Raising Our ROI Attracts Parents and Donors

Five years ago, our school went through an accreditation process that highlighted our need to stabilize fundraising and enrollment while engaging in strategic planning to reach key goals. As a prerequisite to achieving these goals, we needed to upgrade our school quality to “investment grade.” With a proud legacy of 65 years, it was time to build on past successes. Our approach emphasized being deeply rooted while becoming forward focused.

Upgrades

Rav Kook suggested contemporary Judaism needs to be like putting “fine aged wine in beautiful new flasks.” In more modern terms, this meant we had to improve both our steak and our sizzle. This required significant investments in personnel improvements and intensive curricular review. New educational upgrades were purchased, including technology designed to improve parent communication, teacher instruction and the collection of student learning data. Ongoing professional development by our local independent school association ensured research-based best practices informed our professional growth.

Our strategic compass included widespread adoption of data-driven teaching and learning for all staff and students, peer coaching, science of learning–based instruction and increased enrichment and remedial opportunities for students utilizing curriculum-based measures (CBM). This led to clearer goals to better market our school to potential local donors and families. Better quality of services helped us resonate with a broader array of families by showcasing program improvements and growth.

Outreach

Proactive outreach to retain existing families, attract newer families and identify potential candidates for our school increased via social media, amplifying our messaging to a broader array of constituents. Our ground game required us to stretch across silos to partner with a wider array of communal institutions such as the Jewish federation, local synagogues, the Holocaust museum and local preschools as well as PJ Library. We’ve aimed to forge synergistic collaboration with others that share even partial common goals.

The time is ripe to engage disconnected families to our nurturing Jewish institutions. This trend started after the Covid era and has increased as more people appreciate varied outposts of Jewish life.

Transformative Gifts

As a result of our institutional improvement efforts, our school, the Rudlin Torah Academy-Richmond Hebrew Day School, received gifts designed to support day school scholarships totaling over $3 million, $1 million from Marcus and Carole Weinstein and $2 million from Josh and Elly Goldberg. How did we achieve this accomplishment?

It started by building relationships. Our Parent Volunteer Association, headed by Elly Goldberg, runs a yearly Purim fundraiser providing food to others. A few years ago, RTA board member Rebecca Levy hand-delivered a mishloach manot basket to the Weinsteins, who were involved in philanthropy to causes like the JCC and the Holocaust Museum, but less so to day school.

This personal touch opened the door to building a relationship with the Weinstein family, who we learned are passionate about diversity in the school community. The Weinsteins began increasing targeted gifts to us over the past three years to interest areas such as broadening our student base and honoring Holocaust survivors.

Stakeholders saw increased coverage about RTA in the Reflector, our local federation newspaper. Articles about our school developments were communicated through press releases, advertisements, articles and images demonstrating the quality of our educational program.

Relationships

Building relationships takes time and can yield significant results. Our efforts brought more people into RTA’s orbit. Not every school visitor enrolls their children, but positive guest experiences tailored to individual interests with a compatible docent often turn strangers into stakeholders, allies, supporters and even ambassadors. These grassroots connections build relationships one person at a time.

Forging relationships expanded opportunities. For example, this year, local heads of federation beneficiary agencies were invited to attend a mission to Israel. I decided to attend this mission, despite it taking time away from school. In fact, my mission attendance along with other RTA board members and parents positively impacted our receiving even more significant communal support.

Investing in Jewish day schools is slowly becoming viewed as investing in a communal asset with long-term returns, instead of as purely a charitable endeavor. Donors give to organizations they trust, and if they see their friends involved, they are more likely to continue their giving due to that trust and reliability. Indeed, a local rabbi, Rabbi Dovid Asher, who is very supportive of our school was instrumental in helping to usher one of the recent major gifts, helping to bolster the donors’ confidence in us.

Lay Leaders

Influential lay leaders can advocate for the school’s mission and facilitate connections with potential donors as well as showing the community that the school is a community asset. This year, our lay leaders have also played critical roles in advancing the school’s mission. Steven Skaist, an RTA alumni parent and lay leader within the Richmond Jewish community, approached his close friends the Goldberg family, an existing donor family, to consolidate their giving into a “Jewish Futures Fund.” This fund would focus on our day school scholarship needs as well, and would also enhance other related initiatives in the greater Richmond Jewish community such as adult education and Israel advocacy programs.

