Anatomy of a Capital Campaign
Our last Nonprofit Tips and Tidbits talked about the preplanning you need to complete a successful capital campaign. With the board’s approval, the campaign officially launches. But the work – and fun – has only begun!
1. Recruit volunteer leadership. Campaign leadership often includes a campaign chair and honorary campaign chair(s). Think of people who will lend credibility to your campaign (“If so-and-so supports this effort, then it must be important”) and who will share their networks with you and the campaign. Often a campaign can trace its success, at least in part, to the campaign leadership so think and recruit carefully.
2. Develop campaign committees and recruit members both from the board and the community. When correctly developed and leveraged, the campaign committees extend the work of staff with members engaging and even soliciting people in their networks to support the campaign.
3. Create a campaign gift pyramid. You have likely heard that 90% of your funds should come from 10% of your donors. To achieve this goal, you need a lead gift of about 25-30% of your campaign total with top gifts that help you achieve that ratio. We call this the gift pyramid because it shows a few gifts at the larger dollar amounts and increasingly more donors as the gift amounts get smaller. Creating a pyramid allows you to see how many gifts you need at each gift amount.
4. Add prospects to your campaign pyramid. If you plan to launch a $1.1 million campaign, you need a leadership gift of about $250,000. Who can make that gift? You need to start to fill in the blanks on your campaign pyramid to identify where you can slot these donors. Your campaign feasibility study can help with that as can the giving history of your donors and information shared by your volunteers.
5. Launch the “quiet phase.” Using your campaign pyramid with the prospects identified at each giving level, begin to engage and solicit gifts, starting with the largest and working your way down to smaller dollar amounts. Solicit your board early as well; many major donors will want to know that your board supports the campaign. Frequent communication with and between volunteers can help keep the dollars coming. We call this phase of the campaign the “quiet” or “leadership gift” phase because you keep the campaign and its details among a small group: your board, volunteers, and major donors.
6. Launch the public phase of the campaign. Once you raise about 65-75% of the campaign goal, you take your campaign public and engage and solicit your broader constituents. We wait until this point for two reasons. First, you want to show your community that you have a good chance of success to encourage them to make their gifts which will often come in smaller dollar amounts to fill out the base of the pyramid. Few people want to make the first gift. Second, you want to encourage your leadership and major gift prospects to make a large contribution rather than making a smaller gift in the public phase. Often the public phase starts with some public gesture – groundbreaking, press conference, or dinner – to bring public attention to the campaign and project followed by frequent broad-based solicitations via mail, email, and social media.
7. Celebrate! When you complete the campaign, you will have some kind of wrap-up event that celebrates your accomplishments and thanks your donors. The appropriate type of event will depend on your budget and organization. Often organizations will use a dedication event to host a dinner for major donors and send a formal report to smaller dollar donors. In the process, ensure that you thank your volunteers and take time as a staff to celebrate what you accomplished!