Podcast: How the Northern Forest Center Raised $30M: A Capital Campaign Success Story
Season 4, Episode 12
In this episode, co-founder Andrea Kihlstedt speaks with Lila Thorne, former Director of Development at the Northern Forest Center, about their groundbreaking $30 million capital campaign. Lila shares the compelling story of how the Northern Forest Center launched an innovative campaign that combined philanthropy and impact investing to support communities across a 30 million-acre landscape spanning four states in the Northeastern U.S.
This episode also delves into the innovative financial model that fueled the Northern Forest Center’s impact investments, how they managed to raise funds across multiple communities and states, and how they achieved success by securing significant investments from national foundations, corporations, and even a church.
Listen now to discover how you, too, can create an inspiring and effective capital campaign!
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Andrea Kihlstedt:
You want to hear a great campaign story? Well, you’re in luck today because I have with me someone who’s going to tell you one.
I’m Andrea Kihlstedt, co-founder of Capital Campaign Pro, and I have with me today Lila Thorne, who was, for a bunch of years, with the Northern Forest Center, during which time she worked on a very big and very interesting capital campaign. She, Lila, and Northern Forest Center have been clients of Capital Campaign Pro, so we have gotten to see this campaign unfold up close and personal. And I asked Lila to share her stories with you so that you can hear from her, from the horse’s mouth, what it was like and what happened.
Welcome, Lila.
Lila Thorne:
Hi. Thank you for having me.
About Norther Forest Center
Andrea Kihlstedt:
So Lila, let’s start this way. Just tell everybody a little about where you are in the country and what the Northern Forest Center is. Let’s start there.
Lila Thorne:
Sounds good.
Yeah. So my name is Lila. I live a little bit outside of Concord, New Hampshire in the Northeast. I live on a lake in a very beautiful forested area. And I have three kids and four chickens and live and work mostly from my son’s bedroom. I worked for the Northern Forest Center for six years and actually just finished my tenure there eight days ago to become a full-time mom. And the Northern Forest Center is just a fantastic nonprofit.
I’ve worked for many nonprofits and so I can vouch for them in saying that they have a wonderful team culture and a mission that is really focused on creating innovation and vibrancy across a rural landscape, which spans 30 million acres. Actually ranging from the northern Adirondacks across into the Green Mountains of Vermont and Northern Vermont and Northeast Kingdom into the White Mountains of New Hampshire and then up into the North Woods of Maine.
So all this land is similar in the context of its economic history. It was a place of hardcore foresting and pulp and paper production for a long time. And then was left to its own devices as big pulp and paper companies moved out to seek places that were cheaper for production in the 1990s. So at that point, a lot of conservation nonprofits moved in to say, “Oh, we have to save this land and conserve the forest.” But there was no actor saying:
“Well, what about the communities that are here? What’s their livelihood now that the economic pillar is gone from their communities?”
So our focus is creating a new model for rural vibrancy across this landscape, specifically from the lens of communities that have been left behind.
Committing to a Different Kind of Capital Campaign
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Lana, when you first called us at Capital Campaign Pro, you called saying that you wanted to do, you, Northern Forest Center, wanted to do as a different kind of a campaign, an innovative campaign that wasn’t just about raising philanthropic money, but that combined philanthropy and impact investing. And you were looking for a consulting firm that knew something about impact investing. You remember this?
So Amy and I put our thinking caps on and we thought, well, we don’t know anything about impact investing either. We know a lot about philanthropy. And we debated how to come back to you. And we finally came back to you and said:
“Listen, we know a lot about philanthropy, we’re happy to help you with that. But I think you know about impact investing and why don’t we put our energies and minds together and we’ll figure it out.”
And that’s what happened actually. You decided, okay, we didn’t have to know about that. You knew about that. And the campaign that you shaped started out as a campaign to raise what, $20 million?
Lila Thorne:
Yeah.
Settling On Campaign Goals and Strategy
Andrea Kihlstedt:
And how did that break down in terms of goals?
Lila Thorne:
Yeah, great question. Yeah, I remember that first conversation with you and thinking about, we were stumped ourselves about who we needed to help us through this thing. We didn’t even know if it was a capital campaign because we wanted to raise a bunch of impact investments, which really in the investment world is called a capital raise. And so we were thinking about, do we find investment advisors that help us through this, but we want to raise investments and philanthropy?
And in the end, we decided that we didn’t know how a campaign worked, and so we needed your help there. And that we were going to take a risk and try and figure out the investment side. Which we did have a little bit of experience in, but not to the scale that we wanted for our capital raise.
