Build Stronger Connections with Your School Community Using Online Tools

© January 2013 | 2000 Daniel Island Drive, Charleston, SC 29492 T 800.443.9441 E solutions@blackbaud.com W www.blackbaud.com
How to Build Stronger
Connections with Your School
Community Using Online
Communication Tools
Contents
1 Executive Summary
2 Your Website as a Communications Tool
2 Key Relationships
3 Reaching Parents
4 Striking a Balance
5 A Legacy of Communications
5 Data Management
7 Attract/Retain More Students
7 Advance Fundraising Efforts
8 Lower the Cost of Communications
9 How Technology Impacts Independent Schools
10 About Blackbaud for K – 12 Schools

© January 2013 | 2000 Daniel Island Drive, Charleston, SC 29492 T 800.443.9441 E solutions@blackbaud.com W www.blackbaud.com 1
Blackbaud
for K – 12 Independent Schools
In this white paper, the tools that can best help organizations reach and exceed their
communications goals.
Executive Summary
There is perhaps no greater predictor of a school’s ability to
effectively support its students than the level and quality of its
communications — among staff, students, administration, alumni,
the community and, very importantly, families. Even in a world where
communications is happening all the time and all around us (via
always-on smartphones, tablets, and the like), it can be challenging
for schools to develop a clear channel through which they can
engage all stakeholders in a meaningful and relevant way.
Web-based platforms such as Blackbaud’s Online Campus
Community™
are helping educational institutions create open channels
of communication hooked into back-end databases, delivering
purposeful, meaningful communications to students and their families.
The schools interviewed for this white paper widely and strongly laud
Online Campus Community for its highly customizable interface, which
enables them to tailor their messaging and promote their brand, mission
and value proposition to existing families and alumni, as well as to
families of prospective students. This has helped educational institutions
develop and maintain strong relationships with their students’ families,
and to create new opportunities and efficiencies for fundraising efforts.
No one tool can take the place of a concerted and comprehensive
methodology for effectively working with an educational institution’s
many stakeholders, but tools such as Online Campus Community that
serve as a robust communications hub can ease, focus, and amplify
schools’ efforts.

Blackbaud
Your Website as a Communications Tool
There was a time, not so long ago, when many schools acted in a
sort of vacuum — with families and the community at large acting
as onlookers, rather than engaged participants in their children’s
education. Thankfully, we have come to realize that it really does
“take a village,” and that open, honest, and authentic communication
among all education stakeholders is required for student and school
success. However, the tools for developing a strong, two-way dialog
between home and school have been lacking. Paper notes stuck in a
child’s backpack or several trees’ worth of giving-campaign materials
might sound cliché, but these scenarios have been the reality for too
many organizations and for too many years. All of that is changing
with a new generation of online communications tools, and a few
companies are setting the bar high with innovative web platforms
that leverage back-end databases to effect targeted, purposeful,
effective communication.
“One of the most basic functions of a school is effective
communication — from communicating classroom expectations, to
schedule changes, to policies, to breaking news, to emergencies,” said
Gregg Miller, director of technology at the Wilmington Friends School, a
PreK– 8 co-ed Quaker school located in Wilmington, Delaware.
Key Relationships
A key — if not the key — relationship in any education community is
the one between home and school. Dr. Karen Mapp is a consultant
now working with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Parental
Options and Education. In an interview on the DOE website, Mapp
discussed the evolving role of parents and families in education and
the best ways to engage them. Mapp, who is a lecturer on education
and director of the Education Policy and Management Program at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education, explained that “the definition
of family engagement has evolved from a limited focus on a parent’s
role as a supporter of their
child’s learning at home, which
is important, to a broader
definition that recognizes the
multiple ways that parents are
engaged — at home, at school
and in the community — and not
only in their own child’s education,
but in the efforts to improve
the quality of education for all
children. We now know from a
growing body of research that
engaging families and community
partners is an essential ingredient
to the improvement of schools.”
Mapp emphasized the need to develop engagement that is
systematic — to integrate it as a sustained element of a larger
strategy to improve student learning. Key to making this a reality is the
development of a technical infrastructure that will enable schools to
One of the most basic functions of a
school is effective communication — from
communicating classroom expectations,
to schedule changes, to policies, to
breaking news, to emergencies.
— Gregg Miller,
Director of Technology, Wilmington Friends School

