Show Me “The Jewish Day School Money”:
Tips for Successful Jewish Day School Grant
Writing By Shira Weinstein, MA, Counseling Psychology 

Over the course of my past 12 years working for Jewish day schools, I have been fortunate to receive several hundreds of thousand dollars in grant funding for special programs. As a Jewish day school alum, it brings me pride to know I am helping to bring the bells and whistles of programs in the arts, sciences, math, literacy, experiential field trips, and special needs program support to the next generation of day school students. With shrinking budgets, rising costs, and the need for state-of-the-art unique programs to win families to our schools, the challenge of bringing in grant funding is a challenge worth taking.

The grant funding application process can be grueling, and the challenges that present themselves are many. Here are seven tips I have learned over the years that will best position your school to receive grant funding: 
1. Establish a grants coordinator who works on all aspects of state, federal, and private grants. While in a larger setting, the grant writer does not carry out the grant or help write the evaluations, in a Jewish day school that is not typically the case. A day school grant writer usually works directly with the team carrying out the grant, creates the surveys, takes the photos, and prepare the evaluations necessary to procure reimbursements.
2. Do your homework to identify organizations that most want to help Jewish day schools. Reach out to those organizations and ask to see award-winning grant applications to review (but not to copy) and adapt your application in ways that may support your application for their readers. Also, some organizations list past winners on their websites. It can be a good idea to connect with day schools that have won grants to learn from them.
3. Study the mission of the grant foundation, and work on matching your needs with their mission. Find out in advance what kinds of projects the foundation will and will not fund. Avoid soliciting support for materials or supplies that your school needs. Foundations typically prefer funding programs rather than materials. 4. Support the application with research. Be sure to show your knowledge of what you are applying for, and demonstrate your school’s needs.
5. Titles can captivate, and a picture says a thousand words. A compelling title, picture, or a link to a school video that supports the proposal can help seal the deal!
6. Follow the rules. This applies to every stage of the grant process. Don’t wait until the last minute or after the deadline to apply. If you say you will do something in the proposal, then you must do exactly that and follow up with a report that shows it was done. Proper and timely reporting is imperative to receiving reimbursements.
7. Not every grant covers every project entirely, so plan accordingly. Sometimes schools must budget to fund incidental costs or reach out to other donors to meet the grant matching requirements. It is important to consider the fact that if the foundation only 
agrees to fund a portion of your program, your school will need to have or raise the additional resources.

In closing, a few important things to keep in mind: 
⇒ Grants are not slush funds. They fund only what is approved from the proposal 
by the foundation.
⇒ Grant writing is a process that involves editing, revising, and checking in with all parties involved in carrying out the grant. From my grant-writing training, I learned that the most successful grant proposals have had at least five to seven readers!
⇒ You will not receive every grant you apply for, but you will have success if you try these tricks and do not give up.

Sometimes winning awards or recognition is the goal, as it leads to connections who want to fund you for future programs. Other times, collaborating with other groups or seeking funding through multiple groups can be the key to success for your organization. Whatever path you choose, keep on trying! Nothing is more fulfilling than watching videos of the special programs or hearing the feedback from the students, staff, and families who have benefitted from the experiences the grant programs have brought to our schools. Make the memories yours!

Jewish day school leaders dream of having a board that understands its fundraising responsibilities and solicits actively and joyfully.

That can be your board if you adopt intentional practices that lead board members to enthusiastically take the school’s case to the community, identify donors and ask for support.

Below are 10 ideas that will prepare your board members to become better equipped to move into donor cultivation and solicitation.

