Podcast: Mastering Capital Campaign Leadership: A CEO and Executive Director’s Guide
Season 4, Episode 10
In this episode, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt dive deep into the critical role of CEOs and Executive Directors in leading successful capital campaigns. As the central figures, these leaders often feel overwhelmed by the complex, multi-faceted demands of a campaign, managing everything from program planning to board involvement, and campaign operations.
Tune in to learn how to transform your role as the campaign’s chief communicator into one that promotes collaboration, engagement, and ultimately, campaign success!
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Amy Eisenstein:
If you’re an executive director or CEO and it feels like your campaign is all over the place, this episode is for you.
Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder, Andrea Kihlstedt. And today we are dedicating this episode to executive directors and CEOs who are the champions of their organizations and their campaigns of your organization and your campaigns.
Capital Campaign Leadership for CEO’s and Executive Directors
So, Andrea, campaigns can feel very out of control and organizations have them when they’re going through significant growth. So the head of the organization is responsible ultimately for conducting and leading a smooth campaign.
So how should they think about this? And we’re going to discuss what challenges they run into, or potential challenges and roadblocks, and how they might think of smoothing out some of the bumps and running an effective campaign.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, I think of campaigns as though they are multi-headed beasts. The word hydra, hydra is that from the Greek? Multi-headed hydra. Sort of a snake with three heads, right?
The 3 “Heads” of the Capital Campaign “Beast”
And often the executive director or the CEO, because they run the organization generally, thinks they’re responsible for all of those heads. Now, what are the heads?
- So you have the program operation and the planning ahead that often leads to a campaign, that’s usually where the executive director, CEO fits.
- Then you have the board, which should play a major role in the campaign.
- And then you have the campaign itself, the campaign chair or whoever is heading up the campaign. And the development staff that’s working with the campaign chair and actually making the campaign happen.
What Happens When these “Heads” Don’t Get Along
So we have three different areas of responsibility, and it’s very common not to think about those areas as coming together into one unified team. They often don’t in fact. And when that happens, when they don’t come together, you can have all kinds of trouble.
You can have board members that go rogue, as we just heard about recently where there were a few board members who were sort of griping about the campaign. I mean, they didn’t know enough and they didn’t understand the importance of their role as being supporters of the campaign. And you have the board that didn’t really understand its role in the campaign and were anxious about how much money they were going to give and what their jobs should be.
And then you had the executive director who thought it was all her responsibility, but it was having trouble getting her work done just in general, right? Big problem.
Amy Eisenstein:
And then you have the development staff, and maybe it’s one or two people, but maybe it’s a few more. Or even the program staff, the program directors who feel disengaged, disenfranchised, don’t know what’s going on. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of campaigns where the whole development staff isn’t part of core information, even if it’s not decision-making, just being in the know is problematic. So yeah, there’s a lot of moving parts, right?
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. And it’s totally disconcerting when you feel like there are a lot of moving parts and that part A, part B, part C, don’t know enough about what’s going on and aren’t unified. So what can you do about that?
Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. I think it’s an important thing. And the executive director sort of, I don’t know what’s the right analogy, if they’re the linchpin that’s holding all these moving parts together or if they’re the chief communicator, let’s talk about them as the chief communicator for a minute. Because I think that they’re in the best position to communicate effectively, to bring people together, to make sure that people understand their roles and responsibilities, and that everybody’s talking to one another and that next steps are clear, why they’re doing what they’re doing.
And then you throw a consultant in the mix and it has the potential to get really messy.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. One of the ways to address this, Amy, is not just to put it on the back of the CEO or the executive director because they are under huge amounts of pressure anyway. But to say, all right, why don’t the executive director begin by figuring out who the players are who are responsible for the different pieces of the organization that are involved in the campaign and in the planning for the growth that’s going on for which the campaign is raising money. Often the people there are the executive director, the board chair, the campaign chair, and often the head development staff person, or sometimes the development chair of the board, it depends on the organization, but someone representing the actual fundraising arm of the organization. So you have three or four people who each have under them some significant aspect of the organization.
