Podcast: Angela Townsend: I Never Imagined the Possibilities… Until We Did a Capital Campaign

Season 3, Episode 10

In this episode, Andrea Kihlstedt interviews Angela Townsend, Development Director of Tabby’s Place, a sanctuary for cats from hopeless situations. Angela shares the story of how they raised more money than they ever anticipated for a special home for cats with an incurable feline disease and how, in the process, of that campaign, she came to understand how generous people can be!

Listen Now:

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Do you think the way to raise a million dollars is by getting 100 gifts of $10,000 each? If so, you’d be dead wrong. And so was our guest today when she began her campaign journey. Listen and find out what happened.

Hi there. I’m Andrea Kihlstedt, and today I’m speaking with Angela Townsend, the Development Director of Tabby’s Place, a cat sanctuary in New Jersey. My usual co-host Amy Eisenstein isn’t here today, but she’ll be back next week.

Greetings, Angela. I’m so excited to be speaking with you today.

Angela Townsend:
Andrea, it’s a joy to be speaking with you. It has been an extraordinary ride on our capital campaign and I am just overjoyed to share our journey and to see your smiling face and to hopefully be helpful to someone else out there.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Fantastic. So Angela, let’s start by your telling us a little about Tabby’s Place for those who don’t know.

Angela Townsend:
So Tabby’s Place is a cage free cat sanctuary for cats from hopeless situations, and we are in our 20th year now. So we’ve rescued nearly 4,000 cats through the years, but we are devoted to those cats who truly have nowhere else to turn.

So we are loved the world over for taking cats who primarily have special needs. Everything ranging from paraplegia to behavioral quirks to everything in between, and to loving them as though each one as they were the first, last and only cat in the world. We are very devoted to the individual. And any cat who doesn’t get adopted has a home for life with us where we truly become their family.

At any given time, we’ve got about a hundred cats who are just happy and thriving in our cage-free haven, and it is truly just an outpost of love in this world.

Capital Campaigns Unlock BIG Possibilities

Andrea Kihlstedt:
What a place to be in an outpost of love. Oh my goodness. Well, Angela, how did you find yourself in a capital campaign? I know it’s not what you were aiming for. How did that come about?

Angela Townsend:
No, it was a wonderful blessing that none of us expected. I had been at Tabby’s place about 14 years at that point, and we had a faithful donor, a generous donor who had adopted a cat who had a very difficult condition, and it was the one condition that Tabby’s Place is not really equipped to take, which we can talk about more, but essentially it’s rather infectious among cats and it’s poorly understood.

So although we take cats with every kind of disease you can imagine, this was sort of the final frontier, and these are cats who have nowhere to turn. So we ended up with one of these cats, this lovely woman adopted one and then came back to us a few years later and said:

“Listen, this cat has changed my life forever. I would like to build a wing on Tabby’s Place so that you can take these cats.”

We loved the idea, but Jonathan, our Executive Director, who is not one to mince words said, “I’m not sure if you realize what that would cost.” And she came back and said, “I think I do,” and presented us with a gift that was a magnitude we’d never received before, and that did indeed give us the jet pack, that this was something we could actually consider our very first expansion in 15 years.

However, it didn’t get us all the way there. So it gave us both an incredible blessing and an incredible challenge to make this dream come true for these cats who have nowhere in the world to turn. And we accepted the challenge and with fear and trembling launched right in.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
What I remember about my first conversation with you, Angela, is that you had taken on this challenge and knew you had to raise a ton of money. For you, was a lot of money. And the way you said about doing it was that you created a beautiful brochure and you sent it out to all of your donors asking each one of them for $10,000. Is that right?

Angela Townsend:
Pretty close, yes.

An Early Campaign Brochure is a Mistake

So we created this beautiful packet that we poured our heart and soul into, and in many ways I am not a fundraiser by trade. I stumbled into development as many of us do. So my fundraising style had always been kind of write it and they will come. I’m more of a writer and then just love people really well, without even asking for money so explicitly.

