Podcast: The Capital Campaign Book Every Board Member Should Read

Season 5, Episode 47

Board members play a critical role in every successful capital campaign — but too often, they’re expected to lead without ever being taught how campaigns actually work. What if there were a practical guide written specifically for them?

In this episode, Andrea Kihlstedt interviews Amy Eisenstein and Sarah Plimpton about their new book, A Board Member’s Guide to Capital Campaign Fundraising: How to Raise Game-Changing Money for Your Nonprofit. Drawing on decades of experience advising hundreds of nonprofit organizations, Amy and Sarah explain why they wrote the book, what board members need to know before a campaign begins, and how nonprofit leaders can use the book as a practical tool to educate and engage their boards.

If you’ve ever wished your board better understood capital campaigns — or if you’re a board member who wants greater confidence in your fundraising role — this episode introduces a resource designed specifically for you.

Listen Now:

---

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Don’t you wish you had a book, a great book that would help your board members do what they need to do for a successful campaign?

Well, in today’s podcast, I’m going to let you know that you do now have such a book, and the authors of it, Amy Eisenstein and Sarah Plimpton, are with me today to talk about this great new book.

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, Andrea. It’s fun, you’re going to interview me for once, right?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I love that.

Amy Eisenstein:
Usually I am interviewing you about capital campaigns, but today we’re flipping the table and of course, we have our colleague and my co-author, Sarah, with us.

Meet the Authors of A Board Member’s Guide to Capital Campaign Fundraising

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So for those of you who don’t know us, let me introduce these two wonderful people. Amy Eisenstein is my Co-founder in Capital Campaign Pro, and she actually runs the show. She’s the CEO of Capital Campaign Pro. And Sarah Plimpton is the Vice President and our Chief Happiness Officer. Really, don’t you want to work in a place that has a chief happiness officer?

And among other things, these two women are just my friends and it is such a pleasure to work with them and a special treat to interview them, because they have worked very hard on writing this book, which is now out, yay.

So, let me start with this question for both of you and Sarah, I want to start with you.

Amy Eisenstein:
Andrea, say the title of the book. Let’s start with the title of the book.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Oh, good, okay, yes.

Amy Eisenstein:
What is the book?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Here’s the book. The book is called, A Board Member’s Guide to Capital Campaign Fundraising: How to Raise Game-Changing Money for Your Nonprofit [Check it out!].

Amy Eisenstein:
Sounds like a good book to me.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Sounds like a good book to me too. Sarah, tell me, why did you and Amy write this book?

Sarah Plimpton:
Hello, Andrea. Thank you for having us on the podcast. So we’ve wrote this book really because board members play a critical role in capital campaigns. We all know this. Amy and I and our advisors, our team at Capital Campaign Pro, we have the pleasure of working with many, many, many board members. And we get questions from those board members all the time about not just their role in the campaign, but why campaigns work the way they do, how to troubleshoot through campaigns, all sorts of things. And we’ve come to recognize that in any given board, you have members who are starting with varying levels of understanding of capital campaigns.

So going into a board meeting and “training” the board on how campaigns work, you’re talking to 18, 20, 25 people who all have very different understandings of campaigns. And so, we wanted to create a resource that met board members wherever they were in their journey of understanding campaigns, working on campaigns, giving to campaigns, and really helped them understand what this campaign business is all about.

So, that was the driving desire when we set out to write this book.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. And what a great, great reason to write a book because there’s a serious need.

So Amy, you’ve written several books before that. Sarah, this is your first book, congratulations. How exciting is that? Amy, you’ve written a bunch of books before that have done well, and now this is another one to add to your collection. Why did you decide you were going to work on this book with Sarah?

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, I would say yes to everything that Sarah said, and I’ll talk from the development director or the executive director’s perspective. And one of the key frustrations that we hear from staff is that board members don’t understand how campaigns work or what they should be doing, their roles and responsibilities. They’re nervous, understandably, this is a huge undertaking for any organization.

And so just like what Sarah said, we wanted to create a resource that really answered the most frequently asked questions we hear from board members, and provided staff with a way to articulate and articulately explain to board members how campaigns work, what their roles and responsibilities are, answer their most burning questions, and take the temperature down on the anxiety that board members naturally feel heading into a campaign.

All About the Book

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So, I want to give people a picture of this book. Often people write books on fundraising and they’re really pamphlets, not books. This is a real book, right? How many chapters, how many pages? How big a big a project was this? How big a book is it?