And if you were to bring those people together regularly as a regularly meeting team, I think you would have the beginning of a process that would start to make sense. Where let’s say they would come together on a Zoom meeting every other week, and where they would talk about not only the campaign but they would talk about what the plans were for moving forward, what the plans were for the building project, how the board was feeling, and when the board was going to be informed, and how the board was going to be informed about the campaign and about their fundraising.
How the board chair and the campaign chair were going to work together, because their roles do sort of overlap and sometimes the campaign chair is the board chair and sometimes the campaign chair is someone on the outside. But if you pull those people together regularly, you have to start.
Amy Eisenstein:
It’s interesting, we didn’t talk about it this way as we were planning for this call, but to me now it sounds like you’re describing the core committee or close to the core committee. We can talk about that in a second, if you agree or disagree.
But I do want to back up for just a minute, because I think we’ve been a little rambly today, and talk about how we came to this topic or this idea and why we think it’s important. So if you are a client or a member, as we talk about our clients of Capital Campaign Pro, you as the CEO or executive director are invited to a monthly CEO Roundtable just for our clients, just for our members, in order to have a strategic and confidential conversation with no board members in the room, no development staff, and really just discuss executive leadership challenges of running a campaign.
Common Capital Campaign Challenges
So this conversation or this topic idea came as a result of this week’s CEO Roundtable where the heads of organizations, of campaigns that we’re working with, come together to discuss their challenges. And one of the challenges that came up was this idea of how to manage through rapid growth. And one of, well, I’d like to say all of our clients are going through rapid growth. That’s what campaigns are about, they’re about building capacity.
But this particular organization is going from serving 1,000 people at a time, I think kids and teenagers, to close to 10,000 kids and teenagers. And if you don’t communicate well in lots of directions, you’re going to have trouble. You’re going to have a lot of growing pains both with the campaign and programmatically and on the board and in the community.
So I think it was a great conversation. And so I just sort of wanted to wind us back to how we got to this topic because I think it’s important to think through that this isn’t easy for anybody, and it’s important to have these discussions and think through how it’s going to work at your organization and think through your communication strategies and what role is everybody going to play.
On Capital Campaign Committees and Parking Lot Discussions
Okay. Back to you. Does it sound like a core committee we’re talking about?
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, what we talk about in the Capital Campaign Pro Toolkit, what we talk about a core committee as a group of people that is pulled together to work on the feasibility study. Now that group can continue on, but you would build it slightly differently if you were doing it for the feasibility study than you would if you think about it in a different sort of way.
So it’s close.
Amy Eisenstein:
I wasn’t thinking about a feasibility study committee, but you’re right. The core leaders of the team that come together to plan early, early on in the campaign and throughout the campaign, right?
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. And I think what I think of in this context of how do you keep the leaders all moving forward during this time of growth and disruption and stress, which it is, is to have a group that comes together specifically about that.
To keep one another informed, to understand their discrete roles, for the board chair to understand what his or her role is with regard to the board members and governance as it relates to the campaign and to the current growth. To have the campaign chair understand how his or her role overlaps with the board chair or the executive director chair. And to have them all come together so that they can be in lockstep. And when there is a problem, they can discuss it and figure out whose facet is best suited to dealing with a problem.
For example, one of the problems that was voiced at our meeting was the problem of a board member — a wealthy board member — who for some reason or other had some gripes with the campaign and had started sort of down talking, sort of bad-mouthing this whole project. I mean, who knows why.
Amy Eisenstein:
Right. It happens in the parking lot after meetings —
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes, exactly.
Amy Eisenstein:
… The parking lot conversations.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Parking lot conversations. So if you had a group like this together… In our call, the executive director sort of felt like it’s her responsibility to deal with it. But if you had a group like this that was working together of the board chair, the campaign chair, the executive director, you could bring that to that group and say, “All right, what are we going to do about Suzy Q?”.