So even sending out this packet, asking for a sum of that amount, we segmented our donors and sent it to the ones that we felt were capable of it and then just blasted them with this packet hoping for gifts of 10,000 or more. And I think we got one, maybe two such gifts and then very quickly realized we’re in trouble. This is not going to work.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. Yeah, it’s such a wonderful idea and such a beginner’s mistake in the capital campaign business. It really won my heart actually, that you had done that, you dived in and did that, and that all of a sudden you realized that wasn’t the way forward.

Angela Townsend:
And we need help here because we’ve built this place from over the last 15 years, but the skills that we’ve had until this point, we need to learn things that we’ve never done before and we’re brave and crazy enough to do it. My boss, our founder and Executive Director was not a nonprofit guy either, so we both have been learning along the way all these years together and we said:

“Okay, you know what? We have more to learn and we’re here for it.”

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And then I know you started working with the capital campaign pro advisor, Richard.

Angela Townsend:
We did.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It was not so far from you actually.

Angela Townsend:
No, he’s right here, and hopefully he’s going to be here for our grand opening eventually because he’s near enough that we can meet him in person eventually. But yes, and from the very beginning it was such a different model from anything that we’d ever done and quite again, scary. It was one of the words I would use, but Richard [Quinn] quickly gave us great confidence because he recognized that our greatest strengths were our storytelling and our relationships with our donors. And really helped us to understand that the love that we shared with our donors was going to be our greatest asset, and that when we went to them, they would be ready. It would be like plucking apples from trees we planted a very long time ago. That they would not be as shocked to hear this ask as we would be to make it.

And [he] really trained us in how to approach folks one-on-one and sit down and have conversations that were not really the shakedown that we kind of feared they would be, and were more in service to the relationship and to deepening it and to making it more beautiful and in a way that really felt like us. And it turned out to be one of the most moving, meaningful, exhilarating experiences of my life. And the bonds that we have with these donors now it feels like are forever in a way that transcends fundraising.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So how much money did you set out to raise then?

Raising and Surpassing Their Campaign Goal

Angela Townsend:
So the goalposts moved a few times, as I understand is quite common in the capital campaign.

Our initial goal, I believe was 1.3 million, which then became, this is over and above that initial gift, which then became 1.6. And by the end we had our sights on 2 and our annual operating budget prior to all of this had been about 1.6, 1.7 million.

So it really was looking at a different solar system than we’d ever lived in and go and requesting gifts that were just many orders of magnitude over anything that we had ever sought. So yes, so ultimately the goal was 2 million.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And you’ve surpassed that goal.

Angela Townsend:
We hit 2.2 million. We still kind of are in the state of astonishment over that, but yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And I think the way you did that was to segment your list.

Angela Townsend:
We did.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And go down and start at the top and begin talking in real ways to donors. Is that right?

Angela Townsend:
That was it. And you said exactly the right phrase, which is real ways.

I think both Jonathan and I, again, we’re not having really background in fundraising. We’re afraid that the ask would come off as pressure, would come off as salesmanship versus being in service to the relationship because we treasure these folks so much that the last thing we wanted to do was to almost feel like we were betraying the relationship by saying, “Alright, now it’s time to pony up.”

And really what Richard helped us to do was to just to deepen that [donor] relationship and to understand that these folks we love are here because they love our cats and they want to change the world for cats with us. So we are giving them the opportunity to be part of something that makes their heart sing.

And that was precisely how they responded. And in many cases that they were honored to be asked to make an investment that was significant. So it was just such an affirming experience in every way. And again, just deepening the friendships that we have with our donors and feeling like we are now together part of something that we couldn’t have dreamed of even two years ago.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
When I first spoke with you, I looked at your website and I found out what you were doing. I looked at your website and the love in your website is so remarkable. It is so sort of palpable, really. It is an organization that really is infused with a sense of caring and a sense of commitment and passion about your mission.

