Podcast: Expert Answers to the Most Common Capital Campaign Challenges

Season 5, Episode 11

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt, the co-founders of Capital Campaign Pro, invite listeners behind the scenes of a recent Campaign Conversations session: a live Q&A forum where nonprofit leaders ask their most pressing campaign questions.

Four guests join to discuss real-life challenges many organizations face during their campaigns.

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
Have you ever had a question about your capital campaign and you just wish that you had an expert that you could call up and ask for advice? Well, today we give four people the chance to ask us their questions.

Hi, I’m Andrea Kihlstedt, co-founder of Capital Campaign Pro. Every month, Amy Eisenstein, my friend, partner collaborator in Capital Campaign Pro, and I have an hour-long session with some of our community members. We call these sessions campaign conversations.

Expert Answers to Common Capital Campaign Challenges

For today’s podcast episode, we thought we’d let you listen in on a few questions we got in one of our recent Campaign Conversations. People asked about situations that we often hear about in capital Campaigns. I hope you’re able to hear yourself in some of them and perhaps you’ll gain some valuable insights.

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, start with your name, maybe your role, your organization my question is.

What are Some Donor Recognition Success Stories?

Randall Whipple:
Sure. I am Randy Whipple or Randall Whipple. I write it Randall and say it Randy. I’m with the Working Ranch Cowboys Foundation. We’re based in Amarillo, Texas. We support working cowboys and their families across the United States in times of need. I have been on the board of directors since we started 31 years ago. You can tell I’ve lost all my hair.

Anyway, my question is, or let me make a quick statement and then my question. My statement is, we as a foundation have decided to stop paying rent and we are going to build a headquarters building. I’m curious, out of the capital campaign knowledge that’s out there, what has been some of the most effective things that you can do for donors? Such as, do you do a brick pavers with their names in them? Do you do special walls? What are some things that have been quite successful that donors really enjoy?

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent question. We’re talking about donor recognition for building a building, or a new building?

Randall Whipple:
Yes ma’am.

Amy Eisenstein:
Andrea, you want to kick us off on this one?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Sure. There’s a lot to say, Randy. We could actually spend our whole hour talking about donor recognition, but we will try to limit that. First of all, let me say that while it’s a great thing to think about how donors want to be recognized, you’ll begin your capital campaign raising money in large gifts from a relatively few donors. For the most part, those donors, while they will probably be happy to be recognized, that’s not why they’re going to give to you. They’re going to give to you because they have a strong passion for an interest in your mission.

The donor recognition, whether you’re going to do plaques or other form of donor recognition, really follows on to their passion to give and their relationship with you. I just want to say that setting up a, we’re going to do bricks to get donors to give is not really the primary strategy the way to start your campaign, but it certainly is important to think through.

When we think about donor recognition in a campaign, we think about giving different kinds of donor recognition at different levels of gifts. We recognize donors at the highest levels in one way, typically a more personal way, and donors at the bottom of the giving pyramid in a less personal way. The traditional way of doing that in a building campaign is to have naming opportunities in the building. People can name rooms, can name areas, can name entryways, can name flagpoles, can name, I mean, there are all kinds of things that you can actually name in honor of a donor. When you get down to a certain level, then you’re going to put all the donors names onto a group plaque, probably organized by giving amount. Now at the very end of your campaign you might do some brick walkway or something like that.

My belief is that they’re often more time-consuming and effort-consuming and expense-consuming than they’re worth. But some organizations do them anyway. Where to begin your thinking is by looking at your building plans and saying, well, all right, if we are going to name rooms in honor of donors or spaces, in honor of donors, how would we do that? The way to think about that is you will have a gift range chart, a chart that shows the levels of giving. You will coordinate the levels of giving on your gift training chart with the amounts that you’re going to be recognizing donors for in your rooms. That’s a very short answer to a very big topic. Amy, what else would you add in this short moment?

