Podcast: Celebrating Success: Wrapping Up Your Capital Campaign with Style

Season 3, Episode 45

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt delve into the crucial aspects of successfully concluding your capital campaign. Celebrating five years of Capital Campaign Pro’s business journey, they share insights on how to effectively wrap up your campaign and celebrate its accomplishments.

Learn why the completion of a campaign is just the beginning, and discover strategies for ensuring lasting donor engagement and organizational success. From acknowledging hardworking staff to tying up loose ends with donors, volunteers, and committees, Amy and Andrea provide actionable tips for a seamless campaign wrap-up.

To ensure your campaign ends in a celebration, download our free ⁠Capital Campaign Step-by-Step Guide & Checklist⁠ – This intuitive guide breaks down each step of your campaign, and the timeline allows you to visualize your whole campaign, from start to finish!

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Amy Eisenstein:
Today we are celebrating successful campaigns. Celebrate with us!

Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder Andrea Kihlstedt, and today, we are super excited to be sharing campaign successes because Capital Campaign Pro completed five years in business, and that means that some of the campaigns that we started three, four, and five years ago are really starting to celebrate success and we’re super-excited to share what they’re doing, what they’re up to, and how they celebrate at the end of the campaign and wrap up effectively and efficiently.

So Andrea, what do you want to say about this important topic?

The Work You Do When You Complete Your Campaign Matters

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, it’s so gratifying really that now every week or every month we’re hearing from our clients and from our advisors that they are either just about to go over their campaign goal, or they have gone over their campaign goal. And all of a sudden, the questions come up about:

“Well, what now? What does it mean to have completed your campaign?”

And of course, as with many things, it turns out that there is more to think about than just going over the goal, and that’s what we want to be talking about today.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. So you go over the goal and then, does everything stop? No, everything doesn’t stop. There’s still more things to think about and more things to do, of course.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Super important things to think about because how you complete a campaign, how you end the campaign, has everything to do with how your fundraising is going to move forward in the future. If everyone who has been involved in your campaign, if every donor of every volunteer of every staff member feels good about the campaign, they’re going to be more likely to stay involved, to continue giving, to give to your annual fund, to serve in other roles going forward.

So how you do this campaign wrap up really matters, not so much for the campaign itself, but for the future of your fundraising.

Acknowledging Key Players as You Wrap Your Capital Campaign

Amy Eisenstein:
That’s right. I think that there three groups of people really to think about. Probably the most obvious one, is donors. You’re probably already thinking about that, but campaign volunteers and staff, how are you going to celebrate and follow up with campaign volunteers and staff?

To me, the first thing you should be doing when you go over your goal is thinking about what kind of raise you’re giving your development director or other incentives to keep them there. Because what happens often at the end of a campaign is that staff leave.

So if they’ve done a great job and they’ve developed relationships with donors and they’ve implemented good systems and you want them to be here for years to come, it’s time to acknowledge your hardworking team that helped make this campaign successful.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I just want to say one thing about that, Amy, which is that if you are a board member listening to this, you should think hard about what your role in this is going to be. Right? The executive director can’t thank themselves. The board chair or a committee on the board, or the board as a whole, really should be planning how they are going to celebrate the remarkable results and process of the executive director.

Not only do development directors tend to leave after campaigns, executive directors tend to leave after campaigns. So if you’re a board member, take this idea back to your board, which is, “As this campaign, as our campaign becomes successful as we go over our goal, let’s think about what we can do to make our executive director feel loved, appreciated, get a raise,” whatever.

Amy Eisenstein:
Give them a month off.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes, whatever. Exactly, exactly.

Amy Eisenstein:
Your whole team, your whole staff, has given their life to this campaign for the last three plus years more than likely, and they are exhausted and deserve to be acknowledged and thanked and given time off, and probably given a raise.

Tying Up Loose Ends After Your Campaign

All right, excellent. So let’s talk about what to do in terms of tying up other loose ends.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So one thing you need to do is to be sure that every loose end that still exists, and I’m sure they will, with donors or prospective donors, has to be tied up.

