Podcast: Should You Hire a Capital Campaign Consultant? What Nonprofits Need to Know

Season 6, Episode 3

A capital campaign may be the largest fundraising effort your nonprofit ever undertakes, but is hiring a campaign consultant really worth the investment?

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt explain why experienced capital campaign counsel can make such a significant difference when the goals are high, donor relationships are at stake, and your staff and board are entering unfamiliar territory.

This episode will help nonprofit executives, development directors, board members, and campaign leaders decide whether they need outside counsel, understand what a consultant should contribute, and identify the experience that matters most.

Listen Now:

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Amy Eisenstein:
To hire a consultant or not to hire a consultant? That’s today’s question.

Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder, Andrea Kihlstedt. And today we are talking about the whys and what fors about hiring a campaign consultant. If you’re planning a campaign, you may be struggling with this question. Your board may be wondering, is it worth the investment? And I recently talked to an executive director who, in theory, wanted to hire a consultant, but then when it came down to the nuts and bolts, wasn’t quite sure what the expectations were.

When Should You Consider a Capital Campaign Consultant?

So, Andrea, we’ve been talking about this, preparing for the episode. Set it up for us. When and how should organizations think about working with a campaign consultant and why? Why? I guess that’s the question.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So let me start this way, Amy. You know, most nonprofit organizations do a capital campaign, have a capital campaign only once every 15 or 20 years. Yeah. It’s rare that you find one that does it every 10 years, every once in a while, but not often. So that means that it is not the kind of fundraising that people get good at inside the organization. Right. I mean, actually, very few people stay in organizations in their fundraising department of an organization for 20 years. It doesn’t happen.

So the chances of someone being in the development director job, even the executive director job, having become an expert in capital campaign fundraising just by being in that organization is very, very slim. In fact, nonexistent. What we find is that people who are development directors may have worked on pieces of one campaign or another in various organizations, but no one says I’m an expert in capital campaigns because they’re not.

The only people who really develop an expertise in capital campaign fundraising are people who do one campaign after another, and they are campaign consultants. For some reason or another, you know, have shifted out of the internal position of being a development director and simply work with organizations who are doing campaigns. And they literally do 5 campaigns, 10 campaigns, 20 campaigns, 30 campaigns. I bet I worked on 50 campaigns in the course of my career.

Amy Eisenstein:
I actually know a lot about capital campaigns. Yeah. So the same is true for board members. They may have served on the board of an organization here or there or even multiple ones that have gone through campaigns. They have sort of one perspective. They see what’s happening, but they’re not – involved or engaged at a deep level with the strategy, the planning from beginning to end for multiple campaigns.

So I think the point is that really only campaign consultants have the experience and the expertise of having been through dozens and dozens of campaigns.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You know, the other thing to keep in mind is that Capital campaigns are a very particular kind of fundraising, and two things really stand out.

One is that the goals are always much higher than the organization has ever undertaken before. So it’s very common to see a campaign where the organization has an operating budget, let’s say, of a million dollars, and they have a capital campaign that they’re working on for $30 million. Right. or $40 million, the big, big jump. And they have never before done any fundraising of that scope. They may do annual fundraising. They may have small campaigns, but not big capital campaigns where they’re raising a ton of money. That makes it very, very high stakes and very, very important.

Now, related to that, is the notion that that money, the campaign money, comes from their most important donors. Some of it may come from public sources, but for the most part, it comes from foundations or individuals who have been involved in those organizations for a great many years. And the relationships between the organization and those people are incredibly important. They will make or break the campaign, and the organization needs to do an incredibly good job of taking those donors through a campaign and then stewarding them. So the stakes are incredibly high when an organization takes on a campaign.

And to wrap around to the earlier topic, no one in the organization really knows a lot about how to do a capital campaign.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. I mean, we hear this all the time, you know, should we hire a campaign consultant? You know, it’s expensive. Do we need to invest? Why can’t the staff just do it? And for all the reasons that you’ve talked about, the high stakes, the, you know, raising 10 times, 20 times, 30 times what you normally raise. without any additional staff or resources, or most importantly, expertise, training, outside perspective, all the things that a good campaign consultant brings to the table is of utmost importance.

Now, you know, the reason that I raised the topic today is that I was just recently talking to somebody who’s thinking about hiring us, and really, she’s thinking about this just as another staff person. You know, she wants somebody to come in and sort of do the work of the campaign. And I think there’s a really important distinction to be made between staff and consultants.

First of all, hiring someone to come in and do the campaign who has tons of experience is going to be cost prohibitive for most organizations. It’s just not practical. There’s a reason that consultants are consultants and staff members are staff members. And staff, for the most part, are implementers. They’re the ones with the relationships. They’re doing the work of the campaign while consultants come in, provide the strategy, the plan, the experience and the expertise, the guidance, the cadence, sort of the timing of the campaign.