Amy Eisenstein:
I think that that’s, of course, I agree with everything that you said as I usually do. I would just emphasize that naming and recognition is not the motivation for donors. You suggested that. I just want to emphasize that, and also say that’s not the first place to start thinking about your campaign. There are a lot of other planning tools and strategies and that comes later.

Because you mentioned bricks, Randy, which of course Andrea has shared her feelings on bricks, that whether you decide to do that or not, comes actually at the last part of your campaign, really from the last 10% of donors or so. But you want to spend all your strategy, planning, brainpower, donor efforts on the first 70, 80, 90% of donors, which will be a much smaller handful of donors to your campaign that will really make your project successful.

One of the things that you can do early on in your planning is ask some of those donors, how would they like to be recognized. They may talk about bricks, but probably not.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, let me say one more thing about this. In recent times, in the last few years, there has been a trend in this field away from naming rooms and spaces and buildings in honor of donors who give big gifts. Now, some organizations still do it, but more and more boards are really asking whether that practice is appropriate to their organization. They may look at other ways of recognizing donors.

For example, I don’t know if there are famous cowboys. There probably are some famous cowboys. You may want to name rooms in honor of famous cowboys that donors may select people who they want to honor in your field relating to your mission and then have something smaller in a plaque with their names on it. These days it’s less standard to put people’s names just because of the amount of money they’ve given on rooms. For many years it was standard practice and today people are asking more questions about that.

How Can We Set a Realistic Goal for Our Project?

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent. Miranda, I’m wondering if you’re willing to come off mute and ask your question. You said my organization needs assistance in getting started with a campaign, which we’d be happy to discuss, but if you want to give us any more context, that would be great. Otherwise, we’ll just talk about that.

Miranda Latchie:
Hi. Yes, my organization, we are a part of a church with the 501 and we are needing to build a new church because the location that we are, the lease is up and we’re wanting to get our own church. If you have any suggestions on guiding on how we should get started with capital campaign.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Here’s where you always begin with a campaign. There is a place you always begin, which is to think about really what it is you want to do and how much it’s going to cost. What is your vision and what’s it going to take to do that. Now, you know you want to build a new church, but where will you build it? How big does it need to be? How big is your congregation? What are the requirements in a building that will hold your congregation?

It doesn’t have to be to the penny, but you need to think through, okay, how much is the land going to cost us? How much you need to be talking to a builder or an architect so that they can give you some preliminary cost estimates. What kind of lighting are you going to need? What kind of a sound system are you going to need? What will the pews cost?

I don’t know much about church building, but I assume those are basics for building churches. You probably will want to put other things in your list of things that you want to fund as well. That’s always a great place to begin, and pull together a small group of your leaders. What church funding has in, specifically is that you serve a defined group of people, usually a fairly small defined group of people. You should involve the leaders of that group or maybe the entire congregation in helping you think through what your campaign objectives are so that they will build their enthusiasm and excitement as you go through that process. Then once you know what you’re going to do and roughly how much it’s going to cost, then you’ll be ready for the next step. Amy, what’s the next step?

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, so many next steps, but I think the main one is to try and determine whether what it’s going to cost your project is in the scope of reality, aspirational, and yet in the scope of reality of what you’re able to raise and or identify alternative funding sources from.

Let’s say you determined that your new church building with a maintenance fund and additional staff and more electricity bills and all the rest of it is going to cost $10 million. Now it’s time to determine, how are you going to do that? Can you raise the full 10 million? Do you have two million in reserve you might use? Does it make sense to take a million or $2 million mortgage if you can’t raise the full $10 million?

First determine what is the scope and scale possibility of what you can raise. There are lots of ways to do that, but the primary way is through a fundraising feasibility study where you talk to your lead donors with the help of a consultant like us at Capital Campaign Pro to determine do a donor and an outlet, and then go out and talk to your biggest potential donors to see if you can raise that kind of money and also looking at alternative funding sources for your project if you determine you can’t raise it.

