitality — covering donor stewardship cadence, the annual fund narrative, the prospective family pipeline, the open house and visit experience, family retention review, and the governance of your advancement team.

Then the twelve-month calendar, month by month, and your Top 10 Selling Points with the WOW factor that makes your school unmistakable.

Catholic school advancement and enrollment management planning | ISPD

The Fundraiser Audit

Most Catholic schools run more fundraisers than they can justify — each one added at some point for a good reason, none ever retired.

So we audit them. Every fundraising event and effort from the year, evaluated on five things:

Net revenue. Not gross. Net.
Volunteer hours and staff time actually consumed.
Alignment with mission and with a culture of belonging.
Donor fatigue created.
Conflict with the annual fund.

Every event is then marked continue, consolidate, redesign, or retire — and the findings go to your principal and Executive Committee before next year’s calendar is approved, not after.

It moves the decision from “we have always done it that way” to a stewardship of your people’s time. And the volunteer energy freed up goes where it compounds: the annual fund.

Two ways to engage

A single school. Your own Executive Committee, your own assessment, your own plan and calendar.

A diocesan cohort. ISPD partners with an Office of Catholic Schools to bring a group of schools through together — shared workshops on Catholic school development, monthly coaching for every participating school, and a separate written plan and calendar for each one.

The cohort model does something a single engagement cannot. Principals and advancement directors who are usually working alone discover they are solving identical problems, and the peer relationships often outlast the engagement. For a diocese, it also means every school moves forward at once rather than one at a time.

If you lead an Office of Catholic Schools, start here.

This is the right process when

  • Enrollment is slipping and nobody can say precisely where in the funnel
  • You run many fundraisers and have no real annual fund
  • Your constituent data is spread across systems, or was never entered
  • There are alumni out there and no way to reach them
  • A new advancement director needs a plan rather than a job description
  • The team generates good ideas and finishes very few of them

Consider another process if…

The whole school needs direction, not one or two functions. That is a Strategic Growth Plan, and advancement becomes one Planning Area within it.

A building project is driving the timeline. Start with a feasibility study.

You have the plan and need the person coached. Our development and advancement coaching and enrollment management coaching work month to month with the people doing the job.

Questions school leaders ask us

What is the difference between fundraising and development?

Fundraising is transactional. Development is relational.

A fundraiser exchanges something for money — a ticket, a raffle entry, a wrapping-paper order. It works once, it consumes enormous volunteer energy, and it ends when the event ends.

Development is the meaningful involvement of people in your mission and vision for the future. It asks nothing at first. It invites, involves, and invests people — and giving follows, because people fund what they belong to.

Both raise money. Only one of them compounds.

They do not have to be, and we do run advancement-only engagements. But they usually should be.

Both depend on the same things: clean constituent data, a compelling story about the school, and families who feel they belong. The family who re-enrolls without hesitating is the same family who gives to the annual fund and tells a neighbor about you. Planning them separately means building the same foundation twice.

Six to eight months from the first assessment to a written plan and calendar in hand. Because the calendar runs June through May, most schools begin in the fall so the plan lands in spring and implementation starts with the new school year.

It is extremely common, and it is usually one of the first Challenges the plan names. Records spread across several systems, alumni who were never entered, lapsed donors nobody has looked at in years.

We do not wait for perfect data. We start with what exists, name a point person responsible for its integrity, define your constituent segments, and build from there. Every school we work with begins somewhere on that curve.

One question, asked of every constituency: how likely are you to recommend this school to family, friends, and colleagues, on a scale of zero to ten?

It measures advocacy rather than satisfaction. Families can be content and still never mention you to anyone — and in Catholic school enrollment, where word of mouth outperforms every other channel, that distinction is the whole ballgame.

Yes, and it is one of the most effective ways to do this work. ISPD partners with diocesan Offices of Catholic Schools to bring a cohort of schools through together — shared education workshops, monthly coaching for each school, and an individual written plan and calendar for every participating school.

Schools move at once rather than one at a time, and the principals and advancement directors build peer relationships that usually outlast the engagement.

Let’s Make Things Happen!

Tell us how many fundraisers you ran last year, and we will tell you what a real annual fund could do instead.
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