Angela Townsend:
Thank you for that. Well, you just made my entire week, but-

Andrea Kihlstedt:
No, it’s true. And I mean actually sent several people to your website to look at it just to get that —

Angela Townsend:
Thank you.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
[That] sense of, you were a little or a small organization that were not sophisticated in fundraising. And I thought to myself, “Oh my goodness, what’s going to happen?” And then I looked at your website, I thought:

“Anybody with this amount of commitment and passion and love can raise money, can raise serious money.”

So off you went.

Angela Townsend:
We did.

Asking for Significant Campaign Gifts

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And one person after another, you started asking for significant gifts.

Angela Townsend:
We did. And success built upon itself as we grew more confident in these conversations, and it’s always kind of been our way. Jonathan and I are similar in this, in that we are perhaps earnest to a fault with our donors. So we were even upfront about the fact that it’s like this is new to us, this kind of conversation. And we started with people who we were really comfy with and could kind of fall over ourselves and bumble around with, but we found that we didn’t feel like we were bumbling around.

We felt like we were just really honestly talking about something very beautiful that they have clearly committed themselves to already by giving us glimpses of their capacity to give and their passion for our mission. And what you mentioned about our website, I think we’ve always been very conscious of trying to build a community of love at Tabby’s Place that is focused on the cats, but that transcends them.

And to be really a sanctuary for everyone who crosses our door, physically or otherwise. And that was, I think what bore fruit and what kind of had opened the door already more than we realized, that people were ready for these conversations more already than we even were. And Richard certainly gave us the skills, the kind of collateral to come in with, that would help people to capture the vision and that would help them to find their story in the big story that we were trying to tell.

That was one of the most, if I can use the word magical things that we experienced, was that people really read themselves into what we were doing, that wasn’t forced at all, that they saw this as their great adventure too. They already felt like that was part of it.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, I mean, you and many other animal organizations, and there are many of them all had and have broad donor bases, right?

Angela Townsend:
Yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You have a lot of people who give you small amounts of money.

Angela Townsend:
That’s exactly right.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s a pattern for humane leagues. And every time animals are involved, you get a lot of people who want to give.

Angela Townsend:
That’s it.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And many of them, like you, don’t understand the potential of building those relationships at the top. Of finding those people who would be happily give more if you just ask them for more.

Angela Townsend:
That’s it. Right? I think the strength that we came in with was that they already felt very connected to us because although there are many things we had yet to learn, donor cultivation has been the one thing that’s kind of come naturally to us because again, we just love people.

So the way that we’d invested in their lives and we interacted with them personally on a regular basis that had, unbeknownst to us already been laying the groundwork, and that’s sort of the Tabby’s Place philosophy towards the cats playing out with people. With the cats, we’ve never been an organization focused on numbers because the kind of cats we take are often with us five, 10 more years.

So we’re devoted to the individual and to the care of the individual. The same with our donors, where it was really these one-on-one relationships. So we came in with that, not realizing it would be our greatest asset for a capital campaign.

Using a Gift Range Chart to Raise Gifts

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. Did you use a gift for each chart? I’m sure —

Angela Townsend:
We did. Which was something I had read about in books, but really had no experience with.

So Richard helped us to customize [our gift range chart] and to make it work for us with targeting our donors and fitting them in there. And it was the kind of thing where it took a bit of success before we sort of believed that this could work for us, because I think we came in also feeling like we are a quirky organization in a lot of ways.

So would a lot of these tried and true things work for us? Or were we too weird or too small, or was our culture too eccentric that they wouldn’t, and to our amazement, they, by and large, did.

Tragedy Strikes in the Middle of the Campaign

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So you raised your 2 million dollars and of course your original donor, I’m sure you have been talking to her on the side.

Angela Townsend:
Well, that is one of the most bittersweet things about this capital campaign, is that very early on in the process she passed away.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Oh no.

Angela Townsend:
And she was quite young. Yes. She got to see enough to know that her dream would become a reality, and her parents are still very devotedly involved, but yes, we miss her every day. That was the heartbreaking piece.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. But her parents are involved?

