Choosing a Stellar Campaign Leader

Dedicated volunteers are worth their weight in gold to your charitable organization. These high-level volunteers, including your campaign leader, provide credibility and undertake the essential relationship-building that helps attract friends, supporters, and financial resources to your organization. In a successful capital campaign, the importance of committed, high-performing volunteer leaders simply cannot be overstated. In fact,…

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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…

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Campaign Progress Reports: The Basics

Reporting on the progress of a capital campaign is a vital function of an efficient and effective fundraising initiative. Capital campaigns are often large endeavors that can appear overwhelming and unaccountable. They are actually precise initiatives with a specific schedule of activities that must be accomplished in a particular order. Therefore, it’s important that your…

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Benefits of a Capital Campaign

What does it mean to have a successful capital campaign? Clearly, reaching or exceeding the dollar goal is a significant and meaningful measure. Winning campaigns, however, create, multiple and diverse ripples of activity throughout an organization which help it become stronger and better able to fulfill its mission.

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Fighting a Campaign Slowdown

As much as we plan, plan, plan, there inevitably comes a time in most capital campaigns when activity slows dramatically. This is known as a campaign slowdown. There are few things more frustrating in a capital campaign than losing valuable momentum. Capital Campaign Momentum Properly planned campaigns get off to a quick start because of…

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Overcome the Emotional Costs of Paying for Fundraising

Few Board Members would argue with the adage “You have to spend money to make money.” Yet campus leaders often quibble about how much to spend to raise money or what funds to use to finance campaign costs. Perhaps a more pertinent expression when it comes to paying for fund-raising is “Everybody wants to go…

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Finding Major Gift Prospects

Everyone knows someone who is capable of making a major gift. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard trustees and volunteers tell me they don’t know anyone capable of a gift of $25,000 or more. Images are conjured up of mansions, exotic sports cars, and lavish lifestyles. “I don’t run in those circles,” they…

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