Podcast: Are Capital Campaign Consultants Worth It?

Season 4, Episode 13

In this episode, Andrea Kihlstedt and Amy Eisenstein dive into the hot topic of whether hiring a capital campaign consultant is a necessary investment or an unnecessary expense. They explore the significant role consultants play in guiding nonprofit organizations through the complex landscape of capital campaigns. From clearing up common misconceptions to highlighting the strategic advantages of expert guidance, this episode sheds light on how consultants can be the linchpin of a successful fundraising campaign.

Tune in and learn how to maximize your campaign’s ROI and ensure a smooth, successful journey from planning to completion. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and actionable strategies from two of the leading experts in the field!

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s probably going to cost you a ton of money to hire a capital campaign consultant. Do you really need one?

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my co-founder, and partner, and colleague, Andrea Kihlstedt. Today we are talking about what consultants bring to the table for your capital campaign. What they do, maybe what they don’t do. And why they are worth their weight in gold.

Yeah, you’ve got some board members thinking, “We don’t need this expense. Let’s just skip it.” But the ROI of a good campaign consultant should be huge and worth their weight in gold.

What Does a Capital Campaign Consultant Bring to the Table?

Andrea, as always, I’m going to invite you to kick us off. You can start with what a consultant does, and maybe that will inform why an organization might need one.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. Thanks, Amy. I think this is such a powerful and important topic because it’s very hard for people to understand what a consultant is going to bring to the table if they haven’t done a capital campaign and they haven’t worked a consultant.

Let me begin by saying that most organizations, when they go into a capital campaign, the staff and board members have very little experience in capital campaign fundraising. Or they may have a big mix of experience in this kind of fundraising. Maybe a board member has worked on one aspect of his university campaign. Maybe a staff member worked at a hospital a few years back when they were doing a campaign. But very few people have actually worked on campaigns from beginning to end, and taken them to success.

What happens in organizations that have people with varying kinds of experience is that everyone disagrees about the strategy and how to move forward. One of the key things that a capital campaign consultant, an outside, experienced expert capital campaign consultant can do is to provide clear direction for the campaign. A really good consultant knows how to go about doing a campaign. What comes first, what comes second, what the strategies are to make a campaign work. They can use their expertise to get everyone in the organization moving forward in the same direction. That’s worth it’s weight in gold.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. I think you provided such an interesting example. You may have a board member who “worked on” a capital campaign for their university. I’m going to put worked on in air quotes. They were involved in some committee or another. They may have helped with a solicitation or two, and they were solicited. But they weren’t actually involved in the strategy, and the planning, and the deep implementation.

But that board member, because they were involved in a capital campaign at a big university, thinks they have campaign experience. Now, for your small to mid-sized community-based organization, they think the same principles or strategies apply. Or you’re small, so you don’t really need a consultant, or whatever their biases and opinions might bring. I just think that was such an interesting example.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, just one more thing about that. The other thing that happens is that maybe the development director, as I said, has worked in an organization that had a campaign. Perhaps a university, perhaps a hospital. Maybe they were assistant development director, or something like that, while the organization when through a campaign. Then they get a job in a community-based campaign, a small to mid-sized organization, and the board that hires them, or the executive director says:

“Oh, well, we’re going into a campaign. You’ve had experience with a capital campaign, so you do the campaign.”

Now that’s really upsetting, because having played a small role in a campaign for a larger institution does not give you enough experience to actually be able to run a campaign, to design and run a campaign for the organization you’re now working with.

To have people in your organization who hire you say, “All right, now this is up to you. Bring that baby home,” is frequently upsetting. You probably know that you need a capital campaign consultant, but you may encounter your executive director, your board chair saying, “Well, we thought you had all this experience at the hospital.”

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. “We brought you here because you had worked on a campaign before,” as if that’s enough experience. “So now, you’re in charge of the campaign.” That’s not a fair position to put a staff member in.

What Does a Capital Campaign Consultant Do?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
What does a capital campaign consultant do? Let me begin by saying that any capital campaign consultant you hire should have a ton of capital campaign experience. That there are some capital campaign consultants who have just put out their shingles, who have done maybe one, maybe two campaigns. Maybe they’re just cutting their teeth on your campaign. Honestly, that would not be a good use of your money, time, and energy.

If you’re going to hire a capital campaign consultant, you want to hire someone who has a ton of experience. Now sometimes, a less experienced consultant will team up with a more experienced consultant, and that’s great. I don’t have a problem with that. Everybody’s got to learn this business somehow or other. But you want to hire a consultant because they have deep experience. It takes a while to do that. One campaign does not give someone what they need to do that.