All right. I think those are the best ways to start. What is the project? What is the vision? How much will it cost and how can you fund it? Can you fund it through philanthropy or how much of it can you fund through philanthropy? Those are good places to start. Now, always when anybody, this goes for everybody on the call is thinking about a big project. Normally a capital campaign is for a big long-term project.

I would be thinking if this is a multiplier of what you normally raise, I would be looking for expertise. What kind of consulting advice or help or strategy do you need to be successful? Because what really is devastating to us is when organizations come to us and they’ve been working on this fundraising effort for a year or two or three and they’re only 50% of the way there or 60% of the way there, and they want help figuring out how to get the rest of the way.

Well, it’s much harder to go back and sort of plan or figure out what to do next than it would be to plan well from the beginning. We encourage you to reach out for consulting expertise to help you develop a plan and a strategy that’s going to work for your project and your organization.

How Can Wealth Screening Help Our Campaign?

Maria, thank you. Why don’t you get us started. Come off mute and tell us what’s going on and what your question is.

Maria Harlow:
I was wondering people’s thoughts and experiences with wealth screening.

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent. Tell us a little bit more. Have you used wealth screening before? Where are you in your campaign? Tell us what’s, I mean, it’s a great question.

Maria Harlow:
Yes. Wealth screening is informative, but it’s not the full picture is my experience. I’m one saying how much, I mean, it can reveal some people with capacity that you did not know that they had it, but it doesn’t tell you exactly how much capacity if they have LLCs and different corporations or make anonymous donations. Not everything is available through a wealth screening. Well, that is for sure true.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I have such mixed feelings about wealth screening. I’m going to be the contrarian about wealth screening, I think. There are certainly some good uses for wealth screening and occasionally it does turn up something surprising, but with some frequency it turns up information that is either not usable or incorrect.

You have to be super careful about wealth screening. It is not likely to give you a whole file of people that you don’t know anything about. It’s not likely to do that. It may turn up information about some of your donors that will be helpful. It sometimes turns up information about donors and what they have and how much capacity they have that is awkward for you to know, which is the biggest problem I have with it. Sometimes it’s not good to know about donors, what they would rather you didn’t know about them. Let’s say the wealth screening turns up that a donor has three houses in various places. They look to you like a modest donor living a small house in your community and you didn’t know that they had house in Hawaii and a house in wherever.

It’s an interesting question how you would use that if they didn’t reveal some of that to you. I just want to raise that issue as what should you know and what shouldn’t you know and how do you use information you get through wealth screening in a way that is respectful to a donor.

Now, one more thing and then I’ll see what Amy wants to add to this. What I actually prefer is for you to consider hiring a prospect researcher when you have someone on your list that you would like to know more about. When you would like to know what boards they serve on, particularly when you would like to know what other contributions they’ve made. I mean, at least as important as people’s wealth, is whether they’re generous, whether they have a history of making significant gifts and a prospect researcher is more likely to be able to find that out for you than a standard wealth screening model. Those are my thoughts. I’ve always been pretty anxious about wealth screening. I know I’m in the minority. Don’t get me wrong, this is not the standard pattern.

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, excellent. I think that what you’re pointing to Andrea is absolutely right. Is that it’s one teeny piece of the puzzle. I think where we see people really fall into traps is doing a wealth screen and thinking, oh my gosh, there’s so much wealth on my list, we can raise all this money. That’s a dangerous trap to fall into or basing your campaign goal on what you perceive to be in your donor database. That’s a dangerous trap.

Now, with all of our clients at Capital Campaign Pro, we do help them and provide wealth screening if they don’t have access to it. We partner with a company called KindSight, which purchased iWave. It’s the iWave KindSight company now. KindSight is what it’s called, formerly iWave. But clearly I’m seeing several people mentioned donor search, which is very popular if you use Bloomerang. Donor search is integrated into that.