Anyway, what we did was we ended up with a $20 million goal, which was almost split evenly between impact investments and gifts and grants. And then we had such wild success in the first year and a half that we hit the benchmark that we had set for ourselves. That meant that if we hit that benchmark, we would raise our goal. So we raise our goal to 30 million a year into the campaign.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
And now the campaign is going to close by the end of the year, at 30 million plus.
Lila Thorne:
Yeah, it’s finishing in December of this year. We’re officially at $27 million of combined investments and gifts and grants. So it’s a nail-biter, and we’ll see how we do in the last four months.
Capital Campaigns SHOULD be Nail-Biters
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Fantastic. If campaigns aren’t nail-biters, you’re not going for enough.
Lila Thorne:
Exactly.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
You’re just sitting back and cruising to the end. Something.
Lila Thorne:
Yeah. This is the amount of time that I think:
“Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if we had just stayed at 20 million?”
Andrea Kihlstedt:
It would be over and done, and you would’ve left a ton of money on the table.
Lila Thorne:
Exactly.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Which would’ve been a mistake.
A Multi-Region Capital Campaign
So your campaign is also interesting because you cover so much territory. But it’s not like you have a local campaign, where in Rutland, Vermont you’re raising so-and-so much money. So you’re raising money from a big geography that goes across communities and across states. How did you think about that?
Lila Thorne:
That’s a great question. Yeah, so our geography, 30 million acres, we’re putting money from the campaign into 10 different communities across our 30 million acres. And we needed to raise a whole lot more money than we had ever thought we could raise. Our operating budget when we started was 2 million, two and a half maybe, and now it’s 5 million. And we have 27 million stacked on top of it. So we’ve doubled our operating budget over the course of the time and had to raise this extra money.
What was interesting about that was that, honestly, a big selling point for our campaign was the ideas behind it. The idea that communities that were left behind deserved a second chance. And the political possibilities that lie behind that in terms of rural America, ideas that if people come together around a common goal, perhaps there isn’t as much division. So we were getting investments in gifts from people that weren’t necessarily linked to those geographies.
And then we were also getting investments in gifts from people who really thought that our financial model was super swanky. They liked the idea that we were using money in different ways to its best advantage.
So we got really large investments and gifts from national foundations, a publicly traded company, a church, places that wouldn’t necessarily have invested in us had we had a traditional model for raising money.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Isn’t that fascinating? I’ve often said in many contexts that capital campaigns are all about ideas, that the case for support is basically a set of ideas, and the more exciting the ideas, the more successful you’ll be. Everybody thinks that it’s about money, but in fact it’s about ideas. And what you’ve articulated is exactly that.
Handling the Geography of the Campaign
Now, did you put together committees in every state? How did you handle the geography of your campaign?
Lila Thorne:
Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah. We actually had a campaign committee for each state that was comprised of five members. And then so we would have state-specific committee meetings, and then we’d have full steering committee meetings interspersed between that. And then we also had a core committee that was three volunteers that would meet between all those other committee meetings.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
And did you run all that?
Lila Thorne:
I did.
On Becoming a Mother During the Campaign
Andrea Kihlstedt:
And in the meantime, you’ve had three babies.
Lila Thorne:
I know. I would like to add to this that the campaign produced not only 27 million, but three baby Thornes in the same time.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Lila’s last name is Thorne.
Lila Thorne:
Yeah, no, not actual thorn.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Let me let people know.
Lila Thorne:
They are thorny.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
They are thorny, but your last name is Thorne, so that’s what she means. Lila Thorne. And now there are three little Thornes.
Lila Thorne:
When we first started the campaign, I was pregnant with my first. And so my co-workers like to joke that I was actually only around for one year less than the campaign because I was so busy being on maternity leave for the other portions.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
But you really were in charge of building that program. You were having children and taking time off to do that, but I know that your role in doing that, you were actually building the development program.
Lila Thorne:
I was.
Juggling Maternity Leave and the Needs of the Campaign
Andrea Kihlstedt:
As the organization grew, as the campaign grew, how did you think about that? How did that work? What were the positions you filled?
Lila Thorne:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I actually think I recommend that anyone in director role needs to take a maternity leave every few years because, Andrea, this is the key. It takes your ego out of it. You can’t believe that you are irreplaceable because you are. And you have to be. And so I had to replace myself three times at different points in the campaign, which meant that I had to really trust my colleagues to step in and support them to do the work that I would’ve been doing had I been there.
So when we first started the campaign, we had me and one other half-time person in the fundraising office. And then we brought on another major gift officer. And then we brought on a campaign coordinator and campaign fundraising coordinator. And then we folded in our communications director into the fundraising team about that same time. She’d been working parallel before.
