Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Are You a Philanthropist?


"A philanthropist transforms the social wellbeing of others through generosity." - McCabe Callahan

Finding the philanthropists who want to transform the social wellbeing of our students in the Jubilee Schools is our goal.  These are the folks who are going to make the difference needed to change lives by providing our students with the opportunity for hope and success.

The current development team for the Jubilee Schools has been in place for less than eleven months. We are searching our way through the development process and in many cases starting from scratch. We have experienced many successes and I want to focus on one of these successes.

We, as a development team, were asked by the Jubilee Schools board of directors to meet several objectives with one major objective being to increase the number of new philanthropists to the Jubilee Schools. They gave us no specific number mainly because there was no real data to go by in setting a number.

We began the process by first cleaning up the database. If a person in our database never contributed to the schools or participated in any activities, they were removed from the database. We then worked to update contact information for the folks in our database to make sure they would be receiving communications from the Jubilee Schools office.

This was a long and tedious process that removed about 2/3 of the names from our database. We want philanthropists and volunteers in our database who are engaged in our mission and not a bunch of names of important people who aren't a part of our Jubilee School mission.

The next task was to set a goal for the number of new philanthropists to the Jubilee Schools. We still didn't have a formula to use so we set an arbitrary goal of bringing in 500 new philanthropists. We had no idea if this was achievable so we set a plan to get this done. We have to have a plan in order to achieve a goal.

The most important part of actually doing development work is to create engagement. To create engagement, we developed first time events and organizations such as the Wings of Jubilee, Tails of Jubilee, Blue Streak 1,000 Club, and Memphis Catholic Alumni Association. We asked the Memphis Catholic Hall of Fame to become more involved with the school. Blue Streak created CatholicTree.org to help the Jubilee Schools raise funds for non-budgeted items such as SMARTBoards, iPad charging carts, and even a new flag pole for Memphis Catholic. This week we will have our first ever End of the Year Bash at Neil's Music Room.

We also created the Jubilee Employee 10x10 Challenge to encourage new philanthropists to join our efforts. In the 10x10 challenge, we asked all Jubilee School employees to donate a minimum of $10 and/or pray one decade of the Rosary (10 Holy Marys) for the schools and ask 10 other people to do the same.

Between the Jubilee Schools and Blue Streak, we are currently at 450 new philanthropists on our way to hopefully reaching our goal of 500.

Part of the plan is not for a one time donation but for our philanthropists to become recurring donors. If we receive one time donations, that is nice but it doesn't transform the social wellbeing of our students. The idea of transformation takes place over time and with a lot of dedication. It doesn't happen overnight. We need the philanthropists to join and help lead our team. These folks are leaders and we need their commitment and ability to make a positive difference.

We are creating engagement so we can bring people on board to support our mission. From there the transformation can take place.

We could sure use your help in transforming the social wellbeing of our students. If you are interested in being a part of the transformation, please feel free to contact me. There are many ways you can help. Let your philanthropic heart and desire to transform the social wellbeing of the Jubilee students lead you to be the change you want to see in the world.

God bless you,
Didier Aur

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