Angela Townsend:
They are deeply involved. Yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I’m sure It makes them feel wonderful to see all of this taking shape. It’s a little bit of their daughter.

Angela Townsend:
And they still have her cat, for whom our expansion is named. So the story goes on.

How the Campaign Transformed the Organization

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So how has this affected your now, your building is in progress as being built?

Angela Townsend:
It is nearly complete, actually. It’s probably about 95% complete. Yes.

So it’s humming with life. We have cats thriving there who would’ve had absolutely no to turn and who are living these amazing lives, which just to see them is like a miracle every day. And yes, and we are looking to the future, and now we continue to work with Richard as we look to grow in our major gifts program, which was also something that we never really formally had in place, but invigorated by our success here and trusting our donors never before. We are ready for this next chapter.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Fantastic. What a transformation.

Angela Townsend:
Oh my goodness. And well, we can never go back, of course, but it’s wonderful and it feels like it’s only grown the love and the sweetness that we work so hard to foster, rather than making us become corporate or something like that. It’s really just deepened everything that we love about what we do.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Is Jonathan as enthusiastic about it all as you are?

Angela Townsend:
In his own accent, he doesn’t… I’m the Bush factory and I think Jonathan has been overjoyed in his way. Because John founded Tabby’s Place 20 years ago out of love for one cat, inspired it all. And to see this come to fruition, it’s a testament to his tenacity and to his love.

Three Crucial Campaign Lessons Learned

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So if you were to summarize the three most important things you’ve learned that have really set you up for success from a fundraising point of view, what would they be?

Angela Townsend:
Without question:

1. The first thing would be invest in your relationships with all your heart. Get to know your donors. Get to truly, deeply care about them and understand why they love your mission. Because once you understand that, you can bring joy to both them and you. You’re in it together. So those relationships are absolutely everything.
2. Have courage, I would say would be number two. The things that sound too wonderful to be true can very well happen. We learned that over and over and over again. So I would say be brave and expect more of your donors than you dare to and lean into your storytelling. I would say one of the greatest assets that any organization has is these stories of what you’re doing every day.
3. And just to step back far enough to realize what amazing things are happening and to remember that they’re not so obvious to your donors and to people outside and to really sort of sing that forth and to help your donors find themselves in that story. Because they want to live inside the big story that you’re telling. And that’s our honor and our privilege is to help them find themselves in there.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Angela, I think I want to clone you and have you come and visit everybody that we work with. It’s so important to remember to tell stories, and I think so many people get so lost in the details of what they do, that it’s easy actually to forget the story.

It’s easy to forget how important it is to be able to stand back and see the big story and share the big story and find out how donors want to be involved in the big story. And of course, just the day-to-day of work is so all consuming.

Angela Townsend:
Yeah, that’s it. Or that we take for granted the big story that we’re living in.

Jonathan and I joke about it all the time, is that we walk into the Tabby’s Place lobby and we forget that it’s not a typical thing that it’s like there’s a paraplegic cat like scooting along into the sunshine, and there’s a cat from Beirut who flew here because he had nowhere in the world to turn, and now he’s right over there rolling on his back. It’s that we live among these magnificent stories that seem so normal to us, but they’re not. They’re something special.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, it is a treat to have watched your progress from the beginning until now, and it will be a further treat to watch you develop in the major gifts field. And I can’t wait to see what the next project is, now that you’ve about finished this one.

Angela Townsend:
Quite confident the best is yet to come. Absolutely.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I have no question. Thank you so much for being with me today, for being willing to share your story.

If you are listening to this and you want to get support from Capital Campaign Pro, just go to our website, capitalcampaignpro.com. There are many places that you can hit buttons and sign up to have a strategy session or a meeting with me or Amy or someone else from our team. We’d be delighted to talk to you about a capital campaign and then maybe in a couple of years you can tell the kind of inspiring story that Angela has just shared with us today.