Podcast: The 10-Year Rule: How Often Should Your Nonprofit Run a Capital Campaign?

Season 5, Episode 38

Most nonprofit leaders think of a capital campaign as a one-time event — a massive push that happens once, maybe twice in the life of an organization. But that mindset can actually hold organizations back. The most effective nonprofits treat campaigns as a recurring cycle, and understanding the right cadence can make the difference between an organization that grows strategically and one that stalls.

In this episode, Andrea Kihlstedt and Amy Eisenstein explored the timing and rhythm of capital campaigns — how often to run them, when to start planning, and what to do in between. Their core message: campaigns are healthy for organizations, and you should be running one at least every ten years.

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
Is it time for you to do a capital campaign?

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my co-founder and colleague and partner, Andrea Kihlstedt. Today we are talking about the cadence or timing of campaigns.

How Often Should Your Nonprofit Run a Capital Campaign?

Andrea, what are your thoughts, some initial thoughts, maybe how did this topic come up for you? Or how do you think organizations should think about when to do their next campaign or maybe it’s their first campaign?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes. Thanks, Amy. I want to start with a notion that campaigns are good for organizations. That they really move organizations forward. That they are good for strengthening the fundraising program, for strengthening the bonds and relationships with donors, for getting the organization to think clearly about what the next steps in its growth are going to be. That campaigns are healthy, and an organization should do them every once in a while.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That raises the question of, well, what is every once in a while? The standard way to think about this, and there are lots of variations that we’ll talk about, but the standard way to think about how often to do a campaign is that you should do one at least every 10 years. Why every 10 years?

Why Do a Capital Campaign Every 10 Years?

Well, think about it this way. It’s a cycle. You have three years to plan what your organization is going to do because you don’t, of course, just raise money. You raise money in a campaign to do something bigger, better, different than you’re currently doing. You need three years to plan that effectively. Then you need three years to plan and execute your campaign.

Amy Eisenstein:
Or four. Three or four.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Three or four.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s six or seven years.

Then you need some years to collect all of the pledges because in campaigns, people don’t give just checks. They actually pledge their gifts usually over three years. If people give in the middle of the campaign, then their three-year pledge period just starts then. By the time all of your donors have finished making their gift, that’s nine years.

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, and of course in those last few years, you need to build the project.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s right.

In the 10th year, not only do you need to finish building the project, but you need to run it smoothly and successfully.

Amy Eisenstein:
And steward the donors, and let them know how it went.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And steward the donors. Exactly.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah.

Cycles of Capital Campaigns

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Exactly. Now, what happens then? Then you move back into a planning period, that first three-year planning period where you’re doing strategic planning and you’re saying:

“Well, okay, we’ve done this now. What’s next?”

You move right back into that cycle. 10 years is a nice, easy-to-remember number. Maybe it’s 12 years. Maybe it’s nine years, but maybe it’s 15 years. But something around that is a nice cycle for significant campaigns. Organizations should be thinking in that cycle.

You shouldn’t just think, well, we did one campaign. That’s it. You should be thinking about — well, what’s next? How do we cycle into the next campaign? What is that going to take?

Amy Eisenstein:
Give yourself time between campaigns, not only to collect pledges, but really to implement and execute the project well so that you can really steward the donors and make sure that they understand the impact that it had, and give it a little chance to run before you start planning the next project. That gap in between one campaign and another is important for the organization, for your relationships with donors.

But the key is not to drop the relationships with donors that gave to the campaign between campaigns. That, I have to say, is something we see too often. Usually it’s because staff is moving around after a campaign, staff go elsewhere and then some of those relationships suffer or the fundraising falls through the cracks a bit. I really want to emphasize there’s a lot of work to be done between campaigns in order to get ready for the next one. Okay.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, let me give you a story. Just a very specific story.

A Real-World Example

Just last week, we got a call from a former client saying, “Hey, we’re thinking about another campaign.” All right. That’s interesting.

