What happens when your school’s strategic direction sets ambitious goals—but your advancement operation isn’t yet equipped to fund them? Mulgrave School faced that question head-on when its Strategic Direction 2025+ identified priorities spanning teacher housing, endowment growth, and a transformative capital project. Rather than jumping straight to the ask, the advancement team first rebuilt its fundraising infrastructure, assessed its data, strengthened its annual fund, and used Raiser’s Edge NXT to identify and prioritize prospective donors.
This session will take you behind the scenes of that process—from an initial pool of 300 prospective families to 24 donor conversations that generated $5.2 million in commitments. We’ll explore how Mulgrave used constituent data, giving history, property information, Linkage–Interest–Ability ratings, portfolio management, campaign opportunities, and reporting to turn a strategic vision into an actionable donor strategy.
The session will also examine how campaign data is now being used to give senior leadership and the Board the information they need to make major institutional decisions. Along the way, we’ll share what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned about building the infrastructure before making the ask—including the unique challenges Canadian fundraisers face when prospect research data is more limited than in the U.S.
The goal: to show how the right strategy, structure, and data can turn a big institutional vision into a fundable one.