Podcast: How to Engage Your Entire Staff in a Capital Campaign

Season 4, Episode 46

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt explore a topic too often overlooked: how to include your full staff—not just your fundraising team—in the campaign process.

If you’re already in a campaign or just starting to plan, this episode will help you build internal clarity and momentum from the inside out.

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
Does the person who’s sitting at the front desk of your organization know that there’s a capital campaign going on, and would they know what to say if a big donor showed up?

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder, Andrea Kihlstedt, and today we are going to be talking about your staff and how to talk to your staff about a campaign.

Communicating About Your Capital Campaign With Your Organization

So Andrea, let’s get started. How do you think about communicating about the campaign organization-wide and why is it important? Why are we talking about this today?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, I’m so glad we are talking about it, Amy. We don’t talk about it anywhere near enough, and it’s actually a very big topic.

So let’s break it down this way. When you look at the staff of an organization, it breaks down into several categories, and each one of those groups of staff members needs to know about the campaign and how it overlaps with what they do. They need to understand what the timing is. They need to understand how they’re going to be influenced and affected. They need to understand what to say to people that ask them about the campaign.

Amy Eisenstein:
What their role is.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
What their role is. There’s a ton. And one way to break it down is to say, well, let’s look at the four or five key groups of staff members and briefly talk through each of those.

So the first that come to mind is the development staff. Not all of the development staff is going to be involved in the campaign. Maybe you have two or three people who are involved in the campaign, but you may have three or four other people who aren’t who just do annual fund, who do galas, who do other things, who just do data entry. So the first category of people, let me just run through all these categories. First category are development staff.

Second category I think of are the communications and marketing people. Now, sometimes there’s just one person, sometimes two. Sometimes it overlaps with development, but somebody in your shop does communications and marketing, and it is super important that they understand how campaigns work and that they understand what role they’re going to play and when it’s likely to fall on their shoulders to do heavy lifting about the campaign.

The third one that is often a real problem if you don’t address it early, is the chief financial officer. Now that’s usually just one person, but when it goes awry can go really awry, and you need to be sure that the chief development officer understands there’s a campaign happening.

Amy Eisenstein:
Not the chief development officer. Finance. Bookkeeping, whoever’s doing that in your office.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And who’s ever creating the reports and whoever liaises with the accountant, all of that role is super important and is likely to have some rubs with the campaign. So you need to talk to those people so they understand what it’s about.

And then finally, the fourth is all of the program staff from the people sitting at the front desk to the people who are actually doing the work of your organization, who are meeting with your children or who are teaching or who are your therapists or whatever it is you are doing, the people who are tending the animals, the people who would —

Frontline staff, they need to understand what the campaign is and what’s going on for all kinds of important reasons.

Amy Eisenstein:
And you rolled it in together, but I want to create a subcategory of program staff and say front, public-facing staff, so people who are answering the door and the phone and sitting at the front desk and interacting with the public. So I’m going to put them in a subcategory of program staff, but we’ve got some good, good categories.

Communicating with the Development Team

So let’s start with the development team, and then we’ll talk about the communications and marketing team, which may overlap and may be separate at your organization. But let’s talk about the development team. Probably anybody who’s not the development director or the campaign director or who might be primarily on annual fund, not all the way consumed with the campaign. Let’s talk about those fundraising staff members who are not primarily responsible for the campaign. What’s their role and what’s important for them to know?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. So they need to understand what the campaign is, what it’s raising money for, what the objectives are, what the timeline is, what the process of the campaign is. Campaigns tend to go on for two or three years. So the development people need to understand what that process, what those phases look like, and when the campaign is likely to bump into or overlap with their work.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. That’s right. It’s super important because they’re going to have prospects that overlap with campaign prospects and who’s soliciting them, who’s soliciting for what, when, timing, messaging, critically important, yes. So we don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty details of how and when to do that, but raising the issue that fundraising staff need to be educated, involved, brought on board, updated about the campaign, and really understand how their role fits into the overall campaign.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, and maybe a good starting place is for the campaign director or the campaign director and the consultants that you’re working with, or campaign director, consultant, and executive director to sit with all of the full development team and explain what the campaign is about, what the goals are of the campaign, what the timeline is, where they are, how they expect the money to come in and be available to ask questions.

Amy Eisenstein:
And I’m sure that annual fund staff are worried that the annual fund’s going to go down as the result of a campaign, so you’re going to want to talk about the strategy to ensure that that doesn’t happen, and they’re an integral part of that process. And the annual fund shouldn’t go down. It shouldn’t be neglected. It shouldn’t be passed over in favor of the campaign.

