Podcast: How a $150MM Capital Campaign Took Center Stage at the Shaw Festival

Season 4, Episode 49

In this episode, Andrea Kihlstedt sits down with Cindy Mewhinney, Director of Advancement at the Shaw Festival, and Richard Quinn, Senior Advisor with Capital Campaign Pro, for a behind-the-scenes look at the Shaw Festival’s bold and inspiring $150 million capital campaign: All.Together.Now.

Whether you’re just getting started or already deep into planning, this episode offers practical takeaways and strategic insight from a campaign that redefined what’s possible.

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
All.Together.Now. – isn’t that a fantastic phrase? Don’t you wonder what you’re supposed to be doing all together now? Well, that’s the inspiring name of the Shaw Festival capital campaign, and today, you’re going to learn about that amazing campaign from the two people who can really tell you.

I’m Andrea Kihlstedt, Co-Founder of Capital Campaign Pro. My partner Amy Eisenstein is off this week, and I have a special honor of talking to Cindy Mewhinney and Richard Quinn about the Shaw Festival campaign. Cindy is the Director of Advancement at the Shaw Festival and Richard is the Senior Advisor for Capital Campaign Pro who’s working with Cindy and the Shaw Festival campaign, so greetings to you both. Thank you for being here.

About the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake

Cindy, let’s start with you. Tell us a little about the Shaw Festival. You’re in Canada, people listening may not know about the Shaw Festival. A little background and how about some background to the campaign?

Cindy Mewhinney:
That sounds great. Well, we are a theater company that’s located in Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is right on the border between Buffalo and Niagara Falls area, sort of more commonly known in that area, and we are one of the few remaining repertory theater companies in North America.

In fact, we’re, I believe, now the second-largest, sort of second to Stratford, who is the other one just a couple hours away from here. What makes repertory theater really special is the idea that you have a core ensemble of actors who are performing in multiple plays at the same time.

During our regular season, which runs from about April until October, you can come and visit Niagara-on-the-Lake. You can stay here for anywhere from a couple days to a week, and you can see between nine and 11 plays during that time period. You might see one actor, in the same stages, will switch over the plays between the afternoon until the evening. We have a very large ensemble that’s here. We have about 600 staff between the artists, the artisans, and our administration teams that work, and we have a holiday season as well.

Really, we’re almost year-round at this point in time, and it’s a chance to really immerse yourself into theater and into what has become a very significant destination for enjoying all things in Niagara, wine, food, restaurants, hotels, and amazing theater. That’s sort of where we’re located and what we’re about.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Sounds fantastic, Cindy. I got to say, I’m tempted to plan a trip up with my husband.

Cindy Mewhinney:
We’d love to have you. We’d love to have you. The other part that’s really interesting is because of the nature of who we are, and our size, and how we work, so much is created right on site, all the costumes. As opposed to a touring company, the actual plays are made from concept of even sometimes where you are taking a play and you are adapting it from a book into making it into a script, and then from there, your design teams come up with what the stage, the set, the costumes, everything. Everything’s designed from scratch here, so as a result, when people come to visit, we can give them the opportunity to see behind the scenes on how everything is made.

You can go visit the wardrobe, you can go see how that’s done, and we’re expanding into more of this area of learn the craft, get involved, get immersed in the workshops and everything else where you can learn the dances, the choreography they’re doing on stage, the dialect of how you speak in that particular language. There’s so much to learn behind the scenes that adds a lot of value to the experience of watching it in the theater.

About the All.Together.Now. Capital Campaign

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s fantastic. Cindy, now you’re in the middle or actually heading towards the end of this big capital campaign. Tell us about it.

Cindy Mewhinney:
Yes, yes. It’s interesting. Are you in the middle? Are you in the beginning? Are you in the end? We’re in a new phase of the process. We’ve just launched publicly our All.Together.Now. campaign, and this started off initially as… It started off on the basis that we knew one of our theaters needed to be rebuilt, the iconic Royal George Theatre which is right in the downtown area.

One of the things about rebuilding that theater, it was never meant to last as long as it had. We’ve put it off and mitigated it to the point where you’re spending so much just to solve for the flooding, and all the other stuff that happen every year, you know you just need to rebuild. When we started to look at the idea of rebuilding the theater, we did a feasibility test with our donor base. It was really interesting because they came back and told us, “That’s great, but what else?”

