Master Class: Scaling Fundraising and Alumni Engagement with a Small Advancement Team

If you work in a small advancement shop, you already know the unspoken rule: the workload never gets smaller—only the team does.

Annual fund campaigns, alumni events, stewardship, giving days, and the ever-present “can you also help with this?” moments all compete for limited time and attention. For many advancement teams, scaling impact can feel less like strategy and more like survival.

This Master Class explores how Perkiomen School, a small independent boarding and day school in Pennsylvania, found ways to streamline its approach to annual giving, alumni engagement, and event management—all with a lean team.

Drawing from a session presented at the GiveCampus Partners Conference, this story shows how Perkiomen simplified its Day of Giving strategy, improved alumni event operations, and strengthened outreach by letting one platform do more of the heavy lifting.

If you’re responsible for annual giving, alumni relations, events, or advancement communications, the lessons here offer practical ways to scale impact without adding head count.

What Small Advancement Teams Can Learn from Perkiomen School

Small advancement teams face a unique challenge: they must deliver results across fundraising, events, donor communications, and alumni engagement with limited staff and limited time.

Perkiomen’s experience highlights several strategies that can help small shops scale their impact:

• Simplifying giving day campaigns improves donor engagement
• Reducing platform fragmentation saves staff time
• Integrating event data with outreach improves communication
• Creative engagement initiatives can drive participation without large budgets

In short: scaling impact isn’t always about doing more. Sometimes it’s about removing friction.

Meet Perkiomen School: A Small Advancement Shop with Big Ambitions

Perkiomen School is a co-educational, college-preparatory boarding and day school in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, serving students from across the United States and around the world.

Founded in 1875, the school established a dedicated development office in 2012. Today, a six-person team leads Perkiomen’s advancement efforts.

Development Writer and Stewardship Officer Abi Rose-Craver manages fundraising communications, supports events, oversees digital engagement, and administers the school’s online giving platform—all while juggling the many “other duties as assigned” that come with small-shop life.

With a lean team and a long list of responsibilities, Perkiomen couldn’t simply add more staff or more hours. Instead, they stepped back and asked three critical questions:

• What’s driving real results?
• What’s consuming time without delivering impact?
• How can our tools work together instead of creating more work?

The answers reshaped how they approached their annual Day of Giving.

Running a Day of Giving with a Small Advancement Team: Lessons from Year One

Perkiomen’s first Day of Giving using GiveCampus delivered strong results. The campaign exceeded its participation goal, reaching 159% of its donor target and raising more than $57,000 from 239 donors.

From a fundraising standpoint, the campaign worked. But behind the scenes, it required significant effort. Abi spent a lot of time:

• Writing copy for project pages
• Compiling and editing student quotes
• Building detailed campaign content across tiers

The campaign page featured multiple project areas and long-form descriptions designed to help donors understand their impact.

What she and the team discovered on the day of the event, however, was something many advancement professionals have experienced: donors rarely read long pages of campaign copy.

And on the day of the event, the advancement team fielded phone calls and texts from supporters who felt overwhelmed by the amount of information and choices on the site.

The campaign was successful, but it revealed an important lesson.

A Key Insight for Giving Days: Clarity Beats Volume

Success isn’t always about producing more content. Sometimes it’s about making the donor experience simpler. From the advancement team’s perspective, detailed storytelling felt helpful. But donor behavior told a different story.

For small advancement teams, this insight matters. Time spent creating long-form content didn’t meaningfully influence giving behavior and it may not have been the best use of their time.

Heading into the next campaign, the team asked an important question: What would happen if we simplified the experience instead of expanding it?

How Simplifying the Campaign Improved the Donor Experience

When planning their next Day of Giving, Perkiomen didn’t try to overhaul everything. The previous campaign had delivered strong results. Instead, the team refined their approach based on what they had learned.

They made several strategic adjustments:

• Reduced the number of campaign pages
• Simplified the narrative structure
• Introduced a clear campaign theme
• Replaced long copy with a visual-first approach

The campaign centered on “Building Opportunities,” connecting donor support to the completion of a new student center—an important milestone in the school’s broader capital campaign.

The giving page featured:

• A video in the hero section
• Fewer clicks for donors
• Clearer calls to action

Equally important, Abi made a conscious decision about where not to spend time. Instead of recreating dozens of student quotes and project descriptions, the team focused on the elements that would make the biggest difference: storytelling, targeted outreach, and donor clarity.

The result was a cleaner donor experience—and a more sustainable workload for staff. And in the end, an additional 52% of donors made a gift in 2025.

Expanding Beyond Giving Days with GC Events

After seeing efficiency gains with online giving, the Perkiomen team turned their attention to another major time drain: event registration and check-in.

Like many schools, alumni events had long been managed through spreadsheets and manual check-ins, an approach that created extra work for the team.