What does a consultant do? A consultant brings deep capital campaign experience to the table, and can guide you in thinking strategically about how to organize your campaign, and how to break it out into logical step-by-step. Here’s what you do now, here’s how we bring the board along. Here’s how we approach the board for their gifts. Here’s how we put a campaign committee or committees together. Here’s how we develop the case for support. Here’s how we shape a set of campaign objectives. And here’s the discipline we need to actually do the campaign month-after-month, year-after-year. These are big, long-term projects, often two to three years, sometimes longer. You need a consultant to understand how they lay out, and has the staying power to help you have the staying power to do what you need to do when you need to do it.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. There will be issues that come up with your campaign, and there will be decisions to be made. Having somebody who has experienced campaigns time, after time, after time will have the foresight, the wherewithal, whatever the word is, to make suggestions, to have strategies, come up with ideas. Share pros and cons. As opposed to you just making it up as you go. We see this all too often with organizations, that they just want to do it, they just want to get it done. They lean on the staff who has limited or minimal experience with campaigns.

Then the truth is, they don’t even know when they’re getting into a pickle. They come to us to talk to us when it’s too late. Or they’ll show up for one of our free webinars and ask these very complicated strategy questions, and expect that in three minutes in a public forum, we’re going to provide a magical answer. I just think that that’s such a huge disservice to your donors, to your clients, to the long-term success and capacity building of your organization to be making it up as you go. Making mistakes, not even knowing where.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Let us give you some examples because we work with clients all over the country. We see these things come up, again and again.

One of the things we see again and again is an organization will start a campaign, will hire us, and it takes time to get to do the campaign planning. It takes time to make sure the project is clarified. It takes time to make sure that the case is strong and solid. Then it takes time to actually be soliciting the largest gifts, often many months. We’ll have a board member, or board members, who says:

“Well, let’s just go out and ask everybody for money. This is nonsense. We’ve been waiting too long to get these big gifts in, I don’t see them coming in. I think we just should go public now. Let’s put out ads.”

Our advisors know how to respond to that. They know how to provide the discipline for a campaign. They know how to convince people that they have to stay the course, focusing on the largest gifts first. Otherwise, they’ll undermine their entire campaign. Without an external consultant who really knows what they’re doing, that’s hard. It’s hard to resist people who are just saying, “Well, I’m just going to go ask my friend at a cocktail party.” You know that’s not going to be a successful campaign.

Examples of How Campaign Consultants Help

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. Well, what happens is that they go ask their friend for $10,000, when that friend really should have been $100,000 prospect for your campaign. If they had taken the time to plan, and strategize, and do the research. Then what happened, you can’t of course possibly make your goal if you are under-asking most of your key potential donors. Which is what happens when board members willy-nilly, or executive directors too, just say, “I’m going to do what I’m comfortable with. I’m going to go for the short wins. I’m going to do what feels good.” Urgency, “I want some money coming in the door.” But in the long run that undermines, as Andrea said, the campaign.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I’ll give you another example. One of the things that we do at Capital Campaign Pro is that every week, we actually have a meeting where our advisors come together and discuss campaign issues. Sometimes they discuss a client, if there’s something interesting to discuss. Sometimes they just discuss concepts and ideas about how to do things on campaigns.

One of the topics that came up recently was the topic of naming opportunities. Now there are many ways to do naming opportunities in the context of a capital campaign. What I found fascinating is that, at this meeting, several of our advisors had examples of different kinds of naming opportunities that an organization might consider for their particular project. I thought to myself how great it is that our campaign consultants, our campaign advisors can go into their clients and say, “Listen, here’s the standard way you’re thinking about doing it, but here are two or three other things, other ways that you might consider doing it. Why don’t we put together a committee and explore other things that may work better for your organization?”

A consultant brings specific expertise and examples to the table around very particular pieces of a campaign that very few other people will have that wealth of resource to bring to their own organization.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. I think that’s such a good example.

All right, I’m just going to take a pause for one second, Andrea. And invite listeners, if you’re enjoying this content, if it’s valuable to you, I would love for you to give us a five-star rating, and like, and share, and subscribe. It’s the way we reach other listeners just like you, and that would be such a huge favor to us. We would really appreciate that five-star review, like, share, listen, download. It helps.

Okay, let’s go back to some more —

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Another example, Amy?

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes, let’s give another example.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Another example. One of the diciest parts of most every capital campaign is the question of how much board members and how much your board collectively should give. It’s always awkward to talk about that. Awkward for the board chair, awkward for the development director, for the executive director to know how to talk about that in a way that’s going to work.

An outsider, an outside consultant can bring a conversation, a rational, considered, experienced conversation to the board. And disperse the anxiety about it by talking about standard practices. And by giving the board a way to think about figure out how much the board should giving, and giving the board an understanding of how every board member should be solicited in a way that is appropriate and makes sense.

