There's a question worth sitting with before any capital campaign begins. Not "how much can we raise" or "what do we want to build", but something more fundamental. What task has God given this school to complete, and are we willing to do the work required to complete it?
That question framed everything at Mount St. Mary Catholic High School in Oklahoma City as they prepared for Higher Ground: Phase II. The answer they found wasn't a fundraising strategy. It was a posture, a willingness to trust that the mission was worth pursuing even when circumstances made pursuing it look unreasonable.
The circumstances, it turned out, were considerable.
Mount St. Mary completed Phase I of its Higher Ground campaign in 2018, finishing a new student commons and commons building that transformed the center of campus. Then, before Phase II could gain momentum, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City placed a moratorium on capital campaigns across its schools. In 2020 and 2021, COVID arrived. In 2022, serious misconduct allegations against students became front-page news in the city, damaging the school's reputation at exactly the moment it needed community trust most. In 2023, the president-principal governance model the school had been operating under failed, requiring a leadership transition.
That's four years of institutional disruption before a single donor conversation about Phase II took place. For the director of advancement living through it, the timeline was personal too. A cancer diagnosis in 2020. The same cancer returning in 2023. Major back surgery in 2024. The loss of a first grandchild at birth in 2025.
The verse that kept coming back through all of it was from Proverbs: "If you falter in a time of trouble, how small is your strength." Not a comfortable verse. But an honest one.
When the decision was made to move forward with Phase II, the first step wasn't a case statement or a consultant engagement. It was a clear-eyed review of what the school actually knew from its history.
The previous campaign had been run without a formal feasibility study. That created real problems, including an unclear sense of financial capacity and a timeline that stretched far longer than it should have. Going into Phase II, the team decided to build the prospect grid the right way, starting with five years of annual giving data and sorting every donor by giving likelihood rather than by gift size alone.
The categories were simple. Donors ready to be asked. Donors who needed more cultivation before a conversation made sense. Names on paper who hadn't yet developed a relationship with the school. That sorting exercise, done honestly, told the team more about real campaign capacity than any aspirational goal-setting would have.
From there, the team identified a target, not a dream number, but a figure they were genuinely confident in given the relationships they had, the asks they could make with integrity, and the timeline that was realistic. Leadership gifts were identified and set. The ask was structured to be fair to donors given what they knew about the school's situation.
One decision that shaped the campaign significantly was the choice to make it comprehensive rather than purely facilities-focused. Phase II includes proposed outdoor athletic facilities with a goal of $8.5 million. It also includes an endowment for tuition assistance, a goal of $1.5 million through planned gifts, and an annual fund component called the Mount Fund with a goal of $1.5 million.
That structure matters for a practical reason. Some donors give to buildings because they can see what their gift produces. Others give to scholarships because access is what they care about. Others make planned gifts because that's how their estate is set up and a campaign creates the occasion to act on an intention they've had for years. A campaign that offers only one of those vehicles leaves real giving capacity unrealized.
The scale of gifts table for an $11.5 million goal reflects that reality. Reaching the target requires two gifts at the million-dollar level, five at $500,000, and another 281 gifts distributed across the $5,000 to $250,000 range. No single donor or single gift category carries the campaign. The breadth of participation is the point.
Capital campaigns at Catholic schools succeed or fail based on whether the right people are in the right roles and whether those roles are clearly defined. At Mount St. Mary, three positions carried the campaign through its quiet phase. The president set the vision and opened the doors that only a school president can open. The director of advancement managed the donor grid, tracked progress, and kept the pipeline moving. The athletic director and director of operations brought the facilities component to life in a way that made the case for Phase II feel concrete and credible to donors who cared about the athletic program.
The ask itself was designed around openness rather than obligation. "Would you be open to a conversation about the second phase of our school's master plan?" That framing is deliberate. It invites rather than pressures, and it positions the meeting as a conversation rather than a solicitation. More meetings, the team's experience confirms, produce more gifts. Not because relationship replaces the ask, but because it earns the right to make one.
Between November 2024 and May 2025, the quiet phase of Higher Ground: Phase II produced results that validated the approach. Ninety-six donors. $9,277,240 raised in cash gifts. $1,475,778 in planned gift intentions. A combined total of $10,753,018.
That's more than 93 percent of the $11.5 million goal closed before a single public announcement. The quiet phase worked because the prospect work was honest, the asks were fair, the case was real, and the people doing the asking had genuine relationships with the people being asked.
The public phase will take the campaign to its final goal. But the hard work was already done.
The tactical lessons from this campaign are useful. Do your feasibility work. Build your prospect grid carefully. Make the campaign comprehensive. Define roles clearly before you start. Ask in a way that invites rather than pressures.
But the deeper lesson is about what happens when a school is honest about its history, including the hard parts, and decides to move forward anyway. Mount St. Mary didn't wait until the scandal had faded from memory or until the governance model was stable or until the personal health challenges of its key staff had resolved. It moved forward because the task was there to be completed.
That posture, more than any particular strategy, is what produced $10.7 million in six months from a school that had genuine reasons to wait.
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Chris Stiles is a Partner at Partners in Mission. He can be reached at cstiles@partnersinmission.com or (405) 990-1806.