Blackbaud
effectively engage with families in an ongoing two-way dialog. “We must
evolve from the practice of encouraging only information distribution,
because we know from psychological and motivation research on
adult learning that just handing out information to adults doesn’t work
in terms of learning and growth,” said Mapp. “People learn best in
situations where they can practice the skill, where they can talk about
the skill with others, and where they can build a network of people in
which they share and exchange information.”
Mapp may have been speaking mostly about U.S. public schools,
but any educational institution — from the smallest private elementary
school to the largest public university — will be judged on its ability to
engage all its stakeholders. These include current students, prospective
students, families, administration, teachers, support staff, alumni, and
the community supporting the school — both physically and virtually
Technology platforms such as Blackbaud's are helping schools meet the
varied needs of all of these stakeholders.
Used in conjunction with Blackbaud’s database systems, Online
Campus Community is a portal to highly valuable and valued
interactions among all of the diverse people who form the foundation
for a successful school.
Kathy Hannon said Online Campus Community has been instrumental
in the tasks of retaining existing students and attracting new
students to Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy, a private school located
in Melbourne, Florida that was founded on and is sustained in the
Episcopal tradition. This is mainly due to the system’s transparency
and automation, said Hannon.
Online Campus Community’s flexibility is also key, enabling
organizations such as Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy to configure
their websites to best meet the needs of their stakeholders — and to
easily make modifications as needs change moving forward.
reaching parents
Online portals such as Online Campus Community play an important
role in keeping all stakeholders — but most especially parents —
actively engaged with educational institutions, according to Dr.
Russell Hyken, a psychotherapist and educational diagnostician.
Dr. Hyken, who is also author of the book The Parent Playbook, noted
that online portals offering schools the ability to promote the “good
news” on a timely and ongoing basis will keep parents coming back and
feeling good about the open relationship the schools are encouraging.
“I think a good portal can be hugely leveraged to get parents involved
and engaged,” said Dr. Hyken. “Let's just say you put pictures up on
the portal every couple of days. That is something parents will want
to see, which means they're spending more time on the site.”
Dr. Hyken added that the positive feeling that comes from an open
relationship may result in parents being more inclined to respond
to fundraising efforts and giving campaigns. “If [parents] are feeling
good while they’re looking at the portal, maybe they’ll feel good and
donate,” he said.
Indeed, Hannon said photos and news about what students are doing
in the classroom and around the school have been a huge draw on
Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy’s site. “We found the pictures were a
huge selling point because people coming to our site wanted to see
the kids working in the classroom and what they were doing.”