They were looking for more. They were looking for a little more of the, “But where are we headed next as an organization?” so we went back to the drawing board. At the same time, as we were going back to the drawing board, another property adjacent to us had become available. It was a seniors home that was being decommissioned, and suddenly, the vision of what the future of the Shaw would be got much bigger. It got much more exciting when we started to think about other ways we could grow and expand both with our programming in addition to enhancing our facilities to do that, so the All.Together.Now. campaign became more than just renovating buildings. It became very much this idea of how we could be more of a festival in nature. You could come here and you could experience things above and beyond just seeing the plays. You would linger a little bit longer in town. Even more than that, we started to really lean into our charitable purpose as a theater, which was what is the greater good that we can bring to society as a whole?

There are all these skills that you can benefit from having theater in your life, whether it’s learning to be a better communicator, whether it’s inspiring your inner artist and evoking your own creativity, or whether it’s how it can really help with health outcomes, because we know that the more art you have in your life, it really can help with things like our mental health. It can reduce isolation. There are all of these other social impact components that we felt we had a role to play and we could play an even bigger role in that way we could give back to society.

So All.Together.Now. became more than just a capital campaign — it became the start of what we saw our role in being a movement, to helping give the arts a greater place in society to contribute to better health outcomes but also just a more enriched life.

The Size and Scope of the Capital Campaign

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s fantastic. How big is your campaign? Is that where you started in size?

Cindy Mewhinney:
No. It evolved over time, and that was kind of a really fascinating point in the journey for us. There was a moment where it was going to be just the Royal George being rebuilt, and I seem to remember that was about a $50 million estimate at the time. Where we’ve landed now that we’ve gone public is we’ve announced 150 million, and that’s because it expanded. The dream got bigger, the vision got bigger.

We got this other site adjacent to where we are that’s going to be artist housing, and a whole new facility for wardrobe, and a whole center for… The Burton Center for Lifelong Creativity, that will be the central hub of that facility that can allow us to do a lot more outreach for students and seniors. You can just imagine that the campaign where it started, by the time we’re going public, it’s tripled in size, and it’s grown a lot of momentum and excitement as it’s gone along.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Richard, you’ve been an advisor to this process, this mushrooming campaign process. What’s that been like for you?

Richard Quinn:
Well, it’s been a true privilege, of course, to work alongside Cindy, and Tim, and TC, and John, and the major gifts team. I started working with Cindy and the team in the summer of 2021. As Cindy had mentioned there, they had completed their feasibility study, and they tested the goal, and they were well-positioned to get started. It’s been an extraordinary journey, as Cindy had mentioned.

I just wanted to mention that when I first began working with Cindy, this campaign had several unknowns that were pretty big, actually, when you think about it. Cindy had mentioned this facility that could potentially become ours. It wasn’t secure yet, we didn’t get it. We didn’t get it for a while within the campaign. The provincial government grant was sort of in process, being negotiated, but it was not secure yet. The Royal George was something that absolutely had to get renovated for all the reasons in which Cindy recommended, but it had not been tested with the Niagara-on-the-Lake community.

Whenever you do a construction project, you got neighbors to have conversations with, and that was really important. This was a moment in which we had to make ambiguity our friend, and we could do that because we truly had trusted leadership, Tim and TC. Tim is the Executive Director, TC or Tim Carroll is the Artistic Director. We’re extraordinarily beloved, are extraordinarily beloved, and this campaign would not have been the success that it was and we couldn’t have been able to navigate that ambiguity if it weren’t for Tim, and TC’s, and, certainly, Cindy’s leadership throughout it. It gave them really an opportunity to inspire not only volunteer leaders as part of the campaign committee but also early-stage donors, so it was really a strategic decision to help the team get comfortable in the ambiguous space and make it work for them. It was a right-headed strategy from the start.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, fascinating.

Getting Their Board on Board with the Campaign

I’m interested in knowing how the board felt about this expansion, this campaign expansion. How much anxiety was there? Richard and Cindy both, what were your roles in that? Richard, did you work with the board? Cindy, do you have access to the board? How nervous were they? Cindy, why don’t you begin?

Cindy Mewhinney:
Well, I would say we have an amazing board. Actually, we have four boards, if I could say that, and each one kind of serves a different function, but we have an amazing set of board members who are… They’re along for the ride the whole way. It wasn’t like anything moved forward without their input, their consultation. I mean, the whole campaign came out of a board strategic planning process.

Originally, we were calling it Festival 360, because that was actually what the board’s strategic plan was, and then the campaign became the realization of that strategic plan. In the same way that you would involve the board the whole way through in adopting a strategic plan, they were bought in whole way through. It just wouldn’t have worked without that level of involvement, and it took a long time.

