9 Tips to Build An Effective Capital Campaign Team of Staff and Volunteers

Your capital campaign’s success hinges heavily on the work of a team that includes both staff and volunteers.

An effective campaign team is essential to your success. And a team that works together with efficiency, respect, trust, and a bit of humor will make your work both fun and more rewarding.

While volunteer management will demand much of your time and the time of other staff, capable volunteers add a breadth and depth to your campaign that your staff simply can’t replace.

9 Tips to make a great Capital Campaign Team

Here are 9 helpful tips that’ll help you build and run a dynamite team.

1. Make sure every campaign meeting has clear, well-defined, achievable goals.
2. Make sure your meetings begin and end on schedule.
3. Provide a clear, written agenda. Follow up after meetings with a brief, concise summary that includes everyone’s tasks to accomplish before the next meeting.
4. Communicate good news early and often.
5. Find creative ways to keep your meetings fresh and compelling, and switch things up when it seems like you’re losing people’s attention or energy.
6. Acknowledge your volunteer’s individual successes, both publicly and privately, whether or not they’re directly related to fundraising.
7. Make sure that everyone has a chance to participate during meetings, and actively ask quieter people to weigh in.
8. Celebrate early, often, and in many different ways.
9. Treat campaign volunteers like insiders. They are!

Our Most Important Piece of Advice

The nine tips above will get you moving in the right direction, but here’s the most important piece of advice I can offer.

Model the behavior you’d like to see in others.

What you do and how you behave will set the standard for everyone else. People may not mention it — they may not even be conscious of it, but they will take their cues about how to behave from you.

• If you’re late to meetings, they will show up late.
• If you start meetings on time and you’re fully prepared, other people will be too.
• If you make the calls you promised to make, then you can expect others to do so (and you can call them out if they don’t).

So, start with your own behavior — and watch it spread.

I know it may feel like a burden, but it’s probably the most important thing you can do to get everyone else to function at their best. And really, no one wants to be part of a half-arsed team.