Blackbaud
Just as you would be highly unlikely to return to a news site that ran the
same stories every day, so, too, will parents, alumni and others tune out
after seeing the same, old content on an educational institution’s site.
In fact, schools need to think like publishers, providing content that is
timely, relevant to the target audience, and interesting.
Indeed, key to maintaining stakeholder engagement is maintaining this
kind of stakeholder interest, and both Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy’s
Hannon and Jeff Gaier, the technology director at the Archbishop Moeller
High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, said that the ability to easily customize
Blackbaud’s Online Campus Community platform is key to doing just that.
“The ability to customize in a number of ways to a specific target
group is very important,” said Gaier. “One of the keys with us for the
website is to keep everything fresh and current because you want
people to keep coming back. Particularly for us, we want people to
come back, we want them to keep logging in, because we have the
ability to update any new information. If we can keep it fresh and keep
it current and make it apply just to that particular person, then I think
we'll get him or her to come back more and more.”
Hannon agreed, saying she likes that the Online Campus Community
website can be used out of the box if an organization so desires, but
can also be customized to meet specific needs.
“We like the website because it's a package deal, but we still have
some design and authoring that we can do with the database,” she
said. “If you know HTML, you can create a better website with this
package. It’s not like a canned publisher, where you’re limited as to
what you can do on the website. It’s a very robust program, and I think
that’s what we like about it: We can design for our needs, not for what
all the other schools who are using the system look like.”
striking a balance
Hannon has been impressed with the power and configurability of
Online Campus Community and other Blackbaud tools, but, as they say,
with great power comes great responsibility. Hannon and other experts
note that a balance must be struck between what is freely available on
an educational institution's website and what is password-protected
and behind security systems such as firewalls. In order to develop and
maintain an online site as both a trusted resource and a promotional tool
for prospective families, parents must be made to feel that their own
and their children's sensitive information is being protected.
Hannon said she and her colleagues had to work to ensure that
parents, students, and administrators felt comfortable with the
system’s powerful capabilities — an iterative, incremental process that
was ultimately successful.
“When we rolled [Online Campus Community] out to the parents two
years ago, one of the issues we had was that, as a school, we thought
that everything had to be locked down, secured, and behind the login.
We found as we went through the process that instead of locking
everything down, we needed to educate our parents, faculty, and
students. [We needed to let them know that] although stuff is on our
site, we’re posting it with the knowledge that anybody can see it [and
are therefore taking care in what is posted]. There were some ruffled
feathers when we unrestricted some of this stuff, like our news page.
People were very adamant that we keep that because we had images of
kids in classes and everything else.”
One of the keys with us for the
website is to keep everything fresh
and current because you want people
to keep coming back.
— Jeff Gaier,
Technology Director, Archbishop Moeller High School

Blackbaud
While sensitive information is still password-protected, the academy has
slowly made more information public. Now that a balance has been
struck, the school has leveraged Online Campus Community’s many
configuration tools to develop custom spaces for parents, students
and faculty. For example, on the student side, said Hannon, "we can
create a page on the website that interfaces with their NetClassroom™
or their Gradebook schedules so they can get a snapshot when they
log in, to see their homework, see their grades, without having to go
that extra step deeper into NetClassroom. We post their report cards or
their schedules, that type of thing. They can get a snapshot right when
they log into the website. That’s something they like and go to often —
especially at the high school, where they have a lot of homework.”
a legacy of communications
Bunny Ridenour, associate head of school for advancement at
the St. Alcuin Montessori School, in Dallas, Texas, said robust,
flexible online tools such as Online Campus Community can play a
significant role in helping educational institutions to engage not only
existing families but families whose children may now have children
of their own in school. This is no small feat and its value should not
be underestimated, noted Ridenour: “Schools are only as strong as
the links we have to them. If we don’t honor our past, our present,
and our future, we’re not as strong. It’s just like in families — if you
lose your heritage, you’re not as strong.”
St. Alcuin Montessori School offers a program and a philosophy that
promote higher-order thinking and abstract reasoning skills through
Montessori toddler, primary, and elementary programs. The school
added an international baccalaureate program for middle school in
2005. St. Alcuin has been using Blackbaud products for many years,
and Ridenour said the ability to effectively reach out to alumni with
Online Campus Community is especially important to K – 8 schools,
which sometimes get lost in the shuffle as students move on to high
school and then college.
“K – 8 schools tend to suffer when our students graduate,” said
Ridenour. “After high school and college, as a pecking order, we’re
sort of at the bottom. In terms of keeping those families engaged over
time, the better we can do our website is almost more important than
the print material that used to go home.” Ridenour praised the tight
integration among Blackbaud’s offerings, saying it allowed the school
to more easily provide accurate, up-to-date information on its website.
“There aren’t enough good things to say about that,” she said.
data management
Ridenour is not alone in noting the importance of a website that is
powered by relevant, accurate data that can be served in real time.
An externally facing online tool with nothing on the back end will
take any organization only so far. This is especially true for private
educational institutions, which rely to a great degree on past, present,
and future families — and, thus, their databases — to maintain
the schools’ financial health and ensure its ability to provide rich,
meaningful educational experiences to its students moving forward.
The Wilmington Friends School’s Gregg Miller noted the importance
of efficient data management — and the related importance of data
availability — across all school functions. “Everything moves very
fast and gets more and more efficient, but those minutes saved
usually get eaten up quickly with new tasks,” he said. “Everyone
is dependent on our data, our network, etc. Downtime is usually
considered time wasted.”
This is where a holistic approach is key. Blackbaud, for example,
enables customers to tightly integrate its Online Campus Community
system with its backend database products.