Also, if you’re a Raiser’s Edge user or Blackbaud, any of their products, you probably have access to their wealth screening. There’s wealth engine. There’s lots of companies that do this. We partner with KindSight, formerly iWave, because we think it is one piece of the puzzle and it does provide some information when used appropriately and well. I think one of the things that Andrea is pointing to, and I strongly believe, is that it never replaces having personal conversations with your donors, to find out what their affinity, connection, engagement, interest in your organization is. That’s much more important and more powerful than minor discrepancies in assets.

You can have two donors that have about the same wealth and one is very interested in supporting your organization and the other has no interest. Honestly, in that case, the person with lots of wealth who’s not interested in you is totally irrelevant.

Anyways, I think that that is our experience and what we would say about it. Maria, I know you were looking to crowdsource information. It seems like only a few people are responding that they use it.

Maria Harlow:
Well, I will say, Andrea, you’re not alone in your feelings about it over the years. I know that Bloomerang will offer two screenings a year with your contract and subscription. I don’t see a problem using it, I see a problem like Andrea said, being intentional about how you use it and understanding it’s, like you said, Amy, only a piece of the puzzle. It’s interesting to know though that it can, if we don’t have a wealth screening tool of our own at this point, that we could go through Capital Campaign Pro and through even Andrea to utilize it if a donor, I mean, if a campaigner wants us to do that and we know that they usually think it’s valuable.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Recently I found myself saying often the phrase, lead with curiosity. I think that’s a pretty good phrase for us all to remember. If we are curious about our donors and ask them about themselves, it’s amazing what they’ll tell you. I think some people are afraid to talk to their donors and to ask their donors about themselves worrying that the donors might think you’re prying or that you’re trying to unearth whether they have money. If you are genuinely curious about them and who they are and what they’re interested in and what they do and what are the things they support, many of them, if not most of them, will really be happy to share with you who they are and why they give and how they give, even how much they give.

Don’t let them, I mean, that’s my final negative about wealth screening. Don’t let it undermine that primary function of being personally curious about your donors and spending the time necessary to actually get to know them.

How Do We Balance Everything Involved with a Campaign?

Amy Eisenstein:
All right. Amy, take yourself off mute and go right ahead.

Amy McNeely:
My question is based on just getting some feedback or ways to orient in my role. Currently, there’s focus on a lot of current needs. We’re raising for current needs. We’re expanding, or at a homeless-serving organization. We’re expanding our women’s shelter. There’s grants and there’s the gala. There’s all these things.

Now it’s like a couple of weeks are going by that I just don’t feel like I’m spending adequate time on campaign planning given the time that we’re at and a compressed timeline that we’re working with. Just a general. Things I can keep in my mind is I’m trying to balance all the things, but knowing that you’re all experts in this. I know at my core, I need to be spending enough time to make it successful and to build out strategy and all of that, but I just need a little pep talk, I guess.

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, let me ask you a follow-up question. Are you working with a consultant?

Amy McNeely:
No.

Amy Eisenstein:
Okay. I mean, I’m going to ask a rhetorical question. Why? You’re in a small busy development shop already, unless you’re sitting back with your feet up on your desk with nothing to do, twiddling your thumbs. This is a huge additional project that has been put on your plate and you already have all the annual fund responsibilities. Does it make sense? Is it appropriate to ask you to also plan and implement a campaign on top of your already, I’m guessing, overwhelming responsibilities and, well, let me stop there for one second. I have many more thoughts, but Andrea, why don’t you pick it up and then I’ll continue.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Let me just acknowledge that it’s hard, hard to keep all the balls rolling for all of you or to keep juggling everything. Campaign is so big. The project associated with it is big, and that may be falling on your shoulders also. The responsibility of it is bigger than most of the other things you’re doing, and yet the other things don’t stop. You have to continue with the other things. I just want to acknowledge that what you’re feeling and the anxiety you’re feeling is real. If you weren’t feeling it, something would be a little strange, honestly. Really, we encourage pretty much everyone to staff up for a campaign during a campaign, but the place to begin with that is to look carefully at all of the things you do and see what you could offload to someone else.

