Lake Highland
A thesis that raised forty million dollars.
- Role
- Creative strategy, naming, brand and campaign creative
- For
- Lake Highland Preparatory School, Office of Advancement, through Anon
- Years
- 2020 to 2025
- Explore
- elevate.lhprep.org
The problem
Lake Highland set out to raise forty million dollars across three fronts at once: an annual fund, capital projects and an endowment. A campaign that size needs more than a logo and a goal thermometer. It needs a reason people already believe.
The constraint
We never set out to sell. The brand guide says it plainly: the campaign persuades through its relationships, and something is wrong the moment it feels like selling. That ruled out most of what fundraising creative usually does.
The decisions
Discovery turned up a belief the school already had and had never quite said. I put it into one line: the world needs more Highlanders. Not a slogan. A thesis a whole campaign could stand on, and a whole campaign did. From there the work compounded: the name, Elevate, the brand, the guide that protected it, the campaign website, then five years across the Highlander Fund, the capital projects and the endowment. Every year the work knew more than the year before.
The last ten percent 99
Five years of not selling. Every piece had to sound like the school talking to a family it already knew, never like a campaign asking for money. That held from the first pitch to the last report, and it's the part nobody would ever point to.
What changed
We set out to raise forty million dollars, and we did. A premise on a page in 2020 became a 71,000-square-foot center for innovation, full of students, by 2023, and a field and athletic center breaking ground in 2026.
The idea still runs through the campaign site, in the school's own words: a world with more Highlanders is a better world. People raised the money. The brand gave them something true to say.
When the people I'd worked with moved on, I gave the school the full body of work: every file, every source, the whole system. It was Anon work, and Anon works for people and causes, not credit. It belongs where it's doing good.
Credits. Lake Highland Preparatory School, Office of Advancement.