Of course, your board members are changing over, so then you’re bringing into the fold new members and you have to remember that they don’t necessarily have the depth of how do we get to where we are now so you have to make sure you’re bringing them along for the ride too. That’s half the fun,` honestly. We are so fortunate to have the team of people that we do, but our board has amazing champions. We have people who are not afraid to ask difficult questions. The level of board participation in this campaign is essentially what became the hallmark of our quiet phase. They were on-site and they were very much part of the process the whole way through.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Let’s talk nuts and bolts, dollars and cents. How much money have you raised to date, Cindy, and how much more do you have to go?

Cindy Mewhinney:
With the goal being 150, we’ve just gone public so we held off going public until we could get to our 70%, so we’re just over 110. We’ve launched publicly just within the past couple of weeks. We’ve got another 40 to go. Within that 40, we are hopeful that there is some additional federal government funding that may follow. We’ve just finished going through an election here in Canada, so it’s changed our timeline a little bit on the expectations around when we hopefully might receive that second part.

We did receive an initial first part for the artist village. Looking for federal portion, hopefully, for the Royal George rebuild to come in line with matching what we got from the province, but we have an another 20 million in private sources to raise, and that would be on the cash side. At the same time, our campaign has this really beautiful legacy giving component. We’re doing a lot of work to have donors think about their legacy-giving and their commitments, and that’s an additional amount over and above the 20 million that we need to still raise to get to the work.

Talking with Donors About Cash Gifts and Legacy Gifts

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Have you been having conversations with donors where you talk about both cash gifts and legacy gifts?

Cindy Mewhinney:
Every single time, every single time. It is part of the campaign. I mean, it’s baked into the thinking. This view of what this campaign is about is about securing the future of the festival, so it almost doesn’t make sense not to talk about it, and it’s a beautiful moment to plant the seed of the idea for people who haven’t thought about. It’s a great chance to open the conversation for those who have and maybe haven’t let us know that they’ve made that commitment already, and, some people, it’s encouraged them to think bigger about what their legacy gift is, and we’ve looked at donor recognition as a combination of future gifts that will come down the road combined with cash components.

We’ve tried to approach it that way to really blend the legacy component in as an important part of, we’re going to build these buildings, we’re going to launch these new programs, but we’re also going to build an endowment for the future to sustain what we need to keep going. It really resonates with people.

We’ve raised, I think, close to 30 million already in legacy gifts through this campaign in commitments, and there’s more to come. Literally, we’re just getting started. For me, personally, that is the goal. We haven’t missed the moment to have those important conversations. Knowing so many of these donors have been with us for 10, 15, 20 years coming to the Shaw, it’s part of their life, and it’s the biggest compliment they can give us, by including us in their estate plans.

Richard Quinn:
There was a magic to that. If I can add, there was a magic to that decision, to incorporate legacy into the campaign. Because I remember Cindy, in the early conversations they were having with donors, these were the first conversations that they’ve had with anybody about considering a legacy gift, and they were thanking us for the opportunity to have that conversation, so it was a real moment of education for these folks as well.

I loved that sort of coming together of energy, where the need to sustain what we’re dreaming about through this campaign and the donors need opportunity to make a gift that can help sustain that, help sustain that vision, was a wonderful intersection to witness at that particular moment.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, that’s a terrific, terrific story.

Surprising Gifts Made to the Campaign

I am wondering about surprise gifts. I’m sure that to raise as much money as you’ve raised. As it raised $110 million, you have had some very big gifts, and some of them may have been surprising to you. I wonder if there are one or two that really stand out as donor stories.

Cindy Mewhinney:
Well, what I can maybe share is, early on, when we were in the quiet phase, and, Richard, you’ll remember this, we started to put together a list of what we called our long shots. I can’t even remember where that term came from, but it was the idea of we could see the connective tissue that these individuals or these organizations, there’s a value alignment there or there’s an interest alignment but we don’t really know them yet, so the odds of us being able to quickly cultivate a large gift from them, even though we knew they had the capacity to do a large gift, it was an interesting proposition. We had a few names on that list, probably about 20 in total. When I sit and look back now, none of these things ever happened just overnight. These are years in the making.

But even on this long shot list, several of them, like one of our lead donors really had never given to the Shaw until just a few years ago and suddenly is now making a very sizable $5 million gift to the campaign. Just to look at how quickly relationships can grow when there’s an opportunity and an investment of time to see if there’s a good fit, and when there’s a good fit, it can grow quickly. That relationship started with, “Oh, call it a test gift.” No one really does a test gift at half a million dollars, but the first gift that they gave us was half a million and it was all about capacity building for our team, so adding some staffing roles here to help us with our internal capacity, knowing we were heading in this direction.