We had a long conversation, and it turns out that about 10 years ago they started their planning process for a new building. They spent about two or three years planning the building, buying the land, figuring out what was going to go on in the building, developing clear plans. After the first two or three years, they started working on a campaign. They raised a ton of money for their campaign. They built the building. They started using the building.

They’re now just finishing their second year of having run programs in the building, and having brought their donors into the building to see it and having stewarded everybody, and the campaign is done, and it was a big success. The building itself has been a big success. Lo and behold, if they didn’t get a call from one of their major campaign donors saying:

“Hey, I have some money I’d like to give away. What can I do to make your life easier? What can I do to help strengthen the next part of this organization?”

That got them thinking that maybe it’s time for a new campaign.

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, that’s because they had done a really good job stewarding her. She came to every concert.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s right.

Amy Eisenstein:
She came to every program. She was involved, invited, saw the results of her earlier investment.

I don’t want people to think it’s out of the blue or that unusual either. If you do stewardship well, those kinds of things happen more frequently than you’d think.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, and I think though that they had had this concern about, well, is it too soon? Are our donors going to be upset if we go back now? They’ve just finished paying off their pledges. Is it too soon? Should we hold off for a while? When this donor put her hand up and said, “Well, hey, what can I do to help now?” That got them thinking about their next campaign cycle.

Amy Eisenstein:
It’ll take a year or two for them to plan.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s right.

Amy Eisenstein:
It’s fine. That’s good.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s exactly right. That happens to be in real life. We just heard from them last week.

Capital Campaigns Move an Organization Forward

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. Well, I think the fun part of us now being around in the iteration… You’ve been doing capital campaigns for, I don’t know, X number of decade. I’ve been doing them for decades too, but Capital Campaign Pro has been around now for about eight years, and we actually are starting to see lots of our early campaigns coming back to start thinking about their next campaigns, which is so exciting and so meaningful that people want to do their next campaign. Of course we’re over the moon that they want to come back and use us again.

No. Not surprised, but delighted.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes. There’s something else I want to put in the mix here. Campaigns don’t exist by themselves. They are not really about money. Campaigns really are about generating the fuel, the financial fuel to move an organization forward. Campaigns dovetail with effective planning and effective governance.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s not just, “Well, let’s get some more money.” It’s:

“What are we going to do next? What can we do that will serve our community better? What can we do to improve or expand our services to make a bigger difference in the world?”

When you pair that with campaign planning, which of course raises the money to accomplish what it is you’ve decided as you look forward for your organization, that’s the ideal. Now, many organizations have big ideas and big projects, a big building or something like that only every 15 years or so. Maybe even longer than that.

Consider Smaller “Interim” Capital Campaigns

That doesn’t mean that you can’t have smaller campaigns in the middle. That you can’t say:

“Well, we’ve been really successful. We realize that if we could raise $1 million or $2 million, now we could buy several buses to facilitate the transportation to our organization. Or we could do something else specific that is not a 15, 20, $25 million campaign, but the smaller lift, but would also give you a chance to go back to some of your donors.”

While you have this bigger cycle, this bigger 10 or 12 year cycle, you might have some mini campaigns in the middle of that.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah.

When You Might Not Do a Capital Campaign

Let’s talk about a few reasons continuing this theme of timing when organizations might not be ready for a campaign or when they’re overdue potentially for a campaign. I just want to stress that if your organization is operating at a deficit and your annual fundraising is not doing well, a campaign is not going to fix that. It’s not going to get you out of a hole the way some people think it will. If we have big plans, we’re going to be able to raise all this money. People come to us and ask:

“Are we ready for a campaign? What’s the timing of the campaign? Our organization has been around for X, Y, Z years.”

Sometimes it’s a short amount of time, but sometimes they’ve been around for decades. It’s not the actual age of an organization. It’s the maturity of an organization. While I really believe that campaigns can be jet fuel for your major gift program and your annual fundraising, you can’t come in so behind the eight-ball and expect a campaign to get you out of a hole. I don’t know if that’s related to timing, but I wanted to throw it in.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes. I think it’s such an important point. Of course we do hