Podcast: Unlocking Capital Campaign Success: The 15-Minute Readiness Quiz
Season 3, Episode 35
In this episode, hosts Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt share a quick 15-minute readiness quiz to determine if your organization is ready for a capital campaign. Whether you’re considering a million or $100 million campaign, these three simple questions will guide you in assessing your preparedness.
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Andrea Kihlstedt:
Do you wish that in 15 minutes you would know if you were ready for a capital campaign? Well, guess what? You can, and we’re going to tell you how.
Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I am Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder, Andrea Kihlstedt, and today we are going to give you three simple questions to ask your leadership team and yourself to determine if you are ready for a campaign.
Assess Your Campaign Readiness: Question #1
So Andrea, let’s start with the first. What is the first very simple question that organizational leaders need to ask themselves in order to know if they are ready to head into a capital campaign?
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, the very first thing is this:
Do you know what your campaign is going to raise money for and why it matters to anyone outside your organization?
I mean, think about that. That’s really important, right? It’s not a matter of why your organization needs money. It’s a matter of why you need money that’s going to make a difference in the community you serve. Do you know the answer to that? Can you write it out really quickly?
Amy Eisenstein:
Yes. Write a paragraph. Write five bullets. Write it out. Be able to articulate why you’re doing this campaign, what you need the money for. If you write one word and it’s endowment, you’re not ready for a campaign. You’ll know.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
You’ll know, right? Endowment is not the right answer to this question. We’ll do another podcast on that sometimes soon, okay?
Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. So you need a strong case. That’s what you need. You need strong campaign objectives, a strong case, a reason for having a campaign, a reason that people would care and support your organization.
So that’s number one. Answer that question, and you’re on your way to being ready for a campaign. What’s question number two?
Assess Your Campaign Readiness: Question #2
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Question number two is this:
Who are the 20 people or organizations that you believe will make the all-important big gifts to your campaign?
Amy Eisenstein:
Yes. And big gifts. You have to figure that out by doing your gift range chart. And so if you want to raise whether it’s a million or 10 million or $100 million dollars, you need to figure out what are the 20 gifts that you need that is going to get you to 50, 60, or 70% of your goal. And so these need to be six and seven figure gifts.
These are not any old gifts. These are the gifts that are going to move your campaign needle significantly. So a list of 20 donors, including sometimes corporations and foundations, but it’s individuals, corporations, and foundations, a list of 20 people that have the ability as far as you know to make the financial capacity to make those lead gifts.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
You have to sit and scribble those names. We’re not asking you to do research. We want you to just scribble those names down from your head. To be ready for a campaign, means that you have a pretty good idea who those people are. You’re not doing a lot of deep research. You know who those people are already, so you write it down.
Amy Eisenstein:
That doesn’t mean that you won’t have to do some research, but you’re not ready for a campaign if you can’t scribble those names down.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s why this is a 15-minute quiz, right?
Amy Eisenstein:
Right. By the time you’re ready for your campaign, you will be able to scribble those 20 names down. So that’s good.
All right. And we need to dig a little bit deeper on those 20 names. So what’s question number three, Andrea?
Assess Your Campaign Readiness: Question #3
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Great. So once you have those 20 names scribble down on your paper…
Now circle the people or organizations on your list, the list you’ve made, who you believe already know about your project and feel engaged and involved in the planning.
So maybe of those 20 names, maybe five or six of them will feel engaged and involved. If none of them feel engaged and involved, you’re in trouble, right? If all of them feel engaged and involved, you’re in great shape.
Amy Eisenstein:
You’re ready to go. You’re ready to go.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Ready to go. Right.
Amy Eisenstein:
Yes.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
This is a funny little test because it’s very clear and very specific. And if you actually know what you’re going to raise money for, that’s going to make a difference, if you have a compelling case, as Amy says, and if you can quickly make a list of 20 people who have the capacity to give those big gifts, and if of those 20 people, some significant percentage are already involved in thinking through this campaign and involved in your organization, that points clearly to the fact that you’re ready to move ahead with a feasibility study, you’re ready to move ahead with your campaign.