That was sort of the first couple years while we were still quiet phase. That wasn’t even a campaign gift, that was operational. Once that term of that short-term gift had finished, they were so excited. They were very invested in the big idea of where this was going and what that could do to… The future of what this could be for the town. Next thing you know, they’re in with a $5 million gift for our artist village and, in fact, is now our naming sponsor on our Burton Center for Lifelong Creativity. That’s a relatively new relationship to the Shaw that emerged over a relatively short period of time.

Richard Quinn:
That long-shot process that we went through and we put together a number of folks that could fit that description, I want to highlight how Cindy described that. She immediately went, “It wasn’t just let’s go after them because they’re wealthy and they can make big gifts,” but she looked at it through the perspective of how can we make a connection between what we do and their interests. It wasn’t a blind long-shot list, it was a strategic long-shot list right from the start. I think that largely is why we were able to welcome some of those long shots as campaign donors as a result.

Cindy Mewhinney:
Board members were very instrumental in helping make those connections and build those relationships.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Isn’t that fantastic, to see how generous people can be?

Cindy Mewhinney:
It’s amazing.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s the wonder of this business.

Cindy Mewhinney:
The biggest surprises for me have been the incredible legacy gift commitments that have come from donors who would not normally give at that size and scale. It’s just, it’s so incredibly heartwarming, and it’s exciting to talk about what matters to them. Even in a conversation with someone I was having earlier this week, for them, even though they’ve known for a while they wanted to do something significant on legacy side, feeling more connected into this campaign now, they’re doing a cash portion and the legacy gift, they are feeling so fantastic that they get to be part of what will be in a way and on a scale that they probably never imagined that they could. You can just see them light up in them being able to participate in a way that they probably thought, “Oh, I won’t have any idea what my gift will be used for down the road.”

The Public Phase of the Campaign

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, it’s exciting.

Now you’re in the public phase of your campaign, and rather than just going out for relatively few very big gifts, you are broadening your reach. You’re spreading your arms, you’re spreading the arms of the entire festival, and, of course, you have many, many people in this season coming to your campus, coming to your place. How do you think about doing the public phase of your campaign?

Cindy Mewhinney:
It’s a complicated one, and the reason I say that is I don’t know if you’re ever perfectly ready to launch or go public. That’s my sense about how we feel about it. I don’t know, Richard, if you would agree, that no one ever really feels 100% ready. There’s things you wish you had time to queue up or line up better, but here we are, we’re launched. We’re still in that mode as most of the campaign has been, which is you’re figuring it out as you go. You are adapting as you go. For us right now, we’ve decided that our initial time in this public phase is focused on our mid-level donors.

For us, that’s our governor’s council, is really trying to reach out, bring them into the circle a little closer in the same way we always do, is just bringing people in closer for those who are already connected to us. We’ll work on those asks throughout the summer. As we move more into the fall, we’ll look at going to more of our membership level base. These would be our donors who are $1,000 or less on an annual basis. We’ll look at how we can build out more of our direct mail component around that particular segment, and we’ll do town halls. We’ll make ourselves available when people are putting their hand up and saying, “I’m interested in finding out more.” We have a lot of channels to make sure that…

I don’t know, I guess my philosophy is I want to run with the current. If someone’s putting their hand up and saying, “I’m interested,” we’re going to prioritize the time in that direction, and then we’re going to just continue to use our volunteers to help us with the important one-to-one visits that need to happen, and just really try and make sure that everyone feels they have a chance to ask questions to learn more and to feel part of this ride that has just taken off and, in a lot of cases, they’re only finding out about some of these pieces just now. We’ve been at it for years, but in some ways for the public, they’re only hearing about the components of what this exciting vision is now.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. It’s funny, from the campaign point of view, this public face of your campaign is where the All. Together. Now. really takes shape, right?

Cindy Mewhinney:
Absolutely.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It makes sense from a mission point of view, but from a campaign point of view.

Cindy Mewhinney:
Yeah. We’re using our public launch to really talk about the bigger idea. I mean, as much as I talk about the fact that we’ve got these buildings and these programs, that’s how we’re giving life to this vision, but the bigger idea is really that we need to put down our devices. We need to find ways to be in a room together and have conversations where we can share different points of view, and be okay with the fact that we can agree to disagree, and that we can be in the company with others and be in real dialogue. That’s why we call it the campaign for Real Human Connection.

We see this as a really big need in society overall. We see this as somewhere where if we can create a ripple from the Shaw and if that can make its way that other organizations can pick up on that too, it’s not just us who can achieve this. There’s a movement in this, about how we can all lean into the arts to enrich life and to take away from a lot of the challenges that our technology and devices have taken us down a path that’s just not good for society.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Cindy, what you say is just truly inspiring.

