Starting from scratch

When Isabelle Blake-James arrived at the school in 2018, fundraising and alumni relations at the college did not exist in any structured form. There was no alumni officer and no software. A Dunstanian association existed, but it operated at arm's length from the college and relationships were not close.

Isabelle’s role spanned three areas: admissions, marketing, and development — and the first two took priority. Fundraising, in her own description, became the thing she remembered at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon once everyone else had gone home.

What she did know was that the data had to move first:

• Alumni records sat in a spreadsheet with hundreds of columns that froze the screen every time it was opened
• A few hundred Dunstanians were subscribed in MailChimp, separately
• There was no single place for the team to look up a relationship, and no team to look it up

In order to start better maintaining their data, Isabelle approached two providers at the end of 2018. A US platform did not offer the customer service the college was looking for. ToucanTech sent someone to Catford in person to spend an afternoon explaining the platform to a self-described non-technical buyer, and that visit won the business.

Getting everything into one place

The first priority was consolidation: one system, one set of records, and everyone on the team trained to work in it.

Engagement came next, and it was built by trial and error rather than by copying anyone. Isabelle taught herself the newsletter, sent a few she described as poor, then refined it — looking at what other schools were doing mainly to work out how to be different from them. The tone has stayed deliberately offbeat ever since.

The network launched shortly before the first COVID lockdown, which turned out to be very fortunate timing. Registrations and newsletter readership climbed sharply as alumni looked for ways to reconnect, and that period cemented the first real relationships between the college and its Dunstanians. A relaunched alumni magazine also went out alongside it.

Keeping email open rates higher than industry average

At 70%+, the college's newsletter open rate sits well above the 50% that counts as a strong result for an alumni audience.

Isabelle puts it down to three things:

• Genuine content. The newsletter carries real snippets of life at the college and unexpected news, not institutional announcements
• No monotony. New events and new angles are brainstormed as a team, on the principle that the same thing twice loses readers
• Starting from scratch. The college never inherited a stale, disengaged list. Every relationship on the database was built deliberately, from the first newsletter onwards

Fundraising email opt-in rates are similarly high.

A small team who are disciplined about data

The development office has four part-time, term-time staff plus Isabelle full-time and year-round, which equates to roughly three FTE in total. They all sit in one room, surrounded by the college archives.

• An alumni officer (three days a week) covering events, newsletters, inboxes and merchandise
• An archivist (two days a week) who started as a volunteer. The archives have proved one of the strongest engagement hooks the college has, with alumni and current parents alike
• Launching mentoring and interest groups, including a potential dedicated space for women doctors to help address gender balance in course applications
• A database officer (three days a week) who runs the back end
• A campaign officer handling smaller campaigns, Gift Aid and finance

Both the alumni officer and the archivist are Dunstanians, recruited personally by Isabelle after she met them at college functions. A Head of Philanthropy role is planned, sitting between the fundraising team and Isabelle.

What holds it together is a rule about logging. Nobody leaves at the end of the day without recording at least one thing in ToucanTech — a call, a conversation, a story someone spotted on Facebook. Isabelle spot-checks it, and raises gaps in one-to-ones. The pay-off is that anyone walking into a meeting with a supporter can open the record and see their whole history.

The modules the team lives in day to day are communications and the fundraising module, alongside events and the activity tracker.

The £1m gift

In early 2024, the college receptionist took a phone call and passed on a message: a man had rung to say he wanted to leave the college a million pounds, and could someone call him back.

Isabelle assumed it was a joke. When she did call back, the caller — Alan, then in his eighties — repeated the offer.

She is a lawyer by training, and she was cautious rather than delighted. Before accepting anything she wanted to understand why, and to be certain the gift was not going to end up contested. She visited him in July 2024, taking college memorabilia and photographs of his school friends from sixty years earlier. She left without asking for anything, telling him it was a large sum and he should take time to think.

She went back that September and met his wife, who confirmed she supported the decision.

Over roughly two years there were five or six visits and somewhere north of twenty-five phone calls — all logged. The gift was given in installments and aggregated to more than £1m, which for a school of this size is transformational.

Alan attributes his success in life to St Dunstan's, and to the confidence it gave someone from a modest background. He has since given his company to its employees, on the John Lewis model, bought a house for his housekeeper, and supports his local school.

Why he picked up the phone

The reason is worth sitting with, because it is the whole case for the college's comms strategy.

Alan was on the database but not on email, so he received the alumni magazine in print. Isabelle sends it on paper deliberately, and has taken some criticism for it — her argument being that the older generation leave it on the coffee table and might read it ten times.

One edition carried a page on legacy giving, written by Isabelle, explaining that leaving 10% or more to charity reduces inheritance tax from 40% to 36%. Alan's own solicitor had never told him this. He rang the college because he wanted to speak to whoever had written it.

Going public

Alan initially wanted to stay anonymous. Isabelle spent months persuading him otherwise, and what changed his mind was an article about a £10m gift to Winchester College — the argument being that a named donor gives other supporters permission to give.

In June he attended a black-tie dinner in London at the Royal Automobile Club, hosted by Lord Grade, who had been at school with him. Sixty years on, he was back among his friends.

What's next for St Dunstan’s

• Launching multi-site to centralise fundraising across the college and its prep schools
• A second telephone campaign, run with an external partner
• Recruiting a head of philanthropy
• Building the endowment fund, launched in January 2025, towards a target of £50m by 2038

Advice to anyone starting a development office