The Goldbergs and the Skaists exemplify the type of young donor families who grew up in Richmond, attended the local day school and returned to Richmond to live. They want their own children to benefit from a quality day school experience and are motivated to build on the recent successes at RTA by infusing significant resources to help sustain those gains and foster further growth.

This also helps pave the way for other families considering where to live and makes Richmond a potential destination location with a critical mass of high-quality Jewish infrastructure in place. Classical Jewish sources inventoried the basic components needed to be considered a thriving kehillah; in contemporary society, a vibrant day school is definitely high up on that list.

The Goldbergs stated, “For us, investing in scholarships is the best way to open doors for our community’s students. On the one hand, our schools must be able to spend significantly to deliver the education our students deserve; on the other hand, we must be committed to ensuring every student seeking a Jewish education is able to receive one, regardless of financial circumstance. Through investing in scholarships, we uniquely achieve those twin aims: excellent education that is accessible to all.” These efforts exemplify how strategic consolidation and focusing of resources can enhance and leverage the impact of philanthropy across multiple community sectors, thus enhancing the role of RTA within the broader Jewish community.

Donors are now considering ways to help expand the reach of Jewish communal institutions in an era of high cost of living that proves to be a potential barrier for a number of Jewish families. Mordechai Kaplan pointed out over 100 years ago that an increasing barrier to future Jewish communal involvement in our country was not going to be so much about religion as it was going to be about economics.

Jewish communal strategists look to gain more access to those Jews still below the communal radar who are not yet affiliated in any meaningful way. Day school donors are increasing their gifts that are focused on scholarship and recruitment so day schools can expand their reach into the broader denominational, geographic and racial breadth of the Jewish community who may not think they can afford or will be comfortable in a traditional Jewish day school environment.

Raising Our ROI

Collaborating with other Jewish communal organizations such as Jewish Family Service to provide educational services for newly relocated refugees from places like Ukraine or Israel facing wartime challenges attract new funders to support our mutual causes. Co-sponsoring a PJ Library activity connects us with potential future student families. These types of broader levels of communal engagement demonstrate the school’s commitment to broader community issues, enhancing its appeal to a wider donor base.

Jewish federations are slowly increasing funding to Jewish day schools as part of their long-term strategy to bolster Jewish communal life and attract as well as engage new families. Strong Jewish day schools have proven to be essential for many young families considering returning to where they grew up so their children can have the same positive day school experience in a new and improved contemporary setting.

Over the past few years, and especially over the past few months, increased security and hardened physical plant infrastructure have taken a more prominent place in governmental, federation and major donor priorities. Now, we are poised as a field to capitalize on the silver lining of increased Jewish identity, pride and affiliation awakened by the situation in Israel if we invest heavily in easing the financial barrier into our Jewish communal institutions and day schools. Informal networks of Israeli families helped spread the word about our local school option that teaches Hebrew, is very safe and embraces Israel. New arrivals from Israel needed to be integrated and paired with Hebrew-speaking peers both in and out of school and increased ESL tutoring was enhanced.

Economic uncertainty may tempt schools to project an image of need and scarcity to elicit sympathy-based support. However, experienced fundraisers understand that donors are more inclined to support institutions they perceive as successful. Positioning the school as a thriving entity tends to attract larger and more frequent donations. An elderly board member once proclaimed, “Donors like winners!” Positivity about success aligns with donors’ desire to invest in worthwhile and effective projects.

The best ROI our donors can have is by developing our future Jewish communal leaders infused with a strong sense of Jewish identity and pride ready to face life primed for success. The best place to do this is in our Jewish day schools if we rise to meet the challenges of our times.

Through strategic efforts, Jewish day schools can position themselves as invaluable community assets, driving educational excellence and fostering a vibrant, supportive community. By becoming a port in the storm, Jewish day schools can help navigate communal challenges and enrich the lives of Jewish students and the broader community during uncertain times.

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