So by the end of it, we had a lot more people working on the fundraising team. And then the coup d’etat is that after my third baby, I stepped out of my role, as a director of development, and we brought on a new director of development, and then I worked part-time as a major gift officer. So it was, let’s see, I think by the end of it, we had five people plus the president working in fundraising, which is many more than we had started from.
And what’s cool about it is that at least two of those new additions were people who had never worked in fundraising before. And we saw them and we just saw they had the spark and we believed that they could do it, and they are just fantastic fundraisers.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Wow. Wow. So now the budget of the organization has grown by three or four times.
Lila Thorne:
Yeah, it has. It’s gone from two and a half to five, so yet doubled.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Twice, double. And your staff has grown. Will all of those staff members continue even as the campaign finishes?
Lila Thorne:
They will, yeah. Yeah. We’re now at a much larger scale in terms of what we can do, and we’re deploying the money from our campaign over 10 years. So we have a lot of work to maintain fundraising levels and then also in program deployment.
Lila’s Lessons on Campaign Fundraising
Andrea Kihlstedt:
What did you learn, Lila, about fundraising, about asking people for money? I’m sure you did a lot of asking.
Lila Thorne:
I did do a lot of asking.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
What did you learn?
Lila Thorne:
It became one of my favorite things to do. I just think it’s so fun. I love the drama of it. I love the self-restraint that is required in asking in terms of being quiet after you’ve asked and seeing what the response is. I honestly, I learned, like you said, that a lot of it has to do with a dream, something that isn’t there that the person wants to believe in. And that, more than anything, is what is going to bring someone to make a gift that’s bigger than what they’ve considered.
I learned that you can ask for way more money than you think you can. Oh my God. And so it became a team culture for our fundraising meetings to dare each other, to add a few more zeros each time we were thinking about an upcoming solicitation. So that by the time we were done with a campaign meeting, we would’ve gone from a $50,000 gift to a $500,000 gift. Normally, that’s how the meeting almost always went. And the answers came back pretty often at a $500,000 gift.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. And had you asked for $50,000, they would’ve come in at $50,000.
Lila Thorne:
Exactly.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s what would’ve happened.
Lila Thorne:
That’s what would’ve happened.
Thinking Bigger: Investing AND Philanthropy
Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s so interesting. So was it you that breathed a culture of thinking bigger into the development shop?
Lila Thorne:
I think that I was a big part of it. I think that it was slowly seeing successes upon success that also helped us to believe that we could do it. And then it was just slowly building that culture of self-confidence amongst each other that really helped. It really came from within our staff. It wasn’t an outside instigator that helped us get there.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s so cool. So I have to ask you how it worked out with the impact investing and philanthropy that, as we started, that’s been a defining feature of your campaign, that you asked for money in two ways. People to give philanthropic gifts, and you asked them to invest in your organization, literally to invest in your organization, and then they would get a return on their investment.
Lila Thorne:
Exactly.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
And what did you find out when you talked to people about both? You talked to the same people about both of those things?
Lila Thorne:
Yeah, yeah, we did. Often it was a combined ask, a gift and an investment ask. So the way that impact investments work, to get a little wonky here, is that basically we’re asking people to give an unsecured loan to us. So we’d say:
“Andrea, we’d like you to consider an investment of $50,000, which means that you give us $50,000 and we’ll keep it for a certain rate and term. Five, seven, or nine years with very low returns, one, two, or 5%. And what we’ll do is we’ll invest that in the projects that we’re doing, which is housing, and use that capital to renovate housing, to purchase and renovate houses and use rental income, since we’d rent the houses for five or seven years, to recoup the cost of renovation and pay back the interest to you, your one, two or 5%. And then at the end, we’d sell the house and that sale of the house would return the capital back to you.”
It is a simple model. You could definitely lose your $50,000 because we have nothing backing it, but we have yet to do that. We’ve returned all money back to our investors so far, and we have the majority of investors rolling that money over to reinvest now that this has come to term, which is really cool.
So to return to your original question, it was interesting because some people, especially people who were older, would not be interested in investing because they were like:
“If I die, I do not want this all tangled up in my estate. I’d rather just give you the money.”
But then others really viewed themselves through a different financial lens and they didn’t see themselves as philanthropists. They thought of themselves as doing social good with their money at a concessionary rate than they would in the stock market. So we had a whole different demographic of people interested in us than we would’ve if people were just thinking about, quote unquote, charity. And that allowed us, I think, to raise way more money than we would’ve normally.
Investors Became Philanthropists and Vice-Versa
Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s interesting. And those new people, the people who were interested in being investors, did they also become philanthropists?
Lila Thorne:
They did. What’s so cool about it is it worked both ways. It worked in every direction. We had one couple come in as investors and then they made a multi-year pledge. And then they put us in their will. It’s amazing.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amazing. Yeah. So interesting. And each opportunity gives you a chance to build and deepen your relationship with them.
