Podcast: How Much Should Your Board Give to a Capital Campaign?

Season 6, Episode 4

How much should your board give to a capital campaign? The answer is not a universal percentage, but there is a practical way to arrive at a goal your board understands and supports.

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt explain how nonprofit leaders can establish a realistic collective board giving goal, prepare board members for the conversation, and build early financial commitment from the people closest to the organization.

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
How much of your campaign goal should come from the board of directors?

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder, Andrea Kihlstedt. And today we’re talking about the board and how much they’re going to give to the campaign, how much they might give, how much they should give, all the questions that surround your board and giving.

The Importance of Board Giving During Your Capital Campaign

So Andrea, kick us off. Why is this an important topic? How did we come to this topic today?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, it’s an important topic for several reasons, Amy. One of the keys to capital campaign fundraising is that you should solicit the gifts from the top down and the inside out. That’s a standard campaign phrase, top down, inside out. Solicit the largest gifts first and then go down and solicit the people who are closest to your organization early on. Well, who is that? That’s of course your board of directors.

You need to solicit the board of directors because they are the people who are really tight in. Those are the people who are making your organization run or deciding that there’s going to be a campaign and there’s going to be a project.

Amy Eisenstein:
They’re the insiders. They’re the insiders.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
They’re the insider. They are the literal insiders to your organization. So board giving is important and it’s important that you know it and understand it early in your campaign. So that’s why we want to talk about it today. We also want to talk about it today because Amy and Sarah, who is our vice president, have just put out a fantastic book on board giving on boards and capital campaigns. So we thought it would be a great idea to cover some of these topics, which you can also get by getting their book, in fact, for you or all collection of the books for your boards. So we are unabashedly promoting Amy and Sarah’s book with this podcast.

Amy Eisenstein:
All right. So you might as well say the title. It’s called A Board Member’s Guide to Capital Campaign Fundraising. It’s available on Amazon.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes. So let me, however, talk about this topic.

How Much Should Your Board Give? It Depends…

I asked you in the beginning, well, how much of a campaign goal should come from the board? And a lot of people want to know, is there a percentage? Should it be 20% or 50% or 30%? The answer, as with many things in life, is it depends.

It depends on how your board is constituted. If your board is made up pretty much of people who have the capacity to give, and that’s why you brought them onto the board, then you probably will be looking at a higher percentage of the campaign coming from your board. But if your board reflects at least in part the people you serve and the people you serve are not the wealthy people in your community, then you may be doing amazingly well to get 10 or 15% of your goal from your board.

So there’s no one percentage answer. What is true across the board is that you should spend time working with your board to sort out how much of the campaign might come, might be a collective board giving goal, because that will help each of your board members understand what they should be thinking about giving. If a board member realizes that, okay, I have a $5 million campaign, the board has taken on a campaign goal of a million dollars collectively, then every board member will have a better idea of how to think about their own giving to the campaign.

Amy Eisenstein:
Now let me just emphasize and clarify that not every board member is going to give the same amount. Just like with your overall campaign goal, you are going to have a small number of donors who give significant and huge gifts to the campaign that get you very close to your goal, and a whole bunch of donors who give smaller gifts that make up a smaller percentage. And the same is true with your board.

You may have one or two or three board members, if you’re lucky, that give major gifts that are a significant portion of the overall board percentage or board giving goal collectively. And then the rest of the board members are going to give smaller gifts. But I think the idea is that every board member gives a meaningful and significant gift for themselves.

Now, we didn’t want to go too far down a rabbit hole of individual board gifts, but I think it’s worth sharing a few key things like you’re not going to solicit board members by handing out a pledge form at a board meeting.

That’s for sure. Every board member’s going to be solicited individually to consider their gift. But let’s get back to the topic of the board goal collectively, Andrea. How should boards think about coming to that goal?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, the organizations I’ve worked with where board giving has gone the best are the organizations where board members have been involved in the process of figuring out what the board giving goal should be. It’s not that somebody made a decision and said, “Here’s what our goal is.” It’s that they did their homework and they thought carefully and well not with a small group of board members and then with the board as a whole about what fundraising goal for the campaign would be appropriate for that particular board. And then when the board agreed on a fundraising goal, the asking, the soliciting of individual members of that board became ever so much easier because everyone understood.

