Donors chipped in for a school courtyard renovation in an online campaign. “It works at schools too,” says Ondra Hampl of Gymnázium Šumperk

He was one of the first in the Czech Republic to test an online fundraiser for the school where he works, and it was a huge success right from the start. In a single month, the donors he reached out to contributed more than CZK 500,000 to Gymnázium Šumperk for the renovation of the school courtyard. Ondřej Hampl, the “project guy” of the Šumperk grammar school, is unmistakably a scout and an explorer of new paths. What was behind the success of the school's online fundraiser on Darujme.cz?

Ondra Hampl Gymnázium Šumperk

Ondra, besides being the project officer at Gymnázium Šumperk, you are also a scout, and you have experience with online fundraisers from campaigns for Junák (the Czech Scouts) as well. Could you tell us how your fundraising went?

Four years ago, a friend and I took over the leadership of a scout center. We are in charge of the Scout House in Šumperk. It's a former barracks from the First Republic era, and its gym and sanitary facilities were no longer adequate. One option on the table was to get a subsidy directly through Junák, but we needed our own funds for that, which we didn't have at the time. So we went down the route of raising money from individual donors through Darujme.cz.

We hesitated a bit over setting the target amount, but in the end we chose CZK 200,000. It was a success, and thanks to that we carried out the entire planned renovation. We also tried to follow up with recurring giving, and we now have about 15 long-term donors, but even that means buying six or seven new canvas tents a year, which is great.

The second experience came when a new troop under our center was formed in Loučná pod Desnou, led by my sister. They had no space to do scouting there. In the end, the best option turned out to be building our own yurt. Through the Skautská nadace Jaroslava Foglara (Jaroslav Foglar Scout Foundation) we launched the Skautská jurta (Scout Yurt) campaign. In total we raised over CZK 300,000. Unlike the first campaign, which had mostly small and medium-sized donors, this time one generous family stood out – they didn't even have children in scouting, yet they donated CZK 90,000. Pleasant surprises like this do happen in giving.

And how did you come up with the idea of trying an online fundraiser for Gymnázium Šumperk as well?

At the beginning, when I joined the school to raise money, the management's vision was more about subsidies and grants. Nobody could really imagine this form of funding. But I had a campaign on Darujme.cz in mind from the start. Fortunately, our management is very open to new ideas, so I got the green light to try what I already knew from scouting.

At that point we didn't yet have a suitable project with which to approach our supporters and potential donors. I knew that for it to work, it had to be something people could picture and that would catch their interest. And then came the idea of renovating the school courtyard, and that was exactly it.

When I researched the experience of other schools, I found a few that had run some smaller online fundraiser under an association, but otherwise I never came across an experience similar to what we were planning. I'd love to connect with another school that would go for it too and exchange experiences with them. I think it would be very valuable sharing.

Renovating a school courtyard is actually above and beyond what the founding authority covers. Their priorities are first and foremost things like sanitary facilities and so on, so the chances there weren't great.

The architectural design of the courtyard transformation.

I find the online campaign route very appealing, so I kept educating myself in it on my own. Whether with you at Darujme.cz or, for example, at Svět neziskovek.

After the success of the first fundraiser, we are now trying, through recurring giving (people can become Patrons of our school), to connect the community around the school – alumni, parents of our students and friends of the school – and to link them together not just on the basis of giving and simply contributing money, but also through the various career events we organize, where people can help us with their experience or their many interesting contacts. So it's already paying off a great deal in non-financial ways too. It's yet another way for people to support us.

“But I have to say that launching an online fundraiser generally requires honest preparation, in my opinion. We were active on social media, and I had also been sending out a newsletter about what was happening at the school for about a year. Everywhere, we made it clear that we do something extra and that supporting us makes sense. I'd say we have good visibility and people like to follow us.”

So what helped you in preparing for the fundraiser?

It's important to be able to explain the whole thing well and simply.

We approached two architects to prepare a visualization of the courtyard transformation so that people could picture it clearly. A potential donor is more likely to identify with something concrete. I think that also helped us a lot in the campaign.

Then there was the interesting question of setting the target amount again. People asked how we hit the amount so precisely, but it was rather the other way around: the donors rallied around that amount and in the end we reached it. To this day I still find it almost unbelievable that it can be done. We're glad we were bolder and set the goal at CZK 500,000. Originally we were thinking of a lower amount, but it worked out.

But we're not finished yet; the project will probably be more expensive in its broader version with greenery, trees and surface work that involves more digging into the ground, which is very expensive these days.

Congratulations on such a great result. What else do you think was the key to success?

A more personalized approach by email works. After every mailing, the fundraiser moved forward. Sometimes people are surprised to be getting a few more emails, but I try to keep it reasonable. It's good to segment donors and not send everything to everyone. But overall, during that first fundraiser, everyone received three main emails whenever something happened in the campaign. There's no point sending the same information just worded differently.

So you managed to raise CZK 500,000 with just three emails?

That was the main thing, but I also reached out to existing donors. I sent them a little more.

We sent emails to parents, alumni and teachers. For the teachers, I prepared a sample email they could forward, and social media helped a lot too. We also paid for promotion on social media.

