Fundraising Campaign Success: Making the Calls
Everyone starts their campaigns with high hopes for success; no one designs their campaign with failure in mind. So why do as many as 40% of capital campaigns fail? The number one reason why campaigns fail to reach their goals and their potential is that they simply did not make enough calls. They did not get out and ask for the money! Making the calls is the best way to ensure your fundraising campaign success.
Ensuring Your Success
1. Do a comprehensive campaign study to ensure you have your finger on the pulse of your community.
This means you know from whom your leadership and leadership gifts will come. You know who will chair the campaign because you have already had discussions and you drew up an effective campaign plan. Such a plan includes goals, mileposts for accomplishments, and a timeline including how many calls must be made by whom. Then secondly, you follow the plan rigorously.
2. Don’t make excuses.
Don’t worry about exhausting all of your potential. There is always something more available to the person with the intensity and industry to look for it. We may have lots of excuses about why we cannot solicit this person now, or that we need to cultivate that person before we ask him or her—but if you are going to be successful in reaching your potential, you need to go ask him or her for the money, and you need to go ask now.
As you think back over time and you remember efforts that struggled, do you remember thinking about all the reasons why? Ultimately, you did not have the support you needed because it became more painful to ask for that support than it was to do without it.
3. Ask for what you need
If you really want to succeed, you have to be convinced that people can make a life-changing difference by supporting your effort through their charitable contributions. And, then you must relentlessly go out and ask them to help you, and ask them to help you ask others. Does this sound familiar?
Summary
Learn to budget your time and the time of your campaign leadership. This allows you to monitor your progress against your goal.
By making the calls in a timely fashion, you quickly begin to build momentum. Success begets success and, before you know it, you are over your stated or minimum goal, with months to spare on the timetable. Through proper planning and execution (making the calls), you can reach fundraising campaign success!
CDS has been a leader in nonprofit fundraising for the past three decades. Contact us if you need more intensive help with your major gift fundraising, strategic planning, or in preparing for a capital campaign.