So how is it going to be coordinated? How will people be solicited for both? And you will work with your campaign consultant on that strategy to ensure that that doesn’t happen, but your annual fund team needs to be reassured that that is not going to be the case.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And one way to do that is to have perhaps an hour-and-a-half-long meeting where you lay out what the campaign is, give them a chance to ask questions and talk about how they will be involved and updated going forward, just to open the communication so that they’re not feeling like they’re being left in the dark. That’s always a mistake.

Amy Eisenstein:
All right.

Communicating with the Marketing Team

Let’s talk about the communications and marketing team, whether that’s one person, more than one person, however it works at your organization. To me the most important thing for this is that, or the mistake I think, the default that most communications people do, their job is to share news, and they’re going to want to share news about the campaign too soon. That’s what we see.

And so the question is how are we going to keep them quiet in the quiet phase or really educate them about what they can share and what they really can’t share? Why don’t you talk about that?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
A campaign always begins, the first phase of a campaign is this fairly long quiet phase, a planning phase and then quiet phase where you’re actually not talking to the community about the campaign. You’re talking about the project, but not about the campaign. And the communication staff needs to understand strategically how campaigns work with regard to communications. That’s quite different from what they usually do for their organization, which is to get the word out.

In addition to that, most campaigns have a separate logo, a separate brand from the organization’s brand. And the question that will come up is whose job is it going to be to develop the communications plan for your campaign, which is a different plan from the communications plan for your organization.

Amy Eisenstein:
And the campaign collateral and materials.

Who’s responsible for developing that, when, what does it look like, all of those details need to be communicated.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s right. And it may be that you bring in a firm to work with your communications team on that, but your communications team needs to be involved in that decision and needs to really feel like they’re not being sidelined, but they are in the process of making those decisions and discussing it and discussing what they can do and what they can’t do and who else should be involved in doing it.

So again, incredibly important that they understand how a campaign works and what their role is going to be in that communications process for the campaign.

Communicating with the CFO

All right, third, the chief financial officer.

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent. All right, in a second we’re going to talk about chief financial officers, but first I want to encourage listeners to go to our website and on the homepage of capitalcampaignpro.com, almost at the bottom, is a step-by-step guide to capital campaigns, and it will really give you a timeline and a structure and a way to think about this and put our conversation into context in terms of timing. Now, of course, we hope that you will consider working with us so we can work with you on all these various components, but as a first step, go get our step-by-step guide to capital campaigns so that you can see the timeline that we’re, and the progression of a campaign that we’re talking about.

Okay, chief financial officers, what do they need to know? What’s most important?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So if you’re lucky, you, the executive director, development director, in particular, campaign director already have a good relationship with your chief financial officer. That’s not always the case, but it will truly help if you do have a relationship where you can keep the communication open. Because what happens in a campaign is that you want to count things towards the campaign that your chief financial officer is not going to want to count, and the chief financial officer’s reports about how much the organization has brought in, in a given year or a given period are not going to match the campaign reports because you’re in the campaign, you’re going to be counting things in a different way. You’re going to have different rules for counting that aren’t going to comply with FASB rules or aren’t going to comply with what the accountants need.

Amy Eisenstein:
And you may be taking pledges for the very first time.

You may be taking multi-year pledges for the very first time, and you’re going to, of course, count those. You’re also going to count things for donor recognition that may not exactly line up with the money, pledging and matching and different funds, there’s all sorts of things to account for consider. So you really want to be in line with your finance team as you can, and you may bring in your accountant to help you figure this out.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s not that you want to be in line with them so much because you’re not going to be in line with them. You want to be talking to them so that they understand that for the purpose of the campaign not everything is going to line up, that you’re going to be operating with two or even three different reports. One will be a campaign report that is not going to line up with the annual financial report.

Or cash flow, that everyone needs to understand that’s the case. And the sooner you get everyone understanding that, the less conflict there’s going to be, then everybody can be, you can have regular meetings where you discuss where these differences are going to happen with some frequency of a rub, unless you really talk to your financial office early on in the process. And the bigger the operation, the harder these conversations are, by the way, I think, where the financial office is often quite buttoned up in large organizations.

Amy Eisenstein:
So maybe think in a hospital or a college or something like that, in lots of organizations that we work with, smaller community-based organizations, it might be two or three people. But regardless of the size or structure, you need to come to an understanding and have probably a series of meetings to discuss how it’s going to work over the course of the campaign.