The critical moment is the continuous work on the campaign. That's where a school can run out of breath. In the end it was quite a lot of work. I plan the content of social media posts in advance. We did interviews with notable alumni, we also made short videos with donors explaining why they donated, and we had visuals showing the progress of the fundraiser. It all had a unified visual style. I'm not a graphic designer, but at least it was recognizable.

“A week before the end we were at around CZK 350,000. I believed that if we had over CZK 400,000 on the last day, it would work out and people would want to carry us over the finish line. And that's how it went.”

Otherwise, I'd recommend one month as a good length for running a campaign, so that donors stay interested and you can manage the workload.

At the very end, I posted the progress of the fundraiser on social media every hour. I also shared things like encouraging comments from donors on Darujme.cz.

A lot of it is about how you present the whole idea. I also attended a training by Honza Gregor from N

eziskovek.cz

on individual giving. Honza also gave me good feedback on our current effort to attract long-term donors. For example, not to focus so much on the content of the project (what exactly we'll do in detail: educational conferences, motivational panels, finishing the courtyard), because it's more about a sense of belonging and offering donors something special – for us that's, say, free admission to our educational events or to the school ball, etc. It's mainly about working with people's emotions and their desire to be part of something. We're targeting alumni and students' parents.

We're in the public school system. Some people might think: if we get money from the state, why do we want it from donors... Yes, grants can pay for some basic projects, but if we have a plan to improve something, it's worth trying this way too. And if such people don't want to donate, that's of course their choice.

The local nature of running the campaign also makes a lot of sense to me; it connects a lot of people, because they know our school and how we work. And education is now being talked about more across the whole country. It seems to me it's been a bigger topic for about three years. A fundraiser on Darujme.cz is a good opportunity to raise awareness of this topic even more.

And now for something a little different. You ran the fundraiser under the umbrella of the Nadační fond při Gymnáziu Šumperk (the Gymnázium Šumperk Endowment Fund). As a school, your founding authority is the town, and the donations you can accept are what is called earmarked. So do you think using an endowment fund is the best option?

In our case, yes. Some might go the route of an association, which is also feasible. It also depends on who the school's founding authority is and what conditions it has set for accepting donations. It could probably also be done directly, with the school itself registering; as I say, it then depends on the founding authority.

We actually more or less updated the parents' association (SRPŠ), which already operated in the form of an endowment fund. It received regular contributions of CZK 300 per pupil, which were used for things like student awards or trips to competitions. We amended the fund's statutes so that any other projects could be paid for from it. When we wanted to launch a campaign on Darujme.cz, this was the most practical way.

People in the fund and at the school were open to the idea of free-form campaigning, but I had to carve out my position and earn it through hard work. It's a very new and free element that hadn't existed at our school at all before. For a while I also had a colleague on hand who was studying project management, so for a time I even had something like a team.

Is it common for schools to have a project officer like you?

It's not common. Given how specific such a campaign is, I understand that schools handle it through grants or requests to the founding authority.

With an active teacher or deputy head, anyone can certainly do it. You need a good idea and to communicate it skillfully.

For the recurring giving campaign, I've been putting together a segmented donor database in a mailing tool (SmartEmailing), so in the future we'll know more. We're also having a friend from marketing consult on the campaign, which is another good source of insight.

Do you think it can also be managed on a volunteer basis, if, say, one of the parents wanted to take charge of running the fundraiser?

Definitely. And you certainly don't have to start right away with projects as big as ours. If you set yourself a goal at the beginning of raising, say, CZK 20,000 to repair something smaller, you'll try out how the whole thing works, gain your first experience with the community around the school, see how donors respond to you and what they might like to support, and then you can throw yourself into bigger projects too. But I repeat once again that what matters is how the whole fundraiser is communicated.

And how was it working with Darujme.cz?

The experience with Darujme.cz is great. I think it's brilliant that I can download complete donor lists in a single Excel file. And what I enjoyed most was the emails pinging in with notifications of new donations throughout that fundraising month. Those were truly pleasant emails.

The donation certificate is another excellent feature that made my work much easier.

A lot of people also left us their phone number. I'm planning to call all the donors as part of the recurring giving campaign. It will definitely be a great experience to hear all those people too.

There's a wonderful feeling that the support of the people around us has taken on very concrete, quantified shape, that people stand behind us. Donating money is a big decision and, in a way, one of the highest forms of expressing support for our school. Some of the amounts were very high, in the tens of thousands.

For me, that first fundraiser also meant hope, in terms of building recurring giving, that it can work in the longer term. It was a kind of precedent. We can manage anything if it's done well. We see that we're not alone in this. People want to support us and be part of our story.

“It opened a lot of doors and opportunities. Not just in giving.”

How did your colleagues at the school take the campaign?

I got good feedback. I think they liked it. But it will be most tangible for them once we finish the courtyard and they can go out and teach outdoors.

What would you say to schools and kindergartens considering starting an online fundraiser?

Go for it – the experience and the enthusiasm are wonderful. But I'd also recommend getting advice. And above all, don't think it won't work at your school. It will. It mainly depends on how the idea of the fundraiser is presented. Schools are organizations like any other. It will work just the same as for others, such as nonprofit organizations.

Ondra, thank you very much for sharing your experience so openly, and we wish you many more successes.

The interview with Ondřej Hampl of Gymnázium Šumperk was conducted by Martina Vaňková and Jana Kočí from Darujme.cz.