Capital Campaign Preparation

So you’ve decided to conduct a capital campaign on behalf of your organization. This campaign and its success will help determine its future effectiveness in providing services consistent with your organization’s mission and purpose. You’ve taken all the appropriate steps, including a comprehensive feasibility study to ensure that your base of support is ready, willing, and able to help you reach or exceed your campaign goals. The next step is robust capital campaign preparation.

As with so many things in life, assiduous and thorough preparation increases your odds for success. Regardless of whether you realize it, these are critical moments in the life of your organization. Now is the time to set your campaign infrastructure.

Four Keys to Capital Campaign Preparation Success

What will help ensure that you’re ready for your campaign? Check on these four aspects of your capital campaign preparation:

1. Plan – Ideally, you’ve already made the decisions on how and where you’d like to see your organization go and grow in the next three to five years. Clearly articulated strategy provides a strong basis for your path forward. This same written strategy also serves as a touchstone for the inevitable questions that arise during the campaign.
2. Process – The best campaigns follow a distinct road map. Taking the right steps in the correct order increases the odds of your campaign’s success. You simply cannot overestimate the importance of the specific approaches you’ll take to gain support of your board, enlist key volunteers, and generate significant leadership gifts.
3. Paperwork – You already know that the job is done only when the paperwork is complete. Where your campaign is concerned, there will be a case statement, key checklists, written communications, and forms that promote proper recording of events, accomplishments, and concerns. Understanding how important it is to have the proper, useful documents in place gives proven systems a chance to work on your behalf.
4. People – You will rely heavily on the people involved throughout your campaign. While you might be able to scrape by with only some of the elements above, you simply can’t get it done without people. Leaders, staff, board, volunteers, and supporters all need to handle their roles effectively and efficiently. This will require thorough briefings in advance, as well as continuous and comprehensive communication. Ideally, you’ve taken the steps to ensure buy-in and agreement by each of your key constituencies. Now you’ll want to keep people in the loop at each step and phase of the campaign.

An Ounce of Prevention 

As with any new undertaking, even if your organization has capital campaign experience, things will happen. To the degree that you can anticipate the unanticipated, you’ll be able to step over, through or around obstacles that land in your path.

How do you surprise the potential surprises? You do so by being ready for them. Gather the appropriate people and begin to ask questions starting with, “What would we do if…?” and complete the question. For example:

• What would we do if the Executive Director or campaign chair were to depart mid-campaign? What happens if and when we lose a key player?
• What would we do if we found ourselves 50 percent below our milestone fundraising targets?
• What would we do if the economy took a dive during the early stages of the campaign?
• What would we do if a third party, influential in the community or market, attacked the organization or campaign?

Remember that the purpose of this exercise is not gloom and doom, nor is it to kick off a year or more of worry and fretting. This sort of contingency thinking will help you and those around you take those inevitable bumps relatively in stride. You’ll be able to handle virtually anything that the world can throw at you as you conduct your campaign.

Useful Tips

Here are some practical tips you can use in your campaign preparation:

• Take the time to write out your strategy. Do this yourself or with professional assistance. Either way, give yourself the advantage of clarity of purpose and mission. Fully written, this strategic document gives you a tool to share with and enlist the support of key volunteers, staff, and donors.
• Know your process in advance. This is critical for anyone undertaking a significant campaign. You don’t want to be making it all up as you go. There is confidence and assurance in a known, proven process.
• Have the forms, documents, and paperwork in hand and ready. Remember that the structure and progress of your campaign will be determined by the quality of and your effective use of these documents and sheets. Make them as readily and plentifully available as you can.
• Take great care with people at every opportunity. In every phone call, face-to-face meeting, and written piece, try to over-communicate. By shooting for a target that would have you repeating yourself somewhat, you’ll increase your chances of catching those who may have missed a word, phrase, message, or meaning along the way. Be aware that distractions abound and the world continues to turn. Your ability to cut through the clutter and deliver the goods when it comes to news, critical information, feedback, and encouragement are keys to your campaign’s success.

Make your campaign preparations as important—if not more important—than any other element in your campaign. Be ready for pitfalls, prevent the need for continuous crisis management, and help those around you carry the confidence and assurance that comes from smooth progress throughout your campaign.

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.