Campaign Gifts

So during your campaign, there are always donors you’ve asked who haven’t yet responded and all these loose ends from that perspective. Once you get over the goal and you’re trying to tie things up, you’re really trying tie each of these up. Even if a donor has not responded or given you need then to get in touch with them and say:

“Listen, we’re finalizing our campaign results. Just want to be sure. We haven’t heard from you about a gift. I want to give you a chance to contribute to the campaign, but if not, that’s fine. Please, do let us know so we can tie this up.”

So you want every one of these loose ends tied up. Sometimes it’s a matter of simply sending a letter. Sometimes a phone calls or an email, but you don’t want these things just floating out there. They tend not to feel good when they float. So every outstanding vague gift and donor relationship should be tied up. That should be somebody’s job to do that.

Campaign Committee Members

Then, you should be looking at all of the various committees that have worked on your campaign, and you should find ways to celebrate with each of them to bring each of those committees… Some of those committees you probably already have brought to a close, but the campaign steering committee, for example, you know you haven’t brought to a close.

I was just in a meeting yesterday, in fact, with one of our clients that has been very successful, has gone way over its campaign goal, and the campaign steering committee members have worked long and hard for a long time. We had a campaign steering committee meeting and said, “Our next meeting is going to be the final meeting of this campaign steering committee, and we’re not going to have it on Zoom.” All of our other meetings have been on Zoom. “We’re not going to have it on Zoom. In fact, we’re meeting at the such and such restaurant over lunch. We’re going to have some champagne and we hope all of you mark the date because that is going to be the final meeting of the steering committee.” And that will bring it to an end. We’re not just going to let it sort of fizzle out. Right?

People were delighted. They really were delighted, and now that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other things those people can help with. Their new building is now in construction. They’re going to have all kinds of things for people to work on going forward, but that campaign steering committee is going to be celebrated and come to an end with a little fun, informal lunch at a local restaurant where people can hang out and just appreciate what they’ve managed to accomplish.

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent. I think that’s so important. So thinking about committees, groups of volunteers, individual donors, how are you thanking them? How are you wrapping up the campaign?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s just important.

So think, you get to over this goal, that’s the end, right? No, no, no. The other piece I think we should talk about, Amy, is that though it feels like a pain in the neck when everybody has worked so hard for so long, but somebody needs to write a campaign report. Somebody needs to actually report on what happened.

Amy Eisenstein:
All right. Before we get into that, let me just interrupt for one minute. Let’s get into campaign reports because they are so important, and who should get them, and how you should do them. There’s lots to talk about.

Quick Note: What Makes a Capital Campaign Successful?

I want to remind listeners that all of these successful campaigns, in part, are successful because they were set up well to begin with. Those of them that are our clients, of course, started with a Guided Feasibility Study. So I want to encourage listeners, if you’re thinking about a campaign, if you’re getting ready for a campaign, head on over to the Capital Campaign Pro website and check out our Guided Feasibility Study because it really does set up campaigns for success. That’s what it’s designed to do: to engage donors early and to help you get a solid plan on track, so that two or three or four years later you can be celebrating. That’s what we want.

Too often we get calls and people are stuck in the middle of the campaign. That’s because they didn’t set it up well from the beginning; they didn’t do a feasibility study or they certainly didn’t do our model of feasibility study; and they’re stuck at 40, 50 or 60%, and we definitely don’t want that to happen to you. Let’s talk about campaign reports.

Writing Up a Capital Campaign Report

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, in a campaign report, of course, you’re going to go back to the results of the feasibility study because now you have the whole picture. So in that report, it’s going to say, “Well, we did a guided feasibility study and we interviewed X number of people. We have to see where this is, what it says. This is how much we recommended that we could raise and this is how much we actually raised.”

It’s going to include the gift range chart and it’s going to check off, “Well, which of these gifts actually came in? Where did we do better? Where did we miss a gift or two?” It’s going to look at that.

It’s going to list the committees — the people who served on committees. It’s going to go back and look at the timetable [and answer]:

• When did we start?
• What committees were in existence for what pieces of it?
• What were the challenges that we faced during this campaign and how did we overcome them?
• Who were the staff members who worked on this campaign?
• What were the insights that we learned and what do we want to learn from this campaign that we can apply for going forward for our fundraising?