Communicating with the Program Staff

Okay. Let’s talk about program staff.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes. So I have a story to start us off here. So Amy pointed out that some of the program staff is outward-facing, is public-facing, and some program staff is not, is doing the work inward, inward-facing but not directly outward-facing.

So years ago I worked for a YWCA, and the executive director was in the early phases of a campaign, the quiet phase of a campaign, and her mom was visiting from out of town and no one knew her mom. So she decided she was going to run a little experiment, and she asked her mom to show up at the front desk and tell the person at the front desk that she was a donor from out of town and that she wanted to make a significant gift to the campaign and wanted to know who she should talk to. And what happened, which is what the executive director feared, is that the person at the front desk didn’t know about the campaign well enough —

Amy Eisenstein:
Said, “What campaign?”
Andrea Kihlstedt:
What campaign, and didn’t know who to send her to and flubbed and mubbed it so that the woman said, “Well, maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, luckily it was an experiment and not a test.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s right.

Amy Eisenstein:
Her person didn’t fail.

The experiment worked the way it was supposed to, and everybody was aware that they needed more education. She proved her point, whether she wanted to or not. But I think that’s such a great story because everybody at the organization interacts with the public in many ways, and you never know who at your organization is going to ask about the campaign, and you want your staff to feel included, like they’re on the inside, they’re in the know.

2 Key Reasons to Update Staff About the Campaign

So whether or not they interact with staff, there’s two reasons, or not staff, with the public. There’s two reasons staff needs to be updated and educated and made aware of so that they can start to feel good and excited and motivated and energized by the campaign.

1. Campaigns should be energizing for a whole organization. They should see big, exciting things coming, and they should be able to respond appropriately when asked.
2. And appropriately is different at different stages of the campaign, so they really need to be updated regularly about what’s going on and what can be shared and what’s not being shared.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
What that points to for me, Amy, is that not only do you have to be thinking to educate all of these portions of your staff in the beginning about what a campaign is, but you have to have regular meetings, whether they’re monthly meetings or quarterly meetings, where the staff comes together and has a chance to be updated on what’s happening with the campaign, has a chance to ask questions, has a chance to update their roles given the phase of the campaign.

This isn’t a once and done thing. It starts out that way, and then you have to keep it going so everybody feels like they’re part of the family of this campaign, and they get excited about what’s going on, and they know how to handle their roles accordingly.

Amy Eisenstein:
I think this is such an important conversation because too frequently we’re just in the vortex of the development office and the campaign does impact lots of other departments, as we’ve discussed. But I think so often in the hustle and bustle and the rush of the campaign and the frenzy of the workday, I think we often neglect other parts of the organization. And they really are unaware of what’s going on in the fundraising office, and it does impact them and it is important, so I’m so glad we had this conversation.

Final Thoughts

So what’s your final recommendation for organizations that are getting ready or heading into a campaign, or maybe even in the middle of a campaign, how can they get this on track?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I think my recommendation is to intentionally develop a plan for informing and educating the various elements of your staff so that nobody is feeling like they’re left out. And you can’t just do that off the top of your head. You really need to sit down with key people. And maybe you sit down, for example, with a couple of people from the development office and plan, okay, how are we going to inform the development office? Maybe you sit down with the external-facing program staff and just say, what’s the best way to do this?

So you need to have an intentional process around developing a plan for informing your staff, and it’s not particularly difficult to do. I think people just don’t stop to think about it. So spend some time talking to the members of your staff, putting together a little plan and a timetable, and then not only carry out an initial education process, but be sure you have monthly or quarterly meetings with various elements of your staff to keep them up to date.

Amy Eisenstein:
Let me bring this conversation full circle. And ideally, as you’re planning for growth for your organization, you’re checking in with all of these departments. The program staff should have been consulted about what are the needs for the strategic plan, for the vision for the campaign. For the campaign objectives, the finance team should have been asked, what are the implications of significant growth over the next three to five years.

So this shouldn’t be the first time they’re hearing about it. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Hopefully, you’ve engaged many of these departments in the planning process, and they’re excited. Like I said, this is about excitement, motivation, growth, momentum, rising the, what’s the, the ship, all the ships rise, the water, the tide, who knows? Anyways, something goes up, and everybody, everybody should be excited about the growth potential for your organization.

And that’s really, everybody should feel good about this process, and we want you to come to these discussions with that mindset that everybody’s excited, everybody’s motivated, everybody’s a cheerleader, and that’s the energy that we want around the campaign. And your whole staff, not just the development staff needs to be involved.

So, all right, Andrea, great conversation today. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.