Additional In-Depth Campaign Readiness Assessments – All Are Free
Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. So listen, we’re making a little bit light of this, but this is a quick quiz, a quick readiness quiz. We have much more in-depth readiness assessments on the Capital Campaign Pro website for free. You can go to capitalcampaignpro.com and look in our resources — our free resources tab — and find four detailed readiness assessments that you can do with your board and your leadership team:
- One’s on board readiness;
- One’s on development office readiness;
- The next is on technology systems and infrastructure readiness;
- And the final [assessment] is overall campaign readiness.
So of course, you can do much more detailed analysis of whether or not you’re ready. But if you want to do a high level, Are we ready to move into past pre-campaign planning?, whether it’s into the feasibility study phase or even quiet phase starting tasks for gifts, you’ve got to pass these three high level tests.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
And you know what, Amy? You might actually sit down with your development team with two or three people from your development team, and you can take this test together. Put on a timer. Don’t let it take longer than half an hour. And you can collectively discuss who those names are and whether they’re involved. That’s a really great exercise, campaign readiness exercise.
Amy Eisenstein:
Right.
The Power of this 15-Minute Campaign Readiness Quiz
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, years and years ago, my mentor in this business, when I first got involved in fundraising, said to me, he said:
“I have a test. I have a trick that always lets me know if a development shop and a development director are really good or really great. When I go in for my first day working with them,” he said, “I get them to take out a piece of paper and I say, ‘All right, sit down for 15 minutes and write down off the top of your head your 50 top donor prospects’.
If they can do it, I know they’re doing their job the way they should. And if they look at me like I’m a fool and they have no idea, I know that I have to start at the very, very beginning.”
So this is a similar kind of a quiz.
Amy Eisenstein:
And listen, I want to make sure that listeners really understand that when you first start talking about your campaign, and there are months and months of pre-campaign planning, readiness exercises and activities, you’re going to be researching these people. You are not going to be able to list off these 20 people, or it’s unlikely you’re going to be able to list off these 20 people easily before you do some research and planning and preparation. There is going to be work in identifying your campaign objectives and involving these donors.
So we’re not suggesting that on day one, when you start talking about a campaign, that you’re going to pass this test. These are things that you are going to do. We help organizations all the time in pre-campaign planning get ready to pass this test. And so it is something that you’ll work towards.
So I don’t want you to think that if you can’t pass it today, it doesn’t mean that in six months you won’t be ready to pass it. You probably will, but there are very concrete and specific things that you need to do to get ready for a campaign, and these are three of them.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I love boiling things down to something that’s simple, right? It’s so easy in this capital campaign business to see complex and complicated and lots of work. And when you really boil it down, you want to involve in a capital campaign.
Your key donors, people who have the capacity to give, people who believe strongly in your mission, people with whom you have contact and they’re close to your organization, you want to know who those people are. You want to feel like they’re your partners. You want to know what it is you are going to raise money for that’s exciting and that’s really going to raise the bar in terms of what your organization can do in the world.
And then you need a system to put those things together so that you can go and ask those people for those all-important top gifts. Now, there are many other things that happen, but when you boil down to it, if you can do those, everything else is going to be a whole lot simpler.
We Can Help With Pre-Campaign Planning
Amy Eisenstein:
Now, if you want to know if you’re ready to start pre-planning for your campaign or how to articulate that all important case and identify those donors and involve them, that’s exactly what we do here at Capital Campaign Pro with our clients.
- We help people articulate and flesh out the case.
- We help them identify those all important donors and we give them tools and resources and strategies to engage them and involve them, and then they’re ready for a campaign.
So don’t think that you need to come to a consultant having done all those things, or if you haven’t done them, there’s no hope for your campaign. That’s the pre-work, the pre-planning work of every campaign.
All right. Excellent. I think we’ve tackled this topic well. And now people really have a sense of what they need to do to get ready for their campaign, and a very easy strategy to know if they’re ready.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Exactly. It’s always fun to do these things with you, Amy.
Amy Eisenstein:
Well, thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time.
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