In October 2021, The Webb Schools of California received what it described as “the largest ever made to an independent high school west of the Mississippi” — $100 million from an anonymous donor.

It indeed ranked as one of the largest gifts to an independent school anywhere in the United States. But it may also be the quietest nine-figure donation ever.

By contrast, the George School in Pennsylvania got a New York Times story about its $128.5 million gift from an alumna in 2007.

The Peddie School’s $100 million gift in 1993 from publisher Walter Annenberg was noticed by The Washington Post. Investor Henry Kravis’s 2024 gift of the same size to the Loomis Chaffee School drew the attention of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The Webb Schools’ donation, however, prompted only three online reports at the time: one written by the school, one in the local paper, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, and one in Philanthropy News Digest. And each of the latter two stories largely repurposed what the school wrote itself.

In other words, if Webb hadn’t told its own story, the donation would have gone completely unnoticed and unreported — a tragedy for such a meaningful gift to the school.

The situation bears mention because it’s a good reminder: The surest way for a school to get its stories noticed is to write them in-house and then promote them hard, through Google ads and social media. (A promotional option that Webb also used was turning to PRNewswire to elevate the press release. This approach only gets the news published, not necessarily noticed, and it’s expensive. But it could be appropriate in some situations.)

The old approach of pitching the news media for promotion is largely a sucker’s game. Newsrooms have shrunk too much, and feel-good education stories — even $100 million gifts — draw too little audience in a news environment ruled by outrage and sensationalism.

This post is adapted from the November 2021 issue of Refill, published by Fine Point Communications.