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, it’s, yes, 25 chapters, just about 200 pages, but it’s a quick read, actually. The chapters are short, they’re digestible. They start with a question, they end with thought-provoking questions to discuss at your board meetings. But really, you can pick it up, flip through the table of contents, find the question that you have, and flip to those two or three or four pages. So while it is a substantial book, I would say it’s not dense. Sarah, do you want to add anything to that?

Sarah Plimpton:
Yeah, I agree. I think readability was an important goal for us in this writing process. We really wanted to create something that would be practical, easy for a board member to just pick up and flip to a section that was of interest or relevant at any given moment. And we really tried to break the chapters down into sections that were very concrete.

So we have five sections in the book. The first section being the basics:

• What is a capital campaign?
• Why would an organization launch one?
• How much can you raise in a capital campaign?
• How long will a campaign take?

That sort of thing.

And then the following sections are dedicated to things like campaign leadership roles:

• What is the board’s role?
• How does the board chair intersect with a capital campaign?
• What is the role of the board as a whole versus the role of individual board members?

We also have a section on the actual raising of the money, which is something that a lot of board members feel anxious about and sometimes excited about, which is great. We have a section on frequently asked questions. Things like:

• Do we really need a campaign consultant?
• Do we need a feasibility study?
• What’s so quiet about the quiet phase?

And then finally, we have a section on campaign troubleshooting. When things get a little dicey or you go through hills and valleys on the campaign, what can the board do in those situations, which are common in campaigns. So, that’s how we thought about structuring the book.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. Amy, I know that I’ve been in the background of watching you guys struggle with this book for some time now, and I’ve been fascinated to see it grow and develop.

Amy and Sarah on the Process of Writing This Book

When you began, Amy in particular, I think you thought that it was going to be a quick project. Right? A month, boom, boom, boom, let’s get this baby written and out. And now here it is, I don’t know, is it a year later? Right?

And I think what’s happened in the meantime, and I’ve been delighted to hear it, is that your pride in this book has gone up and up, right? That it’s not just a quick write. This is something that you two have really worked on and worked on hard and carefully, so that it will be most useful to board members and campaign chairs and executive directors and development directors, right? That every campaign has challenges with its board. And your book, my hats off to you for it, has set about providing the fantastic resource for that process.

Amy, what’s this been like for you? What’s the writing process been like for you?

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, this is my first book with a co-author, so I was delighted to have Sarah as my partner in crime on this project. And so, okay, you may have exaggerated a bit. I didn’t expect it to be done in a month but maybe six months, and I think we’re closer to a year and a half later.

But you know what? The truth is that it is so well written and so well thought out and really, that is a tribute to Sarah, her thoughtful, smart, strategic, introspective. And you’re right, I’m more like, let’s get it out to everybody. Everybody needs [this book] now. But the truth is, what you’re going to get is a much, much more useful tool and resource for your board members. And I’m super proud of what we’ve produced.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So I know Sarah, this is your first, you’ve been a writer for many years, a serious writer for many years, but this is your first book, book. Were the things that surprised you in the writing of it?

Sarah Plimpton:
That’s such a great question, Andrea. I think I was surprised or delighted, I think, by the fact that when you feel stumped with a section or a chapter or a transition in the book, if you will, if you just walk away and take a break from it, go for a walk or do the dishes, do something that lets your brain drift away from whatever you were wrangling with on the page, you actually can come back to it with a surprising amount of clarity.

So, it’s funny to hear Amy talk about the six months stretching into a year and a half, because for me, my writing process, I need those sort of breaks to walk away and get perspective on it. So yeah, it was fun, it was really fun to work on it with Amy, and she’s a fun co-author to be partnered with.

Amy Eisenstein:
I couldn’t agree more. And I think that one of the things that we went back and forth about a lot was making sure that the book had your voice and my voice, and I think we did a really good job of it. We started writing alternate chapters and it was really clunky because your voice is different than my voice, but we smoothed it out and I think both of our voices come through beautifully.

Sarah Plimpton:
Yeah, I agree with that.

A Highly Usable Resource for a Nonprofit Board

Andrea Kihlstedt:
All right. So let’s talk about the usability of this book, because I think that’s really, you have created a fantastic resource. And let’s say, I’m an executive director and you’re coaching me. What would you tell me to do about the book? Should I buy one copy? Should I buy many copies? What do I do?

Amy Eisenstein:
If you want to buy just one copy for yourself, your executive director, your development director or your board chair, go to Amazon where you can buy it on Kindle or a hard copy. And if you want to buy a copy for every member of your team, all of your board members, your committee members, your staff members, go to capitalcampaignpro.com/board-book, and you will be able to buy copies 10 at a time for a 50% discount. That’s the very first step.

So then Sarah, once they have it and they distribute it to board members, what’s next?