Perkiomen’s Day of Giving itself had evolved over time. It began during the pandemic as a COVID emergency response fund, initially run through the school’s website and later through another giving day vendor. In 2024, the advancement team ran its first Day of Giving on GiveCampus—and the experience quickly changed how they thought about their broader advancement operations.

As Abi explains, “After our first Day of Giving on GiveCampus, I loved it so much that I started advocating internally for us to use the platform for events too.”

Abi worked with Perkiomen’s Alumni Director and Director of Development to expand the platform beyond fundraising and adopt GC Events for alumni gatherings like Reunion and Alumni Weekend.

At first, cost was a concern. But the team realized the platform could serve multiple departments across campus—not just advancement.

Pro Tip: If your department has a smaller budget, see if other teams across the institution could also benefit and share the cost.

Today, in addition to Reunion and Alumni Weekend, GC Events supports a range of campus activities, including:

• Major milestone celebrations like the school’s 150th Anniversary and student center opening
• Admissions open houses and parent information sessions
• Student life events and school-wide celebrations

Operational improvements include:

• Mobile event check-in
• Real-time attendance tracking
• Custom reports for logistics like housing

By expanding the platform beyond fundraising and using it across departments, Perkiomen was able to reduce manual work while making the investment more valuable for the institution as a whole.

Integrating Outreach with Events and Campaigns

One of the biggest efficiency gains came from connecting campaigns and events with targeted outreach.

Instead of exporting lists or reconciling data across multiple systems, the team could filter audiences directly using event registration and check-in data.

This meant communications could be sent to:

• Registered attendees
• Event participants
• Alumni who hadn’t yet responded

For institutions navigating CRM transitions—or those without robust reporting tools—this integration proved especially valuable. Outreach became faster, more accurate, and easier to manage.

Creative Engagement Ideas That Work on Small Budgets

Of course being efficient doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice creativity. In fact, simplifying systems gave the team more room to experiment with engagement. Two Day of Giving initiatives stood out:

Cash Cab Trivia

To raise student awareness of the Day of Giving, Perkiomen created an interactive “Cash Cab” experience. Throughout the day, the Alumni Director drove students to class in a decorated golf cart while asking Perkiomen trivia questions that mixed school history with quick lessons about philanthropy.

Faculty and staff across campus contributed simple prizes—laundry card reloads, dress-down days, Wawa snack runs, and even a “promposal” from the school mascot. Most rewards were free or already part of existing student life budgets, making the initiative both fun and low-cost.

The G.O.A.T. Challenge

The G.O.A.T. Challenge (Greatest of All Teams) created a friendly competition among athletic teams. From Tuesday through Friday of the campaign week, teams competed to receive the most gift designations of $5 or more, with the winning team earning $1,000 toward its budget for the following year.

Originally designed to encourage parent participation, the challenge quickly became a student-driven crowdfunding effort. Athletes rallied friends and family to contribute small gifts, bringing new donors into the campaign while tapping into students’ natural competitiveness and online networks.

Neither initiative required a large budget—but both generated enthusiasm, participation, and shareable moments across campus.

While these ideas energized the campus community, the real operational efficiency came from simplifying the systems behind the campaign.

Breaking Silos Across Campus

One of the biggest benefits of Perkiomen’s approach was improved collaboration across campus.

Advancement partnered with:

• Athletics
• Student life
• Alumni relations

These partnerships created natural engagement opportunities and reduced the workload on the advancement team.

Built-in competition generated follow-up content. Cross-campus support expanded participation. And delaying final campaign announcements until after the event gave staff time to reconcile gifts without weekend burnout.

Key Lessons for Small Advancement Teams

Perkiomen’s experience offers several takeaways for advancement professionals responsible for both fundraising and alumni engagement.

• Simplify the donor journey: Fewer campaign pages and clearer messaging often outperform detail-heavy approaches.

• Focus staff time where it matters most: Not every storytelling effort requires long-form content.

• Integrate systems whenever possible: Event data, giving campaigns, and outreach are more powerful when connected.

• Encourage creativity: Engagement ideas don’t have to be expensive to be effective.

• Collaborate across campus: Partnerships reduce workload while increasing participation.

The Big Takeaway: Scaling Impact Doesn’t Require a Bigger Team

This Master Class is a powerful reminder that scaling advancement work isn’t always about doing more. It’s about doing what matters most, and doing it more effectively.

By consolidating fundraising, event management, and outreach into a single platform, the team reduced manual work and created space for creativity, collaboration, and meaningful engagement.

Their Day of Giving evolved, their alumni events became easier to manage, and their outreach became more targeted. And perhaps most importantly, the advancement team reclaimed time to focus on the relationships that move their mission forward.

For small independent schools and lean advancement shops, that may be the most valuable outcome of all.

See the Solutions Behind the Strategy

See how advancement teams simplify giving days, manage alumni events, and send targeted outreach—all in one platform. Our self-guided product tours let you explore GC Online Giving, GC Events, and GC Outreach at your own pace.