Blackbaud
Database systems such as Blackbaud’s The Education Edge™
,
The Financial Edge™
, and The Raiser’s Edge®
not only streamline
users’ experiences by making intelligent use of information, but also
provide true integration and save time and money — two resources
no educational institution has enough of.
The Education Edge on its own facilitates admissions, enrollment,
communication, reporting, and student billing.
The Raiser’s Edge and The Financial Edge, designed for use by
private schools and other nonprofits of all sizes and types, provide
organizations with the tools they need to cultivate lifelong relationships
with donors, save time and money by streamlining important daily
processes, demonstrate increased accountability, and diversify
fundraising methods. The systems also provide nonprofit fund
accounting tools and nonprofit credit card processing capabilities.
Gaier, of the Archbishop Moeller High School, said his school has
been using The Raiser’s Edge for nearly two decades. Archbishop
Moeller High School is an Archdiocese of Cincinnati secondary
school for young men sponsored by the Society of Mary (Marianist
Order) and is dedicated to teaching the mission of the Roman
Catholic Church.
“We’ve used The Raiser’s Edge going on probably 20 years for our
alumni and donor database,” said Gaier. “With that, we're putting
in all the information about our alumni and donors. Obviously, with
private schools, fundraising is a critical piece, and having accurate
information really allows you to survive. The nice thing is that we can
tie that to our website, with the community and the login, to start
pulling in some more information from our constituents.”
A recent letter from Moeller High School President Bill Hunt to the
Moeller community underscored the fundraising success the school
has seen, and the importance of the connection, assisted by their
website, between the school and all of its constituents.
“Now that the 2011– 2012 fiscal year has come and gone, I wanted
to report to you that we achieved our overall goal of $1.25 million
raised for the Annual Fund! The actual year-end total came in at
$1,276,181.35,” said Hunt in an open letter on the school’s website
dated July 2012. “More than just reporting the numbers, though, I
wanted to thank all of you for your support of our Men of Moeller this
past year. Your partnership ensures we fulfill our mission of developing
leadership in young men. Gifts to our Annual Fund make a difference
toward that mission and help to narrow that gap between tuition and
the actual cost to educate a young man at Moeller.”
Moeller High School is also increasingly using The Education Edge
as the school’s community database, said Gaier. “That will be all our
parents, all our faculty, all of our students. Also any admission piece
is part of that — part of our recruiting effort to draw in new students.
We have a database of grade school individuals, or potential
applicants. The nice thing about both [The] Raiser’s Edge and [The]
Education Edge is that when people log into our website, if they’re
on the Education Edge side, the database will know that and they
can update their profile and that gets dumped into their record. If
they’re on the alumni side, then that profile record will get dumped
into the [The] Raiser’s Edge.”
Gaier said data will be the focus for the near future at Moeller:
“I think we have a lot of the right tools with The Raiser’s Edge,
The Education Edge, and the community with Online Campus
Community. With all of that, our big hope this year is getting as
much data in those databases to utilize as we possibly can, and
using that data effectively. We want to be more efficient at getting the
data in, and I think the tools will help with that. This will help us make
better decisions, whether they are about recruiting or fundraising or
getting information to parents that we want to get to them. That’s
really our big focus this year.”

