Herzog Foundation celebrates 100 trainings in 2024, attendance to grow in 2025

The exponential growth of the Herzog Foundation’s trainings is nothing short of extraordinary.

After hosting its first two events in 2021, the foundation, which supports Christian education and publishes The Lion, grew to 16 trainings in 2022, followed by 50 in 2023 and 100 this year.

The trainings involved 6,644 attendees in 2024 across multiple locations, a number that could approach 9,000 next year.

The rapid expansion follows the foundation’s ethos of empowering Christian school leaders, finding experts to train them, and using resources wisely to bring them together, says foundation President Darrell Jones. 

“In its very first year of existence, the Herzog Foundation became aware that if we can just give free, accessible professional development to smart people running schools, they can do this far beyond what we as a foundation would be able to do,” Jones said at a gathering celebrating the 100th and final training of the year, held at Herzog’s headquarters near Kansas City in November. 

The 24 trainings currently offered fall under three primary areas: leadership development, organizational development and teacher development. The list of virtual trainings is also growing.  

Herzog training director Sadie Elliott says the popular events are making a measurable impact. 

“Christians schools that have attended our donor development training have seen their average monthly donor revenue increase from $9,000 to $19,500 per month,” she said. “That’s an investment beyond any grant we could ever make to one school.” 

School leaders also leave the trainings encouraged. Attendees, known as guests, were asked how likely they were to leave Christian education before and after experiencing Herzog’s events and resources. 

“After finding Herzog, the ‘likely to leave’ is reduced by 20% because people are finding that they have community and that they have access to really quality coaching, and that’s really the ultimate goal in our heart,” Elliott told The Lion. 

One eye-popping statistic is that guests report an 85% implementation rate from the trainings, Elliott said, a testimony to the their effectiveness. 

The Herzog Way 

Some of the success is attributed to what’s known as “The Herzog Way.”  

When the foundation was plotting its first events a few years ago, board Chairman Todd Graves insisted that the trainings not resemble “cookies and Kool-Aid in a church basement,” Elliott explains. “Our team is always thinking about how we can better serve and treat the guests. The guests are truly at the center of all that we do, and we call them guests intentionally.”  

That means housing, quality meals, and snacks and drinks are provided once guests arrive at the training. Each seat at an event costs the foundation about $1,200, but the value far exceeds it. 

The foundation opened a training site in Nashville in March that hosted 20 trainings this year, and another site in Dallas-Fort Worth in September that held three events but will grow to 25 in the new year. 

As a result of the expansion efforts, attendance next year is expected to rise from about 70 per event to close to 90, Elliott said. 

Rusty Campbell runs the Nashville site, and Amy Billingsley is in charge of Dallas. The events team staff travel to host trainings outside of Kansas City, in places such as Florida, Virginia and the Pacific Northwest.  

Elliott said a West Coast site, likely in California, could be established soon. 

“We have a really small but mighty team behind the scenes running these training events,” she said. “We have five event coordinators who are really the heart behind each event and how it runs.” 

Finding the experts 

From the start, Herzog has maintained it isn’t the expert in education, but uses its platform to convene them: 55 trusted coaches who go through training and help attendees act on the knowledge they receive. This results-oriented approach appears to be working. 

With all of this high-quality training available in a well-hosted environment – and free to attend – some schools feel guilty for attending multiple times or bringing additional staff members, but Elliott says that shouldn’t be the case since that’s why the trainings exist. 

“For us, it’s a better investment if [a school] keeps coming to trainings, because we’re growing their leadership in so many different areas and they’re not just siloed to ‘well, we help them raise more money,’ which is obviously great and a win, but have we helped them be a better leader? Have we helped them grow in marketing? Have we helped them improve their crisis management capacity?” 

Elliott also points out social issues and other battles rising up in places such as Vermont, Minnesota and California that “are not going to be exclusive to those states much longer.  

“Do you have your documentation in order?” she asks schools. “We really look at it holistically: the more a leader comes to our events, the stronger our investment in them is. And then similarly, those leaders that bring back or send back additional people from their school, we feel like that helps kind of foolproof the school – that if one leader leaves, the learning and the implementation that they’ve done from our practices doesn’t necessarily leave with them but we’ve helped kind of train the institution.  

“So, we see a lot of repeats as a win for us. I never want school leaders to feel bad. I’ve got some that will send 10 or 15 teachers to a training together and it’s like team building as well as professional development. And that’s really a privilege for us to get to fund that for them.” 

To learn more about Herzog Foundation Trainings, visit https://herzogfoundation.connect.space