Upgrade Your Campaign Executive Committee Meetings

Your campaign executive committee is the heart and soul of your capital campaign. Keeping these volunteers informed, inspired, motivated, and enthusiastic can make or break your campaign effort. Read on to learn how you can ensure that your campaign meetings are interesting, informative, productive, and positive.

How to Improve Your Campaign Executive Committee Meetings

At the outset of your campaign, the ultimate financial goal may appear to be an optimistic and overly challenging target. Your committee and their meetings should be well planned with specific objectives that measurably move towards success.

The first step, of course, is the careful selection of this group of volunteers. This is the group that will guide, steer, solicit and sell your campaign. They must first be committed to the goals of the project. Secondly, they must make a generous gift of their own, preferably one of the largest gifts of the campaign. This sets the tone for giving. The group should also be respected members of the community who are willing to solicit their colleagues and friends, and make involvement in this campaign a priority.

Your campaign committee meetings should be informed, inspired, focused, motivated, and enthusiastic! This is the responsibility of the campaign chair, in concert with and under the direction of fundraising counsel and senior staff.

Nothing can slow the momentum of your campaign effort quicker than meetings that don’t give your committee the updates and information they need, are not focused on the key elements of the campaign, and lack optimism, motivation and inspiration. These key leaders might be apprehensive about the campaign goal that was set in the beginning. However, poorly presented and conducted meetings will do nothing but reinforce that concern!

Campaign Executive Committee Meeting Agenda

There are certain agenda items that should be common to every campaign committee meeting. The basics are:

1. The update. Bring your committee up to date on the progress of the campaign. Not just gift totals, but details of prospect solicitations, gifts closed, pending asks, and follow-up required. This review should prompt input from committee members on their specific actions of follow-up, new solicitations, and other efforts to move the process forward.
2. The prioritizing of the next round of prospect contacts and “asks.” This will move into a discussion regarding assignments, contacts, intelligence on target prospects, etc.
3. A look at longer-range prospects. These take place beyond the assignments covered in the previous section.
4. A time for general input. Ask each committee member for comments, questions, or any other discussion they feel is pertinent to advancing the campaign.
5. A summary of the meeting. The chairman should cover the highlights, the challenges ahead, and the accomplishments to date. Remember to close the meeting on a positive note.

The key to these meetings is accountability and assignment. Everyone should feel held accountable to their peers and the organization. Each meeting must also contain concrete action points, in which volunteers accept new tasks and everyone is in agreement as to the direction and pace of the campaign.

Summary

When each meeting follows these principles, members take away the latest information, a focus on upcoming priorities, specific assignments, motivation, and enthusiasm for a goal that will be achieved through a solid process. Meeting by meeting, the campaign marches forward to 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.

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