Blackbaud
Attract/Retain More Students
Wilmington Friends School is using Blackbaud’s NetClassroom, part
of The Education Edge. NetClassroom enables schools to easily
share student information among administrators, teachers, and
parents. For example, parents and students can check their child’s
grades, attendance, conduct, and schedule, as well as print report
cards and transcripts, all from the home or the office. The use of
NetClassroom has been a huge boon for engagement with students
and families, especially when paired with the school’s new laptop
initiative, according to Miller.
“We just implemented a one-to-one laptop program for our students
in grades 5 through 12, and we also use tech for students via
NetClassroom,” he said. “Parents love that they can keep track of
assignments, etc., and kids love that they can get assignments and
handouts even if they left them in their lockers. It's also a nice selling
point that if a student is absent, it's not a problem.”
Advance FundRaising Efforts
Research done by Blackbaud and published in the Online Giving
Report shows that online giving was up 13% year over year in 2011,
with 54% of organizations in the analysis experiencing results at
or above this growth rate. Large organizations grew by 8.6% and
medium organizations grew 13.1% in 2011. Smaller nonprofits grew
12.8% compared to the same time period in 2010. (The 13% figure
was arrived at after excluding large international affairs organizations
from the analysis. There was a significant amount of giving in this
space in 2010 after the earthquake that year in Haiti.)
The online giving picture for the education industry looks even
better, with education seeing a 26% increase in online giving in 2011
compared to 2010. The growth since 2009 is a staggering 40%.
One school that relies more heavily than most on such giving is the Church
Farm School, a small boarding/day school for financially needy boys in
Chester County, Pennsylvania. Only 10% of the school’s budget is met
by tuition revenue, with the balance covered by charitable contributions,
according to Neil Fanelli, the school’s director of finance and operation.
“As a mission-driven institution, our livelihood
depends upon buy-in by the public and each
and every constituency of the School,” said
Fanelli. “We must raise a significant amount
of dollars/donations every year to continue
our charity.” Church Farm School’s website is
designed and implemented with the help of
Blackbaud Interactive.
To help the school meet its needs, Fanellli
said, it is committed to consistency in its
database (in other words, a unified database
approach), software (Blackbaud modules),
and website across the entire enterprise.
“This model will help to create efficiencies in
ONLINE GIVING IN THE EDUCATION SECTOR — YEAR OVER YEAR INCREASE
2009
2010
2011
14%
26%
Parents love that they can keep track
of assignments, etc., and kids love that
they can get assignments and handouts
even if they left them in their lockers.
— Gregg Miller,
Director of Technology, Wilmington Friends School

Blackbaud
compiling and sharing information, as well as enhance effectiveness in
regard to mass communication and appeals to our constituencies and
others,” he said.
This level of enhanced communication has yielded impressive returns:
“During fiscal year 2011 – 2012, a goal was set to increase alumni
participation in our annual fund (or annual gifts),” said Fanelli. “Through
web-based communication, and tapping information existing within
The Raiser’s Edge and our database, we achieved campaign goals and
increased alumni giving and participation levels by nearly 300%.”
Hannon said Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy’s annual fund is a
common page on the website that is always up and functional. The
site works to promote the two major fundraising events put on each
year by the advancement department, and the school also has an
alumni class notes page that runs off the database. She said the
school may also be looking down the road at software that will help
them track alumni.
Lowering the Cost of Communications
Gaier said use of Blackbaud’s programs has significantly decreased
the number of paper mailings that the school sends out, including for
fundraising campaigns.
“The biggest change has been improved communication and then
lowering the cost of communication,” he said. “We used to do a number
of mailings to parents, a number of mailings to alumni, a number of
mailings to donors — we have reduced our mailings probably by 75 or
80% because now we can communicate by email using the database.”
Gaier said Blackbaud is also making communication more effective
because it can be more targeted.
“We’re just getting into targeting information,” said Gaier. “When people
log in, we can target information to them based on what their roles are in
our community — for example, whether they are a parent or a student or
an alum…if somebody is in the class of 2002, when they log in we might
have information on their 10-year reunion on their landing page. They
would see information about that 10-year reunion, but other members of
the community would not.”
Miller said the Wilmington Friends School development office does “tons”
of fundraising efforts: “I don't think any of them don’t use technology.
From email blasts to alumni, to thank-you videos posted on the website.
Our auction is totally tech-driven. Even our ‘low-tech’ fundraising chores,
such as mailings and thank-yous, all rely on data-driven mailing lists,
printers, etc.”
The St. Alcuin Montessori School’s Ridenour said the ability to quickly
and effectively configure Online Campus Community to focus fundraising
efforts has paid off. Some people, she said, tend to give more or more
often when they are donating to a specific cause rather than to the
organization. She related a story about a family who wanted to set up a
fund to refurbish a playground in their daughter’s name. The school was
able to build a dedicated portion of its website promoting the cause,
which Ridenour believes resulted in increased giving.
We have reduced our mailings
probably by 75 or 80% because now
we can communicate by email using
the database.
— Jeff Gaier,
Technology Director, Archbishop Moeller High School

