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Learn how one Catholic 6-12 girls' school in Pennsylvania built a Week of Giving on traditions their community already loved, finished at 107% of goal, and hit 88% of its Annual Fund target by November.
Academy of Notre Dame raised $243,761 from 427 supporters in five days, with a development team of six. Wendy Waltman, their Director of Annual Giving, helped them get there by layering giving onto Spirit Week instead of building a campaign from scratch.
The Academy of Notre Dame advancement team already had a spring giving day, the Senior Class Gift, Reunions, and Grandparents Day on the calendar for the year ahead, so a new initiative risked becoming one more thing asking for the community's attention.
Instead, Wendy moved their giving push to the fall so it could build on the energy of Spirit Week, a week the community already turned out for. The result was their Spirit Week of Giving campaign.
Notre Dame's main giving push lived in the spring, alongside the Senior Class Gift, Reunions, and Grandparents Day. That timing meant waiting out most of the fiscal year before the team knew where the Annual Fund stood, which left little room to adjust if the number came in short.
A giving initiative in October would change that, since it lands early enough to shape the rest of the year rather than close it out.
Notre Dame already had Spirit Week, an annual tradition the student body treated as a highlight of the year.
They also had the Senior Pool Plunge. Since the early 2000s, seniors have jumped into the pool in full uniform while moms line the pool deck taking photos, and in Wendy's words, it's a big deal.
Notre Dame's "All In" came from the Senior Pool Plunge, a tradition going back to the early 2000s. The image of seniors jumping in gave them the campaign name.
Their school gates got the same treatment. Notre Dame's campus gates are iconic to alumnae, who spent their school years hearing phrases like "beyond the gates". The community had already assigned them meaning, so the gates went onto the campaign creative, and the final logo framed a heart between them.
Wendy offered one note for schools running more than one giving initiative: give each a distinctly different visual identity, so the community can tell them apart at a glance.
She recommends finding inspiration in four places:
A campaign built on something that already carries emotion and nostalgia has a head start. By tying theirs to a week the community already loved, Notre Dame began with people's attention rather than having to build it.
Wendy mapped out the timeline and budget ahead of time, so here is the full calendar before we get into the details.
For anyone planning a fall campaign right now, Wendy's advice is to start on challenge and matching dollars sooner than she did. She did not have those lined up in advance and would begin that outreach around August.
Video was the largest line item because they hired a professional service. Giveaways stayed low cost by using items already on hand or pulled from the school store, and the signs are reusable, so that cost does not repeat next year.
Daily themes tied to giving buckets. Every day named a program area:
Academy of Notre Dame’s Spirit Week of Giving page: https://www.boostmyschool.com/orgs/ndapa/campaigns/ndapa-all-in-2025
Because each theme was a live fund, a donor moved by Wednesday's athletics push could give to athletics that day rather than to a general pool, which kept the daily message and the actual ask aligned all week long.
Notre Dame worked through the Parent Association and the Parent Leadership Council, then ran outreach over WhatsApp, text, and personal social networks.
Leaderboards, challenges, and a comment wall gave alumnae something to compete over and respond to. Notre Dame ran thirteen separate challenges across the week, and the strongest came from within the classes themselves. Two alumnae from the class of 2008 offered matching challenges to their own classmates, one unlocked by reaching 25 donors from the class and the other by winning highest alumnae participation.
Every class at Notre Dame has a class color, and the campaign tracked those alongside individual classes, so alumnae could see how their color was doing as well as their year. The class of 2008 finished on top of the alumnae leaderboard with 17 donors, and Red led the alumnae color standings with 53. Wendy said, “tying live leaderboards to challenges was the single strongest motivator of the week.”
Notre Dame's giving page included a comment wall where donors could say why they gave, and it drew 114 posts across the week. It gave people a reason to come back to the page beyond checking the totals, and it left the team with a set of quotes in the community's own words.
The approach here was to ask rather than assign.
Wendy's tip: Ask Student Council for recommendations on how to get students involved. They know what their classmates will actually do.
That question is what brought in the School Spirit Club, who took it on themselves and got a leadership moment out of it. They ran a QR code pep rally at Monday drop-off with fifteen to twenty students working the line. Tuesday brought a table with class color necklaces, temporary tattoos, and candy, since the week landed on Halloween.
Participation reached across the whole school, with the strongest turnout in the middle school grades.
Notre Dame built the communications plan in advance, mapping each day's message, send times, and audiences, so the community heard about the week through every channel they already used.
On Instagram, Notre Dame ran the Spirit Week dress-up themes alongside the giving campaign. Pajama Day on Monday, Philly Sports on Tuesday, Neon on Wednesday, Halloween on Thursday, and Spirit Day on Friday, when everyone wore their class colors head to toe.
The two sets of themes ran side by side all week, so students had a reason to show up in costume and the campaign had a giving theme attached to each of those days.
The video budget covered testimonials from a current parent, an alumna who is also a current parent, and students, including a pair of friends and a pair of sisters. The standout was Mrs. Gallagher, a longtime former faculty member the whole community knows.
They also gave people plenty of ways to give, and their numbers show how varied those preferences are. Credit and debit cards led on volume with 168 gifts, and Apple Pay came in a close second at 153. Add Venmo's 46, PayPal's 13, and Google Pay's 7, and digital wallets accounted for more individual gifts than cards did.
Roughly two dozen signs went up across eight designs: A-frames at the main entrance, logo signs with and without the dates, six double-sided QR code signs, and a set written to be read as phrases, with "Are You" and "All In for ND?" on some and "Thank You for Being" and "All In for ND!" on others. They lined the driveway in and out of campus and stood at the athletic field.
The week ended on Spirit Day. Every class wore their colors, and the day built to class skits themed to Broadway musicals, with a trophy going to the winning class color. Notre Dame streamed the skits live so young alumnae could watch from wherever they were, which gave the people they had been asking all week something to actually watch.
Wendy and her team hit a lot of markers of success that week, but the one they were proudest of was this: coming out of five days, Notre Dame sat at 88% of their year-long Annual Fund goal. That meant the team spent the rest of the year building on a lead rather than closing a gap, and did not have to rely on the spring giving day to get there.
That freed the spring day to do a different job. Wendy's plan was to focus it on alumnae, so each campaign has a distinct audience instead of two asks going to the same people for the same thing twice.
Notre Dame ran that day in April 2026, built on the same principle as the fall week. Instead of picking a date off the calendar, they anchored it to the Feast Day of St. Julie Billiart, founder of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.
They achieved 190% of their goal, with 380 supporters against a goal of 200 and $178,433 raised. Alumnae accounted for 223 of those supporters and current parents for 86, so where the fall week was school-wide and student-driven, the spring day was alumnae-led, exactly as designed. Every trustee gave, 19 of 19, for 100% board participation.
Notre Dame set out to get an earlier read on where the Annual Fund stood. What they found along the way was two campaigns, each with its own audience and its own reason to give, and a year they could spend building on a strong start.
Planning your own giving day or giving week? Boost My School works with independent and private schools to build campaigns on the traditions their communities already love. See a demo.
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