Hard for you to do internally. But with an outside expert, with an outside consultant, you can do that very well, in a way that board members feel very good about the process.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. That’s a great example. One more. We’re working with this big performing arts organization up in Canada at the moment. Of course, as many Canadian organizations do, they get a lot of public funding. They were trying to figure out do they include that public funding in the campaign goal? How do they talk about it? When do they announce it? How do they leverage it or not? That is strategy that a campaign consultant who has lots of experience can help guide the discussion. They’re not the first people to encounter that. In fact, in the States, certainly we have organizations all the time where there’s a variety of funding sources, including government.

It is an important decision about when to announce specific gifts. Not just government grants, but how to think about the campaign, how to structure it, how to talk about the goal. What to include and not to include, in terms of when the price of the project is different than the philanthropic goal. How do you reconcile that? How do you talk about that with donors? So many strategic decisions and discussions to be having. Having someone who has that deep campaign knowledge, and has been through this time and time again with lots of organizations, to lead you through that discussion.

A Shoulder to Lean On

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You know, the other thing, and it’s an important thing, that outside consultants do is that they provide a shoulder to cry on. A shoulder to lean on is perhaps what I should say. That, for the development director and other internal staff members, campaigns are fully of pressure. On top of the annual fund, on top of all the other fundraising, you’ve got the pressure of making sure the campaign goes well. And because the numbers are big, the stakes are high. It wouldn’t surprise me if you had some nights that were sleepless because of it.

Having a consultant who will simply listen to you, and reassure you, and tell you from their experience that they’ve seen this before, and that they know it’s all going to come round because they can tell you that it probably will, is just a huge weight off your shoulders. That you’re not there alone. You actually have someone who knows what they’re doing, who can be your sidekick, or your therapist, your campaign therapist.

Amy Eisenstein:
That’s funny. I was actually going to bring that up, Andrea, because of course, your consultant … Hopefully you have a positive connotation about therapy. Who doesn’t need some weekly fundraising therapy?

We provide that at Capital Campaign Pro to our clients in two forms. One is with your one-on-one campaign expert and advisor. But also, in these weekly peer support group calls that we have. I love when clients come eagerly and say, “Oh, I’m here for my dose of stress release, relief, and fundraising therapy every single week, because I get to talk, and share, and be heard, and listen, and get good advice.” It’s really a wonderful thing.

Campaigns can be stressful. Why wouldn’t you want somebody by your side, telling you when you’re going off track, and when you’re on the right course, and providing strategy and expertise?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You know, Amy, we started this session by talking about the fact that it could cost a lot of money to hire a campaign consultant. You have to keep in mind that you’re going to be raising a lot of money. That, while campaign consultants do cost a chunk of money, the reality is that in your capital campaign, you will probably be raising more money than you ever raised before.

Final Thoughts

To have a campaign that fails because you don’t have the expertise and support you need is simply being, what is it — penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Is that the expression?

Amy Eisenstein:
That is the expression.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
While it may feel like a lot of money to think about hiring someone upfront, you have to think about it in the context of the larger capital campaign fundraising goals. When you do that, it actually won’t seem like you’re spending all so much money proportionately.

In fact, it’s a wonderful opportunity to bring in someone who can help strengthen a bunch of the systems in your development program. These experts know what they’re doing and can help you strengthen other things in your program as well. Leaving you, as an individual and as an institution, from a fundraising point of view, much stronger than when you started out.

By and large, it is an investment that is worth making.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. I think I used the term ROI. The return on investment should be huge. In fact, campaigns, campaign-style fundraising, are the most effective, cost-effective type of fundraising out there. Generally on average, costing 10 cents for every dollar that you raised. That’s not just the cost of the consultant, that’s the cost of the whole campaign. Including donor recognition, and donor events, and systems, and staffing, and all sorts of things. Materials that you will, not might but will need, to run a successful campaign. Campaign consulting and expertise should be included in your campaign budget. The ROI, the return on investment, should be very high.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You know, Amy, I think we’ve made a pretty good case for why it’s important to have a campaign consultant. Your organization is going to have a campaign maybe once every 10 years. Not every two or three years. Maybe every 10 years, maybe every 15 or 20 years. Given the size, the magnitude, the importance of this kind of fundraising, and the relative infrequency of people really knowing what they’re doing unless they are consultants, honestly, it’s a no-brainer in my opinion, to hire a really seasoned campaign consultant.

Amy Eisenstein:
Now you may think we’re biased, and we totally are, of course. But what I would challenge you to do, or invite you to do, if you’re considering a campaign, getting ready for a campaign, planning a campaign, is go to the Capital Campaign Pro website, sign up for a free strategy session, and talk to us. Learn what value add we can bring to the table for your campaign. There’s no obligation, there’s no commitment. You’ll just learn what you would get working specifically with us, but in general what you would get from working with a campaign consultant. And it may not be as expensive as you think, so who knows?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Who knows?

Amy Eisenstein:
Thank you so much for joining us today. We hope you learned a lot. We’ll see you next time.