Your school's anniversary is the perfect opportunity to bring your community together for a year of celebration and fundraising. Whether you’re celebrating the birthday of your school, or other landmark moments such as becoming co-ed or opening a junior / senior school, milestones are a great reason to get your school community involved in fundraising. Check out five ideas to make the most of your anniversary year below:

1. Create a book of memories

A book with photos and stories from across your school’s history is the perfect purchase for a proud alum of your school. You can work with a school archivist (or a keen volunteer from your alumni / staff / parent community!) to pull together photos from across the years, and ask for stories to accompany. Working on a project like this can be easier with an online school community, using the platform to ask members to identify and even tag others in photos or share the story behind the photo. 

2. Celebrate with an event

Depending on your resource, you could choose to run several events throughout your anniversary year, or shift your focus to one bigger event. School fetes or gala dinners are always popular choices, but if you don’t have the capacity to host a large number of people, you can always keep it simple with a school assembly, school tour, or exhibition talks from successful alumni. 

While events can be costly, they are often one of the best ways to raise donations and put you face-to-face with many potential donors. Having a CRM system that captures event attendees from when they sign up and enables you to segment and send tailored communications straight after the event is a great way to ensure you maximise the fundraising impact of your event.

3. Get your student body involved 

Get your current students involved to help to bring your school’s history to life. You could do this by hosting a ‘recreate the photo’ competition using photos from your school's archives, or host a fashion parade through the decades to share what uniforms looked like back in the day! You can also ask students to participate in an aerial photo by standing outside in the shape of the number of years you’re celebrating. These can all provide great content to share with the rest of your school community - especially current parents - to encourage donations throughout the year. 

4. Hold a number challenge

Everyone in your community can get involved in a number challenge; take the number of your anniversary and get creative! You can ask people to get sponsors for bigger challenges (e.g. running / cycling 75km) or donate your anniversary number for smaller challenges (such as doing 75 star jumps, bake 75 cookies). Create a tailored online giving page for your challenges and see who can reach the target first! 

5. Focus on the impact of your fundraising

One of the most impactful ways to fundraise is by sharing testimonials from past or present students. Whether you are fundraising for bursaries and can share how bursaries have impacted on the lives and careers of past or current students, or a capital campaign to improve the experience for future generations, use your anniversary year to reinforce the impact behind your fundraising. You could create a special donor report for your anniversary, highlighting all the years of philanthropy throughout your school’s history and the impact this has had on the students and community of your school. 

Anniversaries are an exciting time for your school and you should aim to make the most of the goodwill during your anniversary year. Use an all-in-one system made for development teams such as ToucanTech to make it easier to track donations, engage donors, send targeted emails, share content and photos, and manage events all in one place. To find out more, speak to a member of the ToucanTech team.