Campaign Consultants Bring Valuable Training to the Table

And, of course, training everybody from board members to staff members all the way up and down the organization. Why don’t you talk a little bit about this outside perspective or, you know, ability for consultants to talk at every level of the organization? I’ve heard you talk about that before.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes, it’s so important. You know, I’ve always, I’ve been a consultant all my professional career. fundraising career. And I’ve always really loved the role of being an outsider. It’s a role where you get a lot of power as an outsider, as opposed to being on the inside and within the political you know, shenanigans that goes on in every organization.

So if you come in as an outside consultant, then the board and the staff have decided to hire you and they’re going to pay you for your expertise as an outsider. You come in with a lot of clout. People are going to listen to you because they’ve paid for your expertise. So when you come and say, well, here’s what we should do, and here’s, let’s put together this committee, or here’s an agenda for this committee, or here’s the way we should be thinking about that, people actually jump too.

People say, OK, yes, they follow you. It gives you a tremendous amount of ability to move things along. But if you were on the inside, you’re just one of many voices. So consultants learn over time to be very good at wielding that outside power. They know how to do it. They know how to bring people along on the inside. And people on the inside come to rely on their outside expertise. They see it as politically helpful. As the outsider, consultants also have access to people at every level of the organization.

So outside consultant can be talking to the board chair, can be talking to the executive director, can be talking to the development director, can even be talking to the development assistant, can be helping the development assistant understand how to do things better.

So the outside consultant can be talking to everybody without being anyone’s person, right? Their goal is to make this campaign work, and they can be talking to everybody in the organization so that everyone understands their roles, knows how to make the campaign function and work well with a minimum of stress and political shenanigans.

Campaign Consultants Mitigate Political “Shenanigans” That Derail Campaigns

Amy Eisenstein:
I love that you bring shenanigans into it. I think every nonprofit and board can relate to that, unfortunately, for better or for worse.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Let me just say a little more about that. First of all, like anything else, the more you learn about a particular thing like capital campaigns, the more you understand, right? You develop an instinct about how things work. so that you can make judgments and decisions that turn out to be right, and you can make them quite easily and quickly, because you’ve seen these situations again and again and again. I mean, that’s what experience gives you, the ability to analyze a situation, to see a situation, to ask the right questions, and to make decisions that will benefit the entire process, and to do it without having to say, well, should it be this or should it be that, you know, getting bogged down.

So when someone really is an expert in capital campaigns, they know how to do this business. They know what has to go first and second and third. They know why they’re not doing it one way and are doing it another way. That helps everybody start to build confidence and to move forward.

Campaign Consultants Help You Avoid Costly Mistakes

Amy Eisenstein:
I’m so glad you raised that. Some of the questions I’ve gotten recently are about how many hours will you spend with us or work on this campaign? And what really a valuable consultant can do is make decisions quickly. And so you’re paying them for 20 years of experience, not for the one hour that they’re sitting there with you. They can look at your budget, at your case for support, at your campaign plan, at your gift range chart, at your pipeline of donors, and know, based on the 20 or 30 campaigns that they’ve worked on over the last 10 or 20 years, what will work or what doesn’t work. And you’re paying them to help you avoid costly mistakes.

And I think that that’s, you know, the trouble that organizations get into. They don’t know what they don’t know. So sometimes common sense is not the same as campaign sense. And, you know, ChatGPT and Claude spit out campaign garbage, unfortunately. You know, I’ve had people come to me, oh, well, he asked Claude for a campaign plan. Well, you know, it’s giving you terrible advice. Somebody telling me, well, you know, the first thing we’re doing is planning a cocktail party. Okay, that’s what Claude said. Then you’re getting what you paid for.

I, you know, it’s upsetting. It’s sad. You’re investing in this big opportunity for growth. And then we have organizations that come back to us that haven’t planned well and come back and they don’t even know if they’re stuck or not.

And so to me, I know we’re totally biased. We’re campaign consultants. So we’re saying you need them. But that’s what decades of experience shows us. And it just is so upsetting and heartbreaking when an organization comes. They’ve been working on this for two, three, four years, and they don’t know why they’re stuck, and if they’re stuck, what to do next. And, you know, it’s so much harder to get someone unstuck when they’ve made all these you know, to us, very obvious mistakes, which no fault of their own.

How would they have known? But that’s the reason to work with someone who has tons of experience.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You know, Amy, I love Claude. Claude’s my… I call her Claudette. Thank you very much. But she’s my bestie.

Amy Eisenstein:
Guru, yes. She’s my bestie guru. So I’m a big fan of Claudette.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I use her all the time. She and I have conversations almost every day. Oh, boy. One thing or another. And if you prompt her properly, she can give good advice. Yes. What she can’t do is to hold your hand as you walk through what is really a very… complex business. It’s a complex business that requires judgment, good judgment all the time. And I totally believe in getting as much out of AI as possible and learning as much as possible. I agree. And having a real live person who has seen it all, who has been through campaign after campaign to hold your hand and to be at your campaign committee meetings, for example.

There’s nothing like being the campaign expert at a campaign committee meeting. Everybody who is on the committee is so happy that there’s an expert in the room. Instead of wandering around trying to figure out what to do, they turn to the expert. They say, well, what do you think of this, and what have you seen, and what’s your experience? And as a campaign expert, you can say, I’ve seen this before, and this is what I see works, and this is what I see doesn’t work, and let me suggest that we move down this path. And everyone heaves a sigh of relief because you’ve been in the room. And Claude or Claudette can’t be in the room for you. That’s not what happens. That’s not her function and not her purpose.

