Sometimes a school or parish does not need a five-year plan for the whole institution. It needs its advancement work to stop being a calendar of events and start being a program.
This is the process for that. Six to eight months, focused entirely on development and advancement, delivered either to a single school or parish 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. Annual funds, major gifts, planned giving, alumni engagement, and donor stewardship all rest on that one idea — and none of them hold without it.
months, start to finished plan
ranked Challenges drive the whole plan
months of dated calendar, June through May
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 the year’s donor communications and the first major gift portfolio reviews. September: personal outreach begins, division by division. October: alumni engagement season. November: iGiveCatholic cultivation. December: Giving Tuesday, and year-end appeals. January: major gift visits and the mid-year portfolio review. 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
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
Consider another process if…
The whole school needs direction, not one function. 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.
Enrollment is the pressing problem, not advancement. That is the Strategic Plan for Enrollment Management.
You have the plan and need the person coached. Our development and advancement coaching works month to month with the people doing the job.
Success Story — Catonsville, Maryland
Mount de Sales Academy
Mount de Sales Academy is an all-girls Catholic high school in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, rooted in the Visitation and Dominican traditions and led today by the Dominican Sisters. Its advancement operation was not broken. It was busy — and busy is not the same as aligned.
ISPD engaged with Mount de Sales in June 2023 and worked with the school through the 2023–24 year. An Advancement Assessment came first. Then, across late fall 2023 and spring 2024, an Advancement Core Team of volunteers, the Advancement Team itself, and an Advisory Committee worked through two planning workshops and a convocation with open breakout groups. The Strategic Plan for Advancement was delivered in May 2024.
Seven challenges came out of it, ranked by the planning teams and by two separate convocation votes. Alumnae engagement finished first. Not the annual fund. Not major gifts. Admissions referral finished last.
That order is the argument for this process. A school that cannot reach its own graduates has no major gift pipeline to build and no advocates to recruit for it. So the plan starts there: a national alumnae committee organized by region, an alumnae professional network offering job referrals, childcare, and tutoring rather than a mixer, multi-generational reunions, and an Alumnae National Advisory Board.
Underneath the seven challenges the plan did the structural work — six advancement teams realigned, ten roles restructured, a major gift portfolio process begun, and an Annual Fund rebuilt around four divisions: a Parent Division with personal outreach to every parent, an Alumnae Appeal, a Friends Division for past parents and grandparents, and business community cultivation.
One line from the convocation says it better than the plan does: “Don’t make the first connections to alumnae a request to donate money. Make the first connection an invitation to do something fun.”
Questions school leaders ask us
Fundraising is transactional. Development is relational.
A fundraiser exchanges something for money — a ticket, a raffle entry, a wrapping-paper order. It works once, consumes enormous volunteer energy, and ends when the event does.
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 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.
Contact us today to learn more.