Blackbaud
The educational institutions we spoke with for this white paper represent diverse locations,
sizes, socioeconomic status of their communities, and missions. But all of them have
several things in common: They are committed to providing the best possible education
to their students in a safe, nurturing setting; they are committed to working with families
from the time students are in the classroom to when those children have children and even
grandchildren of their own; they pride themselves on the dedication and expertise of their
staff; and they have realized that open, authentic communication is the key to achieving
effective learning communities, maintaining strong ties with alumni, managing effective
fundraising, and attracting new families. They also have realized through hard work
and extensive research and collaboration with families that online tools can be the
difference between developing and maintaining dynamic, two-way dialogs with parents
and alumni and settling for static interactions that are not only ineffective but could even
degenerate relationships.
These schools are also challenged to collect, analyze, and deliver to appropriate stakeholders
(in an understandable form) the copious amounts of data they collect every day. Systems
like Blackbaud’s Online Campus Community, The Raiser’s Edge, The Financial Edge, and
The Education Edge are easing the burden these and other schools shoulder as they work
to meet the challenges of the 21st century school.
How is Technology Impacting Independent Schools?
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Blackbaud
© January 2013, Blackbaud, Inc.
This white paper is for informational purposes only.
Blackbaud makes no warranties, expressed or
implied, in this summary. The information contained
in this document represents the current view of
Blackbaud, Inc., on the items discussed as of the
date of this publication.
All Blackbaud product names appearing herein are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Blackbaud,
Inc. The names of actual companies and products
mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their
respective owners.
About Blackbaud
Serving the nonprofit and education sectors for 30 years, Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) combines technology and expertise to help
organizations achieve their missions. Blackbaud works with more than 27,000 customers in more than 60 countries that support higher
education, healthcare, human services, arts and culture, faith, the environment, independent education, animal welfare, and other charitable
causes. The company offers a full spectrum of cloud-based and on-premise software solutions, and related services for organizations
of all sizes including: fundraising, eMarketing, social media, advocacy, constituent relationship management (CRM), analytics, financial
management, and vertical-specific solutions. Using Blackbaud technology, these organizations raise more than $100 billion each year.
Recognized as a top company by Forbes, InformationWeek, and Software Magazine and honored by Best Places to Work, Blackbaud is
headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina and has employees throughout the US, and in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Mexico, the
Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
About Blackbaud for K – 12 Independent Schools
Build a strong, integrated school management infrastructure with Blackbaud’s Total School Solution™
. The only truly integrated and customizable solution
that allows you to connect all of your school operations, including online admissions, re-enrollment, communications, billing, and more. Spend less time
on administrative tasks and more time building relationships. Learn more about a Total School Solution for your small, faith-based, or large school.
Visit Blackbaud.com/k – 12 request a demo speak with a k – 12 expert

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