Lessons to Apply to Other Capital Campaigns

Richard, you work with many Capital Campaign Pro clients, and you’ve been doing this for a long time. I wonder, as you think about the Shaw Festival and what you’ve learned from that, what you’ve seen with Shaw Festival, are there things that you would hope and wish that all other campaigns would be able to do too? This is sort of a surprise question, I didn’t warn you about this one, but what would you like organizations to take from these lessons?

Richard Quinn:
Well, first, Tim and TC really embraced this campaign as a campaign of discovery. They knew that the campaign now would be different from the campaign at the end, and it’s still constantly evolving, as Cindy was mentioning. I think it’s really important for everybody embarking on a campaign not to be overly wedded to their first ideas about it, but rather to be open to it morphing over time into something that’s even better, even richer. I think that’s what the Shaw campaign has really been all about. What was particularly great about the Shaw campaign and everybody involved was that they were open to that. All of them were open to that.

Not just Tim and TC, but the volunteers, they had permission by Tim and TC to think expansively about that. I remember a couple of months ago, one of the committee members said in the committee meeting, “It’s taken long. This has been a long time, but we’re better for it.” It was one of those wonderful moments where you heard it from the volunteer articulating exactly how we all felt. Everybody’s heads went up and down and they really appreciated that honesty. It was a great journey as a result of that openness.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, it’s a wonderful big idea, I think, for everyone launching a campaign to think about. When organizations are going into a capital campaign, it often is a time of change in an organization, and rather than being intimidated by that and trying to be rigid about it, the idea of opening your arms and embracing whatever that change is going to take, I think, is a wonderful reminder. This has been a wonderful conversation. It is inspiring to hear what you’ve done with this campaign, both of you. I’m just thrilled to be able to take it to everybody listening to this podcast. Let me just close by asking each one of you just for one final thought about one thing that’s really inspired you or one thing that you would leave with our listeners.

Cindy Mewhinney:
Obviously, campaigns take longer than you ever think they will take, so whatever you think it’s going to be, double it easily, at least that’s been our experience. Patience is important. But I would say almost even more than patience is just… It’s the concept of the first “first who, then what”, having the right people to go through the journey with, because there are a lot of hard moments that happen. It’s really interesting to see how every person who has been in our orbit around this, the volunteers, the leadership, Richard, John, others that we’ve been working with the whole way through, we all have our moments where we’re in a moment of doubt and you really need your fellow teammates to help you through those moments.

We talk about the messiness of a campaign in the sense that the roadmap is not clear. In the rear view mirror, it looks obvious, but at the time, no way. There’s no way it looks clear. There were so many moments through this campaign that I really valued not only the sage wisdom Richard brought into the space but also very much the calm in the storm. Having people around you who can say:

“It’s okay, and it’s okay that it’s not perfect, and it’s okay that you don’t know exactly how this is going to unfold. It’s going to be okay.”

I immensely have valued having the right people in this room together, the right leadership. Colleen, as our fundraising chair, just incredibly optimistic and a real champion. Just having all the right people around makes those hard moments much… It makes it worth it and it makes it possible, because these are a long haul. These are a marathon. They are not a sprint.

Final Thoughts

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Cindy, you’ve just put out there the embodiment of All.Together.Now. Richard, what’s one thing you would leave with our listeners?

Richard Quinn:
Well, Cindy’s example was so inspiring. It’s hard to follow it, but I will say, let me get a little tactical, just intentionally, I think incorporating legacy into this campaign was absolutely the right thing to do. Providing our donors with an opportunity to give in ways that many of them had never thought was possible from a philanthropic perspective, I think, really opened up all kinds of opportunity for us. I love in particular the way in which Cindy has embraced with the donors the notion of a cash gift combined with legacy can provide them with an opportunity to have a naming opportunity that they can’t necessarily achieve with just cash, and that the naming opportunity becomes the cultivation of the stewardship of that gift over time, and it deepens their connection to Shaw to the point at which that legacy component gift matures, shall we say. It was a really good strategic decision to do, and I think Shaw is better for it.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Thank you both so much for being with me today and sharing your wisdom in the stories of the Shaw Festival All.Together.Now. campaign with our listeners. For those who want to go visit the Shaw Festival, what’s the website, Cindy? I should have looked this up. Shawfestival.ca, is that right?

Richard Quinn:
Shawfest.com.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Shawfest.com. Take a look at shawfest.com. I think this may have inspired me to go up for a couple of days. If you want more information about capital campaigns, of course, go to capitalcampaignpro.com. On the home page, you will see a tab with resources, many of which are free, or you can sign up for a strategy session to find out what it would be like to work with your senior campaign advisor.