Podcast: Setting Effective Goals to Manage Your Capital Campaign Without Overwhelm

Season 4, Episode 27

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt dive into one of the most pressing challenges for nonprofit leaders: managing a capital campaign on top of an already packed workload. If you’re an executive director or development professional, you know the demands of juggling end-of-year fundraising, annual campaigns, galas, and donor management. Adding a $5 million or $10 million campaign can seem impossible, but Amy and Andrea share practical strategies to make it manageable.

Whether you’re facing your first capital campaign or looking for tips to refine your approach, this episode delivers actionable insights to help you prioritize effectively, avoid common pitfalls, and achieve your campaign goals.

Listen Now:

Amy Eisenstein:
I’ll bet your board expects you to take on a campaign on top of all of your existing already overwhelming job. If that’s the case, today’s episode is for you.

Hi, I am Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder, Andrea Kihlstedt, and today we are going to talk about your work goals and how to get it all done and what you might not be able to get done and how to prioritize and everything that comes along with plopping a campaign on top of your already overwhelming job as executive director, as development director.

Whatever seat you hold, you are probably not sitting around twiddling your thumbs or reading a novel at work with your feet up. And so the question on the table is, how are you supposed to manage a campaign in addition to all of your other roles and responsibilities?

Managing a Capital Campaign In Addition to Other Responsibilities

Andrea, this is a question that came up in our weekly client group coaching call. So what was your response when the topic came up or how do you want to tackle this?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I mean, it’s such a good and important topic because it’s a problem for most everybody who is a staff member doing a capital campaign. And it always makes me either laugh or cry. I’m not sure which.

In all my years of fundraising, I have never gone into a development shop and seeing the development director with their feet up on the desk reading a novel because they didn’t have enough to do. It doesn’t happen. It’s not the kind of work we do. It’s not the kind of business we’re in. Everybody is scrambling to raise as much money as they can for their cause with or without a capital campaign. And lo and behold, here comes this mega capital campaign. I mean, a capital campaign isn’t a little thing.

It’s like all of a sudden people are tasking you with raising $5 million or $10 million or $20 million on top of what you already do and you would be well served to say, how in heaven’s name am I going to do that with everything else?

Now, one of the answers to that question is, do you need to hire staff? If so, how do you think about hiring staff? But that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. What we’re going to talk about today are:

• How do you set goals?
• How do you set goals for yourself so that the capital campaign doesn’t fall off your radar in the rush of getting everything done?

I mean, particularly end of year fundraising, end of fiscal year fundraising and gala time, when you’re going to be totally crazed just to get the regular work done.

So how do you go about thinking about campaign goals that are going to help you make sure that the work of the campaign is getting done at the same time everything else is happening?

Amy Eisenstein:
I just want to say that I love this topic. I think it’s so important because you know, Andrea, and listeners may know too, I am a ridiculous goal setter. And every year, I have a big hairy audacious goal and I break it down into monthly tasks and daily tasks and weekly responsibilities. And that’s somewhat what we’re going to talk about here, although it’s not neat and evenly divided or wrapped up in a bow like that, but I think the concept is still the same.

You have this big hairy, audacious goal of a capital campaign and it’s overwhelming to look at it all at once. So the question is, how can you divide it into manageable tasks? And I think that’s part of the topic for today.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s right. Now, I should say that I realize what a total kook Amy is about goal setting. When I said that one of my goals for the years was to take naps and she said, “Well, that’s a lousy goal. You have to tell me how many naps a week or a day you’re going to take.” I said, oh my goodness.

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, daily naps. I said, daily naps. Be specific about your goals. Yes, Andrea, you didn’t like that one bit, did you?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It just made me laugh.

How We’re Approaching this Subject

So listen, here’s the way we’re going to approach this subject. Primary thing on your mind with a capital campaign is probably the amount of money you have to raise. And let’s say for the sake of this discussion that you have to raise $10 million in your capital campaign.