The Benefit of a Team Approach to Capital Campaign Consulting

So, you know, one of the things that we do at Capital Campaign Pro, which just tickles me, is we have a dozen advisors, consultants who work with our clients at Capital Campaign Pro. And every week we have a group meeting from anyone who wants to come to bring to the table. Things that are going on to workshop something that’s going on with one or another of their clients. And we have these unbelievable discussions, these rich, deep discussions about what’s happening here and what are the various strategies and how to move ahead best and how to handle this.

It’s amazing to put that much expertise in a room, in a Zoom room, and actually workshop a situation with people who have been through myriad campaigns and to see how much wisdom comes out of those groups and then you can go back to the client.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. So in fact, your consultant actually has a whole team of people that they’re consulting with. If they… haven’t seen the situation. Or, you know, if there’s something especially sticky or tricky, you know, they can come to five or 10 people who have worked on hundreds of campaigns. Yeah, I mean, that is what makes our team magical in our opinion, right? Is that it’s not just one consultant with one client, but all the consultants leaning on one another.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Sometimes I think to myself, when I sit in on one of those calls, I think to myself, oh, if only these calls had existed when I was a young consultant just getting going, I would have given anything to have that kind of expertise.

Amy Eisenstein:
So I’m going to do a quick plug for our new book. Sarah Plimpton and I on our team wrote A Board Member’s Guide to Capital Campaign Fundraising. It’s now on Amazon. It is available on our website to buy multiple copies for all of your board members, and it will help answer actually lots of these questions. If board members or maybe your CEO is questioning:

• Should we hire a campaign consultant?
• What do we do next?
• How do we get started on our campaign?
• How can we be successful?

You know, all the questions that your leadership team is asking as you’re thinking about a campaign, this board member’s guide, A Board Member’s Guide to Capital Campaign Fundraising, answers. So there’s a quick plug.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s a good plug. And Amy, you know, I’ve read your book and Sarah’s book, and I think it’s just terrific. I really do. And I’m so super proud of you for having written it. Everyone in the campaign, though your board may not be a fundraising board, your board may not be the group that’s actually making the campaign happen. You may have another group, another committee that’s doing that. But your board needs to understand about capital campaigns because they will play some important roles.

So if you’re going into a capital campaign, whether or not you think to hire us to be your consultant, this book will be a great resource for you. And you should take a look at it. You can go to Amazon and Google Amy Eisenstein board book and see what comes up.

Final Thoughts

But before we leave, Amy, before we leave, I want to go back to this topic of campaign consultants, because everyone listening to this is considering probably hiring a consultant. You may say, well, what kind of a consultant should I hire? And there really is one big mistake that I don’t want you to make, and that is, hiring a consultant that doesn’t have a lot of experience.

Now, that flows from what we were talking about earlier, but it’s not uncommon to see consultants that have worked, for example, for your local hospital campaign, and then the campaign finished at the hospital, and they think they know enough to hang out a shingle and become a local consultant.

Well, I too started out in business many years ago and scrambled my way up, so I have some sympathy for that. But if you’re a nonprofit going into a campaign looking to hire a consultant, those are not the kind of people you should be hiring. You don’t need to be their guinea pig. You do not need to be their guinea pig, right? You need to hire someone who really knows what they’re doing. So the question to be asking is how much experience do you actually have in capital campaign fundraising?

Have you been a consultant that has taken multiple organizations through a campaign? Have those campaigns been successful?

Can we talk to people who have gone through full campaigns with your guidance about that experience and learn about their campaigns?

Don’t hire someone who is new in the business because they’re cheap, right? Keep is not what you want to be working for.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. Or maybe the local person, you know, who’s recently or in the last three or four years has hung out their shingle. They’ll say they’ve worked on three or four campaigns. Dig into that. Find out. Have they led them successfully from start to finish? That’s the question. Have they consulted? Have they been the lead consultant? from start to finish. And I get it. I know everybody needs to get some experience somewhere, but that doesn’t mean they need to get their experience on you.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You know, Amy, you know, and perhaps others listening know that I wrote, I don’t know, 20, 25 years ago, this big book on capital campaigns, Capital Campaign Strategies That Work. And with some frequency over the years, consultants will say to me:

“Oh, your book was a godsend when I did my first campaigns. I had it on my desk and it was dog-eared and I had it all marked up and, you know, I used it to guide me as I helped my clients.”

And while I was delighted that my book was helping consultants, a piece of me said, oh no, you don’t want to hire a consultant that’s using my book. Right? This is not good.

Amy Eisenstein:

All right. Thanks for listening. I think this was good, hopefully helpful. Share the episode with your board members, your leadership team, your executive director. And yes, get the expertise you need to plan your campaign well. You don’t want to be stuck two years from now. You don’t want to make very common mistakes that we see all the time. So set yourself up for success and good luck with your campaign. And we’ll see you next time.