1. Don’t limit a board member’s school experience to the boardroom. Include board members in school events- give board members meaningful jobs. Be as specific as you can when assigning duties, for example, a greeter at an event should be not only welcoming guests but should identify her/himself as a board member and engage in conversation with a community member. Any significant interaction should be reported to the head of school or development director.
2. Thanking donors and understanding the donor story. Board members should always call, or better yet, meet in person to thank donors. Learning about why donors support the school gives your board members insight into the school’s position and impact in the community. This helps them shape their own story.
3. Invite the development director to board meetings. Getting to know the development director gives board members greater comfort in communicating potential donor opportunities.
4. Underscore personal giving. The emphasis on 100% board giving is greater than ever. Can you give a list of board gifts, without names, at board meetings to show increased numbers at each board meeting? Even if you just show top gifts -that can serve as a great incentive for people to make their gift and be counted.
5. Provide the board with mission metrics. A monthly or quarterly dashboard with significant achieved benchmarks or accomplishments can be shared at board meetings. These examples give board members easy to remember data to share with potential donors and enable the board to have snapshot picture of the programs and progress.
6. …and mission stories. Board meetings should have a mission focus-a teacher telling a story; a short video; even a student coming in a meeting to tell about a project he/she initiated. Again, easy to remember and re-tell.
7. Board members should be able to tell their own story of why the school is important to them. These stories should be shared at meetings. Even spending time at a meeting writing a 30-second elevator pitch can be fun and impactful.
8. Celebrate any cultivation or solicitation success. Knowing that your outreach is being appreciated will motivate others.
9. Give board members written scripts for social media and other outreach. The easier you make it for your board members, the more willing these busy people are to participate.
10. Prospecting together. Can a small group of board members meet regularly to prospect? This can be done respectfully and confidentially.

None of these activities involves asking for money, but all lead to a board that understands what the school does, who the donors are, and their own relationship with the school. The next step is the knowledgeable, joyful ask!

Jack Lew, former treasury secretary of the United States and an Orthodox Jew, used to quip that it was easier to balance the budget of the United States than it was to balance the budget of a synagogue. This analogy holds true for Jewish day school budgets too. Getting them to balance is not always easy and it may seem tempting to approve, yet again, a large tuition increase.

Before you vote for a 4% or 5% annual tuition increase, here are five questions to ask yourself (and your fellow board members) first:

1. Does your school have opportunities to capture more non-tuition revenue? Non-tuition revenue typically includes fundraising dollars, income from endowments, federation funding and government funding. For many schools, this non-tuition revenue can represent 20% or more of a school's budget. There may be other sources of revenue as well. If your school owns its real estate, can it rent its facility to a summer camp or after-school program
2. Has the average tenure of teachers and other faculty increased over the years? While tenured teachers and faculty are generally perceived as positives, no school can afford a teaching staff or faculty that consists solely of individuals with 10+ years of experience. In order to manage their costs, schools should continually balance the mix of staff and may sometimes need to hire a junior or mid-level staff member to replace a more senior one.
3. Are there too many administrators in your school? In his aptly titled book "Mind the Gap", former head of school Richard Soghoian argues that private schools would be better served hiring fewer, better- paid administrators. Soghoian adopted such a strategy during his tenure at Manhattan's Columbia Grammar and Prep. The result was a leaner school cost structure and an average to below average tuition.
4. Are scholarship funds being allocated appropriately? It is sobering to realize that more than half of families in Jewish day schools are scholarship recipients. The overwhelming majority need these subsidies in order to enroll their children in day school. Yet many day schools use scholarship funds as incentive funds to recruit new families to their school. Many schools readily offer a discount of $1000-$5000 per child off tuition to a (typically new) family that asks for it, irrespective of their need. These practices hurt schools in at least two ways. First, schools wind up giving out more scholarship than they would otherwise need to. Second, parents know that tuition is negotiable and they will negotiate for (non-need based) discounts.
5. Would attracting 5 or 10 more students obviate or mitigate a tuition increase? For schools with excess student capacity, the addition of just a handful of additional students might bring more revenue than a 1%-2% tuition increase. One Orthodox school in New Jersey held tuition nearly flat for several years in a row by partnering with their existing parents to help bring new families into the school.

There are, of course, many good reasons to support a tuition increase. Tuition should ideally be set at the cost to educate (excluding scholarship), and schools that price tuition way below the cost to educate essentially give a scholarship to each and every one of their families. This is not considered best practice and those schools should probably raise their tuition.

Most schools, however, charge a tuition that equals or exceeds the actual cost to educate a child and need to consider a cost benefit analysis before approving a tuition increase. For the average day school, a 1% tuition increase will garner just $25,000 in additional revenue and will force more middle-income families to become scholarship recipients. So, scholarship invariably goes up once tuition increases. Let's exhaust all other possibilities before raising our hand in support of yet another tuition increase!