It would be tempting to say, well, why don’t we break that amount down by the number of months of our campaign and then we’re going to raise that amount of money every month. Then every month I come in, I say, well, my goal is to raise X number of dollars this month, and if I do that every month, then by the end I’m going to have reached my capital campaign goal.

Amy Eisenstein:
And lots of people do think that way, that if they have a three-year campaign and they’re raising $9 million to make it a round number, then every year of three years they’re going to raise $3 million, but of course, it doesn’t work that way. So let’s talk about how it does work and how people should think about tackling this big goal.

Point to Remember — Capital Campaigns Are Top-Heavy

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So why doesn’t it work that way? It doesn’t work that way because capital campaigns are top-heavy. You solicit the top gifts, the biggest gifts first, and you gradually work down your gift range chart to solicit smaller and smaller gifts. That’s the way campaigns are designed. And they’re designed to do that because when you bring in the largest gifts, you begin to build ahead of steam and a load of confidence that are going to spark the people who give lesser gifts, smaller gifts to make their contributions.

But if you think about it as being Even Steven, you’re not going to have the opportunity to build that kind of energy and excitement that comes with having the top gifts coming first.

Navigate These Big Goals with Your Gift Range Chart

So if you want to set your goals, you have to use your gift range chart. That’s the chart that shows how many gifts do you need at what levels to get to your goal. And if you go to that chart, which it turns out is the chart that drives much of your campaign planning, if you go to that chart and you start saying, well, all right, let me set goals based on how this chart is set up and in the first part of my campaign, I’m going to work on raising these top 10 gifts or the top three gifts or the top five gifts. And then when those are pretty far along, then I’m going to broaden and go to the next 10 or 20 gifts.

After that, I’m going to go to the next 30 or 40 gifts. That thinking that starts very narrow at the top and gradually broadens would be a guide to how you think about setting your own priorities. So it may be that this month your job is to get the solicitations going for the top three gifts of your campaign. That would be a good goal.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, getting meetings with three donors over the next six weeks or months, right? And so instead of thinking about I have to raise $10 million, really it’s $2 million from the top two people, or whatever it turns out to be.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s right.

Amy Eisenstein:
And that’s much more manageable. And so instead of worrying about the ribbon cutting and the kickoff and the public phase and the celebrations and donor recognition, really the focus is how can I get meetings or when can I schedule meetings with the top three people and what is the strategy for cultivating and soliciting those gifts and then it’s much more manageable. Those are great short-term goals.

Managing Your Time Effectively Throughout a Capital Campaign

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Now, one of the things that I often encourage people to do is to set a goal that is very tactical and specific, and that’s to set aside a certain amount of time, perhaps two hours every Monday or on a specific day, but every week, you will set aside a certain amount of time during which you will only work on securing meetings with top donors or with the donors for your campaign. That’s all you’re going to do…

• You’re not going to go on those meetings.
• You’re not going to be having meetings.
• You’re just going to be sitting there — you’re going to be emailing people, you’re going to be following up. You’re going to be calling people.
• You’re going to be doing everything you can to actually get meetings on your calendar in the days and weeks ahead.

You can have a very specific goal, and Amy, you’re going to be proud of me. You can say, every Monday from 10 to 12, I am going to spend all of that time identifying the people who I don’t yet have meetings with but who are next on the priority list and doing as much as I can to tie down those meetings with the goal of getting meetings with at least half the people I reach out to or something like that. I mean, as specific as you can be.

Of course you won’t always succeed. Sometimes you need two or three emails and a few phone calls and help from other people. But if you dedicate that time to getting meetings, then you will actually go on meetings, right? It’s like A follows, B follows C, or C follows A, right? And once you actually go on meetings, you’re actually going to raise some money.

So focus on how you’re going to spend your time getting meetings.

It’s All About Prioritization

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. And you had a throwaway comment there, but I just want to bring it to the forefront here. It may involve other people. So you may be reaching out to a board member and drafting an email for them to send to help secure a meeting. It may not simply be emailing the person. You may be working with the gatekeeper. You may be going through board members. You may be researching on LinkedIn, how to approach them, who knows them, who do you know that knows the person?

