Mt. Lebanon School District to ramp up fundraising campaign

Mt. Lebanon School District to ramp up fundraising campaign

Mt. Lebanon School District's fundraising campaign has received $1.1 million in pledges and has about $300,000 in hand, but organizers should do more to spread awareness of the effort and court big donors, a consultant said.

Consultant Margaret “Maggie” Schmidt said the campaign had strong and active volunteer leadership, yet was having trouble instilling a sense of urgency in potential donors with the $109.65 million high school renovation nearly complete.

“The high school renovation project is nearly completed, and there's been no real incident, no critical thing out there making people say, ‘Yes, there's a danger here or a challenge here and we need to make this happen,' ” Schmidt told the school board Monday.

The $6 million fundraising campaign originally was planned in 2012 to offset the second round of bonds issued for the project.

However, it couldn't have been started in time or raised enough to avoid borrowing money.

With bonds funding the renovation, proceeds from the campaign will be split between other capital projects and an endowment fund that will award grants for classes and programs at the schools.

So far, the campaign has secured a total of about $1.1 million in donations and pledges, with most coming from two “pacesetter” donors, Schmidt said.

In fundraising parlance, pacesetters are the early, big-money donors who help a campaign reach as much as half or two-thirds of its goal while fundraisers still are making private, individual appeals to potential donors.

Schmidt's comment was the first time anyone disclosed in a public meeting how much had been pledged and raised since the fundraising effort began in 2013.

Almost half of what's been raised so far will reimburse the cost of starting and running the campaign, though most of those expenses were one-time fees for things like purchasing software, said school board president Lawrence Lebowitz.

“The equipment, if you will, to run the campaign has been purchased and now we're just talking about personnel costs going forward,” he said.

The district will need to hire a new director for the capital campaign because Alyssa Jackson DeLuca resigned this year.

Schmidt has been filling DeLuca's role on an interim basis but said she has other commitments.

DeLuca's salary was about $82,500 a year, and Schmidt is being paid up to $2,000 a month for part-time work.

Schmidt recommended forming a panel to take requests and award grants to district projects and programs using some of the $300,000 the campaign has in cash, and using a planned grand opening ceremony for the high school renovation in the fall to draw parent and alumni attention to the fundraising efforts.

The campaign will broaden its search for additional “pacesetter” donors to bring in more large gifts, will look for donations from foundations or corporations and will do more to spread the word about the district's needs and reasons for the fundraising, Schmidt said.

“One recommendation is to make the campaign more public, which would mean that more people would know about it, more people would know the rationale and why it's important,” she said.

“It's different than going out and starting to mass-mail information to people.”

She also recommended evaluating the campaign in six months to assess whether the $6 million goal is still realistic.

The board will vote Monday on a contract that would allow the campaign to accept donations online or via credit card, using an add-on to the DonorPro software the district already bought.

The district will pay DonorPro a flat fee of $10 per month, plus 20 cents per transaction and 2.89 percent of each donation made via credit card, which Superintendent Timothy Steinhauer said was pretty typical of such contracts with payment processors.

Matthew Santoni is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-380-5625 or msantoni@tribweb.com.