Because it’s a problem. And then you could say, well, the campaign chair has a close relationship with Suzy Q, or the board chair could talk to Suzy Q about whether she should stay on the board given her disgruntledness.
So by having a small group that comes together regularly, it becomes a place where that executive director could quietly raise this question and make the solution not just hers but take it on as a leadership team. And I think that would be really a good way to get through the campaign. I mean, Suzy Q is only one of many problems that come up through campaigns that shouldn’t be on the back of the executive director only.
Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. And I love the word that you used, lockstep.
You want the leadership team, the head of development, the head of the board, the campaign chair working in lockstep. When campaigns go awry, often it is because people have different visions or going in different directions or just don’t have the right information or all of the information or don’t have a support system.
And so I think this idea of bringing the heads of each arm of the organization together on a regular basis, whether it’s weekly, whether it’s every other week, to discuss the challenges, the opportunities, the next steps, and to support one another through this unprecedented rapid growth of the organization is going to be critical for success.
And then just to say something about this disgruntled board member. Raising it at a board meeting, which I think sort of the default often for board chairs is to bring things up at a board meeting. It’s not always effective. It’s not the most effective. So then having the opportunity regularly to say:
”Okay, we have this issue, let’s strategize, who’s going to talk to Suzy Q board member one-on-one, because she’s really disrupting the campaign. She is causing dissent and sowing doubts, and it’s not going to work for the long-term effort of this organization.”
A Page from Andrea’s Personal Campaign Experience
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, this conversation has brought back to me thoughts of a campaign I did, I don’t know, 10, 12, 15 years ago where the organization did this. They got together, this leadership group, was informal group, and they met the board, chair, the executive director, the campaign chair met I think every other week, something like that. Only if they needed to meet more frequently they did.
But after a while, it became kind of a regular habit that they would meet at the local bar and have a glass of wine on Friday evenings after work or something like that. I mean, they really bonded, it wasn’t that anyone came with a written agenda. They became a team that they could count on to think through issues and problems as they arose and to figure out how to deal with them, how one or another would play roles in helping them.
And I think they all loved being part of that. I remember at the very end of the campaign when the campaign was successful and they reached their goal, those three women, they all happened to be women, those three women all took themselves out for a terrific dinner to celebrate these three years of Friday glasses of wine.
Amy Eisenstein:
Yes. It was the end of an era. It’s funny, I’ve heard you tell a story about campaign committees like that that didn’t want to break up. They wanted to stay and meet because they were having such a good time. And so I thought, that’s where you’re going with this. But it’s a similar kind of idea.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Same idea. But this isn’t the formal committee. It’s sort of the three of us are heading up this organization during this period, we should get together regularly. So it doesn’t even have a name really on the org chart. It’s less formal than that, but it’s more important than that in a way. Or it can be, anyway. You can set it up a variety of ways, but it depends. I suppose the executive director can invite the other people to the table and say:
“Why don’t we meet regularly just so we’re all on the same page and we can discuss things going forward?”
But in this particular campaign I was talking about, one of those women actually ended up surprisingly making the lead gift to the campaign.
Amy Eisenstein:
Or not surprisingly.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, was a surprised, I mean, I don’t think she had expected to give the lead gift to the campaign. But she became more and more engaged, she became more and more invested. She started looking for ways in which she could do that.
Amy Eisenstein:
So she may have been surprised, but we shouldn’t be surprised that the most engaged person… High engagement yields high giving.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes, of course. But it wasn’t set up for that purpose.
Amy Eisenstein:
Right. No, I know. I understand what you’re saying.
All right. Well, I think we’ve had some good musings for today. I hope listeners have taken away a nugget or two as we always do. And the leadership team is important, and we will revisit this topic again and again because I think it’s such a critical piece of campaign success in the campaign puzzle.
So thanks for listening. Thanks for joining us. Andrea, I’ll see you next time.
Poet says
Is there a transcript?
Brian Brolin says
We’ll have one up soon! We usually post the transcript a day or two after the podcast goes live.