Off the top of my head, there are many other things.

Amy Eisenstein:
Let’s talk about two different types of reports because you want to report internally, and I think that’s the kind of report that you were just talking about. And then there’s external reporting to your donors, to your committees, to your board members.

2 Different Types of Capital Campaign Reports

So, I think that there’s probably a variation and a spectrum of reports, right?

1. External Report — There might be one that’s very public that is more tailored to your website and to get mailed out to all donors. That will celebrate success and thank donors and thank volunteers and report on the project. You want to give a project update.
2. Internal Report — And then, of course, there’s the internal report that you want to wrap up the campaign, debrief, use for next time, apply lessons learned, all the things that you were talking about.

So what else would you say is the difference between an external-facing public-facing campaign wrap up celebratory report and one that’s more for internal purposes?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s such a good point and interesting to think about. So internally, you’re going to want to look… We have much more detail. Externally, you don’t want all of that detail, but externally, you probably want to have a listing of all the people who contributed to your campaign, for example. You want to be able to report on how much money you actually raised and what the impact of that money is.

Internally, that’s where you would look, as I was saying, at the gift range chart and how many of those gifts actually came in. Externally, you probably want to have something that really highlights the campaign chair or chairs, that acknowledges the people who really step forward and shouldered the lion’s share of the campaign work. You might recognize externally some of the staff members. That’s a great thing to do for staff members. We often don’t think about that externally, but it’s not a bad thing to do. And volunteers.

Amy Eisenstein:
This is a great opportunity. I think there’s a lot of talk these days about equal recognition for volunteers as for donors that contribute significantly to the campaign. So yes, recognizing donors, recognizing volunteers, recognizing staff, and sharing impact and updates about progress towards impact is critically important for those public reports.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You know, Amy, it will be quite natural for everyone to think about doing an external report. It will be obvious that you have to report on the success of the campaign externally. It’s a little less obvious that you should create an internal report, and it’s a little more onerous. Right?

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It doesn’t fall to the communications team, which the external report may fall to. It falls to the development team to report internally, so it needs to be somebody’s task to do that. It will easily fall away, and I encourage everyone to think carefully about that:

• Who should do that?
• What’s the timing of it?
• How will it be disseminated and to whom will it be disseminated?
• What should be in it?

So if you don’t actually lean in on that, it’s not likely to happen because busy with myriad other things.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. And I think though, one of the many reasons to do it is it’s actually a springboard to your future fundraising, and it will inform fundraising for years to come from those campaign donors who emerged as significantly bigger donors than had ever happened. It will inform your annual fundraising and your major gifts for the future, so don’t skip it.

Celebrating the Success of Your Capital Campaign

Let’s talk about celebrations as a way to close out. I think we touched on celebrating with a committee, taking them to lunch. You do want to celebrate with the community whether you have a new space or a new project or a new program, you do want to think about celebrating with the various committees with the community.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Sometimes that can be in conjunction with a ribbon cutting. Yesterday, actually, I had a conversation with one of our advisors. We have a weekly advisor meeting where advisors come and talk about their projects. The question was:

How should they do the ribbon cutting for this building addition? And should it be also the campaign celebration or should they be separate celebrations?

Now, there’s not one clear answer to that, but the question is the right question. If you’re going to have a ribbon cutting, is that also the end of the campaign? Or do have at the end of the campaign, you celebrate the end of the campaign, and then you have another special event, which is the ribbon cutting and the opening of the building that the campaign enabled? So there are many strategic questions you have to think about.

One thing we know is that having a larger scale celebration of whatever sort fits your organization is a really good idea. Celebrating success is good for everybody and it makes everybody feel good. Campaigns are bumpy roads. They’re never smooth. They’re never easy. They’re always bumpy roads and when you end the campaign with a celebration, sort of acknowledging and recognizing everybody’s role in the remarkable project that has been completed, everybody lets the bumps in the road go away. Right?

Amy Eisenstein:
Smooth out, yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Smooth out, exactly.

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent. All right. Well, I think that’s great. It’s an important topic we haven’t covered before.

Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time.