So there might be more involved in securing the meeting, which is fine, which is why you need two hours and not 15 minutes because sometimes getting meetings is complicated. But if that’s the top priority, then that’s what you will be focused on and what you’ll be doing.

But we talk with our clients, prospective clients daily about how to manage campaigns with relatively small teams, relatively small development teams, the executive director, a development director, maybe there’s another development person on staff and they may or may not be able to hire help, administrative support and other things, but one of the things that I always say is that our jobs as consultants is to help prioritize. I mean, delegating is great too, but really, it’s about prioritizing, and that’s what you’ve just done, Andrea.

You don’t have to work on the campaign for 40 hours a week. You need to really move the needle on the most important things. And if you can do that week in and week out for a couple hours a week, you’re going to be successful in your campaign.

Andrea’s Real-Life Example

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Let me tell you a little story about this. It’s always fun to hear stories. I worked on a campaign where the organization was set out to raise $8 million. It was the first-time campaign for these people. They had never been on a campaign before and they were just full of energy and excitement and trying to figure out what to do.

And I focused them like a laser on their top gift. They had one family foundation that had been a primary funder of this organization for a long time, and if they were going to get a really big gift, it was going to be from that organization. And they thought maybe they could get a million dollars from that organization. And I said, “Well, you know what? Why don’t we set about building talking to them and seeing if we could get $2 million instead of a million on your $8 million campaign?” And we took that as the focus. I said:

“If you can bring in that gift at $2 million, it will anchor your whole campaign.”

You could tell they were anxious about that idea and they wanted to go and solicit everything else and do everything else because it made them anxious, but we actually focused on that. They went and had a meeting to tell these people about the campaign. They learned more about the family that had some changes in it and about the people who are currently running the foundation, lots of backing and forthing. And in the end, in the end, and this is the early phase of the campaign, they had the courage to ask this organization for $2 million. And lo and behold, within the month, they had an informal commitment from this organization of $2 million just focusing like a laser on that one gift.

Amy Eisenstein:
That’s why the quiet phase of campaigns are so long — over a year, usually two years — because these gifts are not quick, fast or easy, but they’re top priorities. And so slowing down to take the time to focus on them and put all of your energy and all of your brain power towards getting those top 10 to 20 gifts really makes or breaks the campaign.

And so you don’t have to be running around like a chicken with your head cut off doing 100 things. You don’t have to be managing 100 campaign volunteers. You don’t have to be planning a ribbon cutting. You don’t have to be doing all of these other things.

Now, I don’t want to diminish the amount of work that A CEO does in terms of planning the project. There are certainly other things going on when there’s a campaign happening, but if you can be laser-focused on these top, top gifts, other things will start to become clear.

Final Thoughts

Andrea Kihlstedt:
As you move into the later phases of the campaign, the broader phases of the campaign, that’s when it becomes very difficult to keep everything going because these broader phases, when you’re actually raising less money from more people, take a ton of work, and that’s when you’re going to need additional staff to help you, right?

In these first — soliciting these top 10 gifts, if you focus on that. You can do it while you’re doing all the rest of your job. So it’s a funny business. The biggest part of the fundraising you actually can do while you’re going full steam at your annual fundraising and Giving Tuesday and the gala and everything else just by saying:

“All right, we need 10 gifts here. Let’s just chug through and get that done.”

So Amy, I think this is an important point. I hope we’ve made it well.

Amy Eisenstein:
Great. Well, I want to encourage listeners to visit the Capital Campaign Pro website. If you’re thinking about a campaign, getting ready for a campaign, planning a feasibility study, or worrying how on earth you’re going to do all of this, visit the Capital Campaign Pro website and sign up to talk to us. We’d love to hear from you and learn what’s going on at your organization.

So thanks for listening and thanks for being here and we’ll see you next time.