Not a Gift Pyramid, But a Gift Diamond

Now I want to give everyone a picture first before we talk a little more about this because it was something that well into my fundraising career was an a-ha for me. So maybe it’ll be an a-ha for other people too. In the capital campaign business, we often work with the gift pyramid, with what we call a gift range chart or a gift pyramid that shows a very few. It’s what’s the pattern of gifts you need in order to arrive at your goal. And the gift pyramid is a pyramid shape. It has a few gifts at the top, more gifts in the middle, and a lot of gifts at the bottom. You probably know what that looks like.

When you try to figure out what your board goal should be, what you’re going to learn is that the shape is not a pyramid. The shape actually is a diamond. This was such an a-ha for me. You probably have one or two or three people who could give really significant gifts at the top. And then you probably have one or three or five people for whom a small gift would be a big stretch at the bottom.

But the bulk of the people on your board can probably give a gift somewhere in the middle, which means that the shape that you’re looking at, if you’re looking at the shape of how gifts are going to come in, is quite different from the shape of your giving pyramid. It’s actually a diamond. And if you sit, if you get a small group of your board members and staff members together and a board list, and you try to evaluate what a giving goal to the campaign might be for each board member, you’re going to see that those prospective giving amounts come in that diamond shape.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And if you go through one board member after another and you say:

“Well, we have a range for John of anywhere between 250 and $300,000, and we have a range for Mary. Mary we know is stretched and maybe she could give between 500 and $1,000. And we have a range for Stewart.”

Stewart is a major donor. He may be able to give 750 to a million dollars, 750,000 to a million dollars.” So if you put those numbers down next to every board member and you see how they line up and you add them up so you get a bottom and a top, they can give collectively from this amount to collectively from that amount, then you’re going to find that you actually have a sense of what your board giving goal might be.

And if you’ve worked that out with a small group of board members, you could actually take that into your board and say:

“A small group of us sat down and we think, having looked at everybody’s past giving, we think that it might be possible for our board to raise between one million and a million and a half dollars towards our campaign goal. Let’s talk about that and what we want our board giving goal to be.”

So you actually can raise the subject at a board meeting by having done some homework, evaluating a high and a low for each of your board members and then adding them up to see.

Get Gift Commitments from Donors at the Top First

Amy Eisenstein:
Now Andrea, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here for a minute because the board member who maybe is at the bottom of that diamond shape, maybe the outspoken one. And they’re looking at this million to million-and-a-half dollar goal that’s been presented and thinking, “Well, I can only give $1,000 or $500, so how on earth are we going to get to a million dollars? And I’m going to raise my hand and object because I don’t want to be. Because there’s no way I can see this.”

So how would the conversation go from there?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
The best way to do this is to get the people at the top to make their commitment informally before you go and talk to the board. So when you go and talk to the board, you can say:

“We already have some informal commitments from the people who can give the most. So we already are quite sure that we have so-and-so much. What’s really a question is whether we should stretch more or be fairly sure of what we’re doing.”

So that’s the best way to do it, which eases that.

Amy Eisenstein:
That’s interesting because I always, whenever you’re going into a board vote or having an important conversation, I always think you should have one-on-one conversations in advance so that you have people on your side to stand up, to advocate, because you don’t want to get into a situation in a critical conversation. Often I’m talking about hiring a campaign consultant.

You don’t want one loud dissenter to derail the whole conversation. So having one-on-one conversations with two or three influential people in advance to answer their questions, to address their concerns, and you’re suggesting essentially the same thing, is lining up so that the vote goes your way, so that you influence the outcome to the way you want it to be.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, and in this case, it is influencing the outcome, but it’s also tying down the largest gifts, which are going to really determine the board goal and doing that in a way that you can then talk to the board about it and say, okay, beyond these gifts, do we want to stretch as an organization or do we want to be more conservative as a board? Whether the goal is a half a million dollars more or a half a million dollars less will have to do with who is outspoken. You’re exactly right, Amy. You may have someone in your board who is all gung-ho who says, listen, we are the board of this organization. Let us swing for the fences. By example. I think we can do it. Let’s lead by example. Let’s go for a higher goal.

Or you may have someone who starts it off by saying, I’m worried that we’re not going to get there and I think we should be more conservative. And whatever they decide is fine. But the conversation, a full board conversation arriving at a board goal will set up your entire board giving process in a positive and concrete way.