Lila Thorne:
Exactly. And showing that you can return the money and that you’re doing good things with it definitely builds confidence in the organization.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. Yeah. Will the organization continue on with impact investing after the campaign?
Lila Thorne:
Yes. Undoubtedly. We’re starting projects that require, one of them requires $11 million of impact investing. So we have a lot more money to raise in that realm. And we have hit a sweet spot where we have this product that people are really interested in using. We raise our own capital and deploy it into our own projects as opposed to a CDFI, which is an intermediary lender.
So we are a little bit more nimble with what we can do with the money. We can keep it in our reserves or deploy it whenever we want based on when we need to purchase a property. I think people are seeing that we’re being savvy with what we’re doing and we’re building a name for ourselves that way.
A Unique Campaign Model and a Gifted Advisor
Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s so impressive. Do you have a lot of other organizations calling to learn about your model?
Lila Thorne:
We do. We have a lot of inquiries about how we function. And a lot of inquiries, is there anyone else like you out there? And as far as I know, there’s one other organization in Appalachia that’s doing similar work. But other than that, the combination of investments in philanthropy over a wide geography is not something we’ve seen.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
You’ve worked with Capital Campaign Pro working with one of our terrific advisors for quite a number of years now, right?
Lila Thorne:
Yeah.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Been a really good partnership, I think.
Lila Thorne:
Totally.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Has that made a difference for you to have somebody for you to call on?
Lila Thorne:
Oh my God, yeah, man. Yeah — our advisor is Xan. She is fantastic, and she kept us accountable. She forced us to think through the sticky technicalities of how to make a pledge form that actually makes sense and how to really fill out your gift range chart in a way that looks feasible. She held us to a standard.
My whole team will tell you that I’m not one for details. I’m just like, right over my head. And [Xan] forced me to sit down and crank out those numbers and the details behind them, and I’m so grateful for her, for that.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I know that throughout this process, periodically I would get calls from Xan saying, “This is so amazing what’s going on in the center.” She was always so delighted to see how interesting the model was and how successful you were and how fearless you were. How willing you were to ask for big numbers and how it paid off.
Lila Thorne:
Totally. She was great.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. That’s fantastic.
3 Big Lessons Learned through the Campaign Process
Okay, Lila, what are the three biggest things you learned in this campaign process?
Lila Thorne:
Wow. I have learned so much through the campaign. I didn’t think I was even going to be part of a capital campaign when I came on the team. And looking back on it’s by far my greatest accomplishment.
- Make a plan — I’d say first is that you have to bake an actual plan. You need to write down what you’re going to do. Even if you have no idea what you are going to do, you just need to put it on paper and do the math quarter by quarter about how you’re going to get to whatever number you’ve set. And you’ll be surprised. You’re actually going to get there if you just do the menial hard work day by day, day in and day out, and you stick to your goals.
- Go big and bold — On the other end of things, I would say open yourself up to the possibilities of what your campaign can create. And live, embody that possible reality and share that with people and they will be so moved by it. We saw that over and over again.
- Build a team — And then the third is invest in your team and trust them and take care of them and work alongside them. And treat them all as an equal in importance, because they totally are. We did it together as a team. I’m no longer part of the team because I’m now being a mom, but I am there in spirit, and I know we’re going to get there to 30 million.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Those are three fantastic things. They’re just inspiring. Really, they inspire me to hear you say that, make a plan. Actually do the work.
Lila Thorne:
Actually make this stupid plan.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Make a stupid plan. It’s so interesting how powerful that is. That was the first one. And the second one was, let’s just recap the second one. Open yourself up to possibilities, to big possibilities because when you do that, people join you in that.
Lila Thorne:
Yeah, the possibility of what your campaign can create.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. And the third is to build the team.
Lila Thorne:
Invest in your team.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Invest in your team. I think people could do much worse than taking those three lessons very seriously, and that those three lessons will, in fact, can in fact create a successful campaign.
Final Thoughts
Lila, you are a gem. It has been a pleasure to work with you. And today it is my pleasure to actually see you. I haven’t had a chance to see you regularly and to talk to you regularly. I’m excited that you’re going to have some time home with your kids. They’re going to grow up in the blink of an eye. So wonderful that you’re actually doing that.
Lila Thorne:
Oh, thank you.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
And then I know when that happens, someone else is going to be ready to scarf you up in a big hurry.
Lila Thorne:
If my children haven’t scarfed me already.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes. Right, right. Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us. I look forward to hearing, at the end of the year, the total success of the Northern Forest Center campaign.
Lila Thorne:
All right. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. I’m sure we’ll talk soon.
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