Kickstarting Your Capital Campaign

It’s not uncommon for an organization to find themselves in a fundraising slump after starting a capital fundraising initiative that has lost direction or momentum. Read our related article, “Fighting a Campaign Slowdown,” for more about this issue. However, don’t lose hope—read on to learn about kickstarting your capital campaign!

In this article, we propose six specific areas of action that you can take to immediately and dramatically increase campaign output. With these steps, we address specific areas of action that are adaptable to your particular needs and position on the fundraising continuum. This process helps your organization to focus on fundraising and the people involved in the effort.

The six areas of focus are:

1. Conduct Top Gift Solicitations and Recruit Leadership

• Organize key volunteers to concentrate on your 10-15 most financially capable prospects and key leadership candidates with outstanding giving potential. Cultivate identifiable lines of contact with existing major donors and leaders. As a next step, begin pursuing the next group of 10-15 prospects.
• Focus on the most potentially lucrative requests. This is effective because most of the funds raised come from relatively few donors. Also, this builds credibility and momentum for the campaign and, most importantly, raises significant funds. Bring to bear an institutional focus on those prospects most likely to give at the top levels. The rest will follow from the momentum you create.
• Specify who those prospects are, and why! Make a specific shortlist of those prospects and establish the logic behind their selection. This will force all involved to focus on this universe of potential support.
• As part of the solicitation strategy, ask each of these key prospects to serve in a leadership position on the campaign as part of their commitment. Do not just ask for money—this will make it easy to say no. Co-op these new supporters to shepherd their investment in your organization and the initiative. Make their commitment so important that it, by itself, cannot be made without their leadership. Build a habit of active support in these key supporters.

2. Bring Pending Requests to Closure

• Be tenacious in your follow-up on outstanding gift requests. We too often feel our work is done after making the gift request. Nothing could be further from the truth! What turns a good gift into a great gift is the intensity and urgency of the request. To make a major gift commitment, most donors must feel a compelling, time-sensitive need is being met by their gift. Asking and forgetting, or being casual in securing the commitment, sends the message that this effort is not important or urgent enough to require their extraordinary support. This is not a message conducive to major gift giving or receiving!
• Bring intense and focused concentration on the top two to three gift requests that have yet to be closed. Design specific strategies to bring each to closure. Train those involved to execute the most effective strategies. This focus within a focus will produce the most positive and immediate results, and will greatly impact your effort to influence others.
• Constantly monitor, report, and discuss the total dollar amount of outstanding requests. This creates an air of expectancy and immediacy. It dangles the immediate financial reward while reminding everyone of the consequence of potentially lost support. It also reminds those involved that the hard work on these requests has already been done. The ask is complete: the answer is needed.

3. Make New Assignments

• Encourage (and facilitate) campaign volunteers and leaders to take on additional prospects right away. This will put fresh names on their “to do” list and give your organization something new to discuss and encourage. Additional visits also produce additional gifts.
• Encourage those solicitors who have taken assignments but who have yet to contact them to do so immediately. You can create a flurry of action by asking everyone to follow through on their commitment to these prospects. This prods them to finish the calls to which they have already committed.
• Make a diligent effort to regularly communicate with your volunteers. Always share progress, offer help, and describe successful asks while reminding volunteers of their assignments and encouraging them to complete them.

4. Focus on Top Prospects (Again)

• Focus on the “Top 10,” board members, top current donors, and others. In other words, focus on those that are the best prospects and those which you know.
• Constantly work to improve your top prospects list. Make this a dynamic and constantly evolving process that upgrades prospects to the top gift levels and brings new names to the list. Improve the input to improve the output.
• Have a special meeting of board members and/or trustees to seek their help in creating more linkages to top-level prospects. (Often, it is even more useful if you can sit with them alone to review the list. Frequently they share in private what they hesitate to share in a group setting.)
• Do the same with top donors.

5. Cultivation and Special Tours

• Design a cultivation plan based on simple, but effective, ways to use current supporters to introduce you to others. Keep it personal and intimate to encourage an atmosphere of closeness and singleness of purpose.
• Conduct special tours of your facilities, if appropriate. Bring prospects to your site; demonstrate what you do and how it impacts the world around them. Don’t let them think you operate in a vacuum. Make it very personal with lots of attention. Follow up immediately.
• Utilize donors, board members, and/or trustees to make introductions and participate in tours. Share their personal stories and unique perspectives on what you do and why they are involved.

6. Logistics and Support

• Constantly work to expand and improve the logistics that support such a dramatic increase in activity. Facilitate the involvement of volunteers by doing the work that will make their involvement easier.
• Produce and utilize high-quality, effective promotional and marketing materials that help your volunteers do what you have asked of them. Do the legwork, be prepared, train volunteers and give them the tools to be successful.
• Be especially vigilant in follow-up and support activities. Have things ready before volunteers realize they need them. “Up the ante” on the professionalism of the effort.

Unless you constantly work to promote the focus and intensity inherent in this process, it is often easy to lose momentum in a fundraising initiative. Let’s face it; you probably have other things to do than fundraising! Our job is to help and encourage an immediate focus on kickstarting your capital 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.

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