Try This Exercise with Your Board Members

Amy Eisenstein:
Now I’ve heard you in the past talk about an exercise where you have board members write anonymously on Post-its or little scraps of paper, what they imagine their high and low could be, and then having them added up right there in the meeting to get the thinking going. Will you talk that through?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, I always like doing it both ways, doing it in advance with a small group. So you come into the meeting with some homework done, giving you a sense. And then you can hand out index cards, for example, to each board member. And you can put on a flip chart in the front of the room giving categories. Highs and lows, maybe six different categories, higher categories to lower categories labeled A, B, C, D, E, F, G, or however many categories you have. And you can say:

“We’re going to hand out these. We want you to think about where you think your giving might be for this campaign and write down on this what your range is going to be.”

And then the staff member picks it up and they make note of the people who are not there so they can add cards in for those people and they add up the lows and the highs. And then you can compare what you came into the meeting with and what people indicated at the meeting and see how far off it is or see how close it is.

Amy Eisenstein:
I love that. And have a discussion right there. Say our small committee thought the board could be at a million to a million and a half. And look, these cards total a million and a half to two million.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Two million. Exactly. Exactly. So immediately you’re making people feel comfortable that these numbers are doable. It’s not just an abstract. It’s like, oh yeah. I think that

Amy Eisenstein:
Second part is so. Because then the one naysayer is clearly out. Now whether they indicate low, it’s really the collective of the total that you’re looking at. So I think that second part, that exercise right there in the room. And then let’s say you do collect the cards and you get a disappointing total, and it comes in at closer to half a million to a million instead of a million to a million and a half. I would continue the conversation and say:

“You know what? That was a great first crack at this. Now everybody knows that in order to get to where we need to be to have a successful project, everybody needs to stretch. So I’d like you to think about this again, and you can talk about using assets and pledging over time, and let’s do it one more time and see if we can get it higher and do the cards again.”

And some people will change their numbers.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting. I should say it tends to make people uncomfortable to do this. This is not an easy exercise. People are uncomfortable talking about money, thinking about money. They’re uncomfortable talking and thinking together about how much they can give.

For the most part, people on a board don’t talk about how much money they have or how much money they give. It’s very quiet. So what this process does is to make it a little more visible. So be prepared for some people may be uncomfortable with the process.

Amy Eisenstein:
Now those note cards are anonymous. They’re confidential, right? So they go in a stack. Nobody’s names are on them. You’re not committing to an amount, but you are helping the board come up with an amount, which ultimately leads to a percentage of the goal. So if the board lands on the board giving goal is a million dollars and your goal is 10 million, then the board giving goal is 10%.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right, right. Now be careful that when you collect the cards, the people who aren’t at the board meeting get accounted for. So somebody has to take from the other analysis and fill out cards for them. Otherwise it won’t work. It won’t work. So you have to be though about, okay, who’s here? Who’s not here? Or what are we going to put for their cards so that we are tallying the same people both times?

Amy Eisenstein:
Great. This is a great reminder.

The Entire Board Should be On Board With Giving

So listen, we were having one of our — with clients, we meet weekly and we invite them to a mastermind peer support type of call every week. And somebody was asking about this, how to do this process. And they were going through some training with their board. And I think it was a useful question, topic, discussion, because every organization goes through this. And I think it is delicate enough and complicated enough that it is something that you want to go through with your campaign consultant. You don’t want to wing this, you don’t want to make it up, you don’t want to skip it.

And so it is an important thing to get the board on board, to get their commitments early. Oh, I know. We were doing a call yesterday and not with clients. These were non-client. It was a webinar style call and somebody said, “I only have two commitments, financial commitments out of our 10-member board. Is that a problem?”

And we said, “Yes.”

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes, I think so.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes, that is a massive problem. You don’t want to head into a campaign where the board isn’t on board. Excited, committed, both financially and sort of time and advocating. All right.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So next time we’re going to do one of these podcasts. We’re going to keep going on this topic, but we’re going to talk about, okay, once you have figured out what your board giving goal should be, then how do you go about soliciting the board?

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So that’ll be our next podcast topic.

Amy Eisenstein:
All right, perfect. That’s where I was going with that. I didn’t know I was going there, but that’s where I was going.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes.

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent. All right. Thanks for listening this time, and we’ll see you next time. Thanks, everybody.