Sarah Plimpton:
What’s next? So, probably not a great idea to just order everyone a copy and hope they read it and move along your business. Better plan would be to actually incorporate some of the end of chapter questions into board meetings.

You might ask your board chair or your development committee chair or maybe a couple board members who are really enthusiastic and great with follow through to help you think about a really structured plan to incorporate the chapters of the book into upcoming board meetings. And not trying to do it all in one meeting, but there are 25 chapters in this book, and each chapter offers a host of questions that board members can and should be asking themselves and each other as they prepare for campaigns, as they move through campaigns.

So really spending time, I think, thinking about, how do we make this talkable for the board? How do we structure it into board agendas? How do we keep the conversation going and not think of it just as a one-and-done type thing. And really, I think, giving your board members a job to do here in helping you co-create that plan. Right?

I think what we’ve learned at Capital Campaign Pro is that when volunteers are invited to come up with the ideas for how to make something happen, they are much more likely to then see those ideas through and take action on them. So, get a small group of your board members together and invite them to help you figure out, how do we keep this conversation going with the board over months, maybe years?

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. I was going to say in terms of timing, you may want to, when you first run out and order your copy, order a copy for the board chair first, right? Send them an immediate copy so that they have it and are excited to give it to the full board. Also, I think you might want to start reading this as a board a year before you’re ready to start a capital campaign and discuss it at every board meeting for the next eight meetings or 12 meetings if you have monthly meetings, and you will refer back to it again and again for the next three years of your campaign. I am confident the development committee will use it, your campaign committee will use it. So, run out and order a copy for your board chair and your development committee chair, and then they’re going to be excited to order a copy for everybody.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
As you know, Amy and Sarah, 25 years ago I wrote a book on capital campaigns, which is still in print and a lot of people still use it, and I still, believe it or not, get royalty checks from it. And people refer to it as, “My Capital Campaign Bible.” I’ve always been thrilled by that. I think that you have written what will be a board member’s Bible to capital campaigns, and I think it’s a really important addition to the field. And something like this hasn’t existed before. Board roles and capital campaigns are incredibly important. And while they can read in my book a chapter on board and capital campaigns, you’ve really covered it well and in a practical, readable way.

And I saw a quotation that an early reader wrote and it just tickled me. It said, this is from someone my age who’s been around the block. And this is not my quotation, but someone else wrote it, saying:

“Based on my 50 odd years of fundraising and at least six capital campaigns that I can recall, this has a lot of good advice, and not just for first timers. I’m really impressed.”

I thought, well, that’s what everybody’s going to say when they read this book. And development directors, executive directors, board chairs are going to want it right on their shelves so that they can pull it out when their organization is thinking about a capital campaign. So, congratulations to both of you.

Sarah Plimpton:
Thanks.

How to Get One or Multiple Copies

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Now the important piece of this is, where do people go to get these bulk orders?

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, first for a single copy, Amazon. For bulk orders, go to the Capital Campaign Pro website, and under resources you will find books, and there you will quickly be able to get your 50% off discounted copies for everybody on your board.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So Sarah, if you think about the process of writing this book, was there a big aha or something exciting for you in the process? And then Amy, I’m going to ask you that too, as a final question.

Sarah Plimpton:
I think the big aha was the questions at the end of every chapter. That was a big aha. How do we take the learning that we hope readers have as a result of reading the chapter and make it even more tangible for them and bring that learning into the boardroom with questions? I was really excited when we landed on that idea and then wove that thread through the book and stepped back and looked at it and thought, yeah, that was good, that was smart.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That was really smart. Makes it really a usable book. I think that’s fantastic. Amy, how about you? What was your big aha or excitement from this process?

Amy Eisenstein:
I think my big excitement is that these are complicated issues and topics, and there are simple ways to talk about them. And there really is a method behind the madness of capital campaigns, and sometimes it’s not intuitive. So sometimes board members will think:

“Well, we should be doing it this way because it makes sense.”

But then once you really understand how campaigns work, it’s so obvious once you understand the real strategy. So, I think to me it’s very complicated questions that we’re answering with very simple answers, and I think it will have light bulb moments for many board members.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, I am proud to be your colleague, I’m proud to be your friend, and I’m proud to be representing this book. I hope everybody listening goes to Amazon, gets their copy, and then contacts Capital Campaign Pro to get a bulk set for your board. It may well change the outcome of your campaign. What’s the title your book, Amy?

Amy Eisenstein:
It is, A Board Member’s Guide to Capital Campaign Fundraising: How to Raise Game-Changing Money for Your Nonprofit.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Thanks guys. Thanks for listening. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this amazing book.