Five years, one Advancement office

Research into the current landscape of giving at the school, the campaign’s goals and ambitions, and who it was all for led me to uncover something special.

So I put it into words.

Lake Highland Preparatory School was built on a foundation of opportunity. Opportunities that stem from unique exposures and experiences. Opportunities to pursue excellence and to succeed in all that one does.

Being a Highlander is not just about enrollment at Lake Highland Preparatory School or a career within it. It is not simply attending classes, participating in the arts, or competing in athletic programs. And it’s not something that stays within the confines of a physical campus.

Being a Highlander is forged over one’s time at Lake Highland Preparatory School. When the experiences and opportunities that students are exposed to help shape and mold them to become model citizens. Where students are developed into strategic problem solvers. Grown into confident leaders. Matured into people of strong character and values. Once a Highlander. Always a Highlander.

Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

And there it was. The heart and soul of what this campaign is about. These are the students, faculty, and staff...the small group of people...who are going to change the world. And this world is a world that needs more Highlanders.

The world needs more Highlanders.

Not a slogan. A thesis. A whole campaign could stand on it, and a whole campaign did.

I wrote this into the pitch and ultimately the brand guide in 2020. The voice, the tagline, the color, the logic underneath all of it. Years later that premise is still standing, and it still runs through the campaign site.

That almost never happens. Most brand lines get quietly retired inside a few years. Softened, hedged, replaced by a committee that meant well. This one held because it was not decoration. It was a belief the school already had and had not yet said.

A line survives that long only when it was true before it was written down.

It started as a naming exercise. Then the brand. Then the guide that protected it. Then the website. Then five years across three fronts at once. An annual fund, the Highlander Fund, so giving became a habit instead of an event. Capital projects, so the belief took a shape you could walk into. An endowment, so the whole thing outlived the campaign that built it.

Every year the work knew more than the year before. The context compounded. By year three I understood the school better than any brief could have told me, and the work got better for it.

And it turned into something you could walk around and stand inside. A premise on a page in 2020 became a 71,000-square-foot center for innovation, full of students, by 2023. It became a field and an athletic center breaking ground in 2026. Not every project lets you watch the idea become a building. This one did.

All of it had to be paid for. How we did that is the part most people get wrong.

There is a line in the brand guide on our posture and voice. The campaign is to be persuasive through its relationships, and something is wrong the moment it feels like selling.

We believed it when I wrote it. And it was the entire strategy.

Fundraising done well is not a transaction. It is not a pitch with a number at the end. It is a relationship that happens to involve money. The gift is the byproduct of the belief, not the point of the conversation.

Watch a good advancement team and you stop seeing asks. You see people who know each family, who remember the kids, their passions and talents, and who show up when there is nothing to collect. The money moves toward that. It always has.

Selling is an easier posture. You can teach someone how to sell. Building belief takes time and it does not scale. But that is also exactly why it works. People give more freely to something they trust. They resist something they are sold.

What was true of the donors turned out to be true of me. At some point the Advancement office stopped being a client. I could not tell you exactly when, but it was early on. They became people I wanted to do good work for, because they were the epitome of relational and believed in what they were building. That is not the softer way to work. It is the more demanding one. You cannot phone it in for people you respect.

I have done transactional work. It pays. It also ends the day the invoice clears, and it teaches you little you did not already know walking in.

This taught me something.

The best work does not always come from the best brief. It comes from great relationships.

The campaign is still going without me. You can see where five years went at elevate.lhprep.org.

We set out to raise forty million dollars. And we did.

But a campaign doesn’t raise a number like that. People do.

Relationships raise it, tend to it, and ultimately get to enjoy it. One at a time, over years.