You can do a simple exercise like take a week and during the course of a week, write down everything you do. I mean, it feels onerous, but it’s not really very difficult. Just jot down everything you do during the course of a work week. And then at the end of the work week, anything that you didn’t actually have to do that wasn’t important enough for you to do that somebody else actually couldn’t do, circle it with red and think about who else in your organization you might offload it to, or if you were to hire someone to do that, an administrative person to do that, what would that look like. You have to look very carefully at prioritizing what’s important and getting rid of the stuff that anyone can do. That’s a place to begin.

Right now, the early parts of the campaign, while they take careful thought and attention, aren’t really so time consuming. They’re just attention consuming. Campaign gets more and more time consuming as it broadens, as you’re raising less and less money from more and more people. But the early part of a campaign, you’re raising 10 or 20 gifts, takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth to do that well, but it doesn’t take, it’s not the same as running a gala. It’s a different effort than running a gala. It may be, all you need is someone to really offload some administrative responsibilities so you can really focus on the organization and your campaign.

Amy Eisenstein:
All right. I’m going to add that the idea that your organizations, your executive directors, your board members expect you to do a campaign and not just you, Amy, everybody on this call, of course. Presumably your campaign is going to raise two times, five times, 10 times what you normally raise, maybe 20 times what you normally raise for your annual fund. The idea that you are expected to do that on top of your existing job with no additional staff or resources or expertise, it’s crazy. That’s what leads to burnout, and it leads to campaign stalling or getting stuck.

To me, Andrea said, think about every campaign needs to think about where they staff up. I think often one of the default places people think is they need a major gift officer, but the truth is that the existing staff, the development director, the executive director, that’s who donors want to meet with, and you have already relationships and established trust.

It’s better to staff up underneath, meaning an administrative person, a data manager, administrative support, outsourcing, grant writing or event planning, or some of the other things that you do that somebody else might be able to do, either that already works at your organization or, that’s the place to think about staffing up. But the other place that campaigns really benefit from, I’m totally biased. You can call me out for it, is campaign expertise.

The truth is, the reality is that most people at nonprofits board and staff members don’t have extensive campaign experience running multiple campaigns or designing multiple campaigns from start to finish, just because by nature of campaigns, organizations do them once every 10 or 15 or 20 years. And so most people that work or volunteer at nonprofits don’t have experience. Only campaign consultants have experience with 20 campaigns, 30 campaigns, 50 campaigns, designing them and running them.

And so campaign consultants provide things. I mean, you talked about helping you stay on track. It’s about designing it well, providing training, providing plans and accountability, and helping you navigate when things get off track or even knowing when they get off track. And so that to me is really the value add of a consultant. If you’re expected to raise multipliers of what you currently raise, it’s probably worth arguing both for staff and expertise that consultants bring to the table. Otherwise, you’re right. It won’t happen because your annual fund is the fire that you need to put out day to day, and the campaign will get backburnered. Sounds like that’s what’s happening.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Sharon has added something in the chat, which I really appreciate, which is that a consultant or an expert also can help educate the rest of the organization. Can help educate the board, the staff. I mean, there’s a lot of training that needs to happen throughout your organization when you go into a campaign. It’s often very difficult to do that as an insider. People don’t listen to insiders as well as they do outsiders, as frustrating as them, as that often is, I think. That’s another good reason to hire an expert from the outside to come and help you with the campaign. Thank you for that, Sharon.

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It was. Don’t worry. I’ve tried absolutely every angle towards getting your consulting services. I’ve been impressed and supported, at least working towards the do-it-yourself side. We’ll see. Keep working on it.

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Listen, we are happy to talk to anybody on your leadership team. That goes for everybody here. If you need help explaining what consultants do and what the value add is and why it’s important, we’re happy to have a meeting with your leadership team. Honestly, that’s what I do. 50% of my time is talking to organizations, leadership teams that are thinking about a campaign and wanting to know how to get started and how we might help. I’m happy to do that.