Annual Portfolio for WHIN Music Community Charter School

PlanetFab created a donor-facing annual portfolio for WHIN Music Community Charter School to support major gift fundraising, strengthen donor communications, and communicate the scale of the organization’s impact.

The Whin Challenge

WHIN Music Community Charter School came to PlanetFab at a pivotal moment. Entering its second decade, the school had grown to serve 466 K–8 students from a new eight-story permanent home in Washington Heights. It had established a partnership with The Juilliard School through the Music Advancement Program and demonstrated strong academic outcomes through its El Sistema–inspired model.

The story was extraordinary. They simply needed a way to tell it at the scale they had achieved.

The challenge was creating an annual portfolio for WHIN that could communicate the school’s impact, vision, and long-term ambitions to prospective donors and major supporters.

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Strategy & Concept for WHIN’s Annual Portfolio

After meeting with Charles Ortiz, Founder & Executive Director, Paul Goldberg, Director of Development, and the WHIN team, one thing was clear: this was not just an educational annual portfolio.

The annual portfolio for WHIN needed to function as a fundraising instrument capable of supporting a million-dollar gift conversation.

Our concept, LOVE ALWAYS WHINS, became the organizing idea for the portfolio. It captured the spirit of the school while providing an emotional framework for the story, positioning WHIN not simply as a school but as a transformative force within its community.

Design & Execution

PlanetFab led the narrative development, creative direction, editorial structure, and design of a 24-page annual portfolio for WHIN Music Community Charter School and companion trifold.

The result balanced emotional storytelling with institutional credibility, creating a publication that could be shared confidently in development meetings, fundraising presentations, and donor conversations. The annual portfolio for WHIN became a central communications tool for advancement and development efforts.

The Outcome

WHIN’s leadership and board described the portfolio as the first piece that fully reflected both the soul of the school and the ambition of its future.

Beyond fundraising, the annual portfolio gave the organization a clearer way to communicate its vision, impact, and long-term aspirations to donors, partners, and supporters. It transformed years of accomplishments into a story people could understand, believe in, and invest in.

The project demonstrates how strategic storytelling, donor communications, annual report design, and fundraising-focused editorial design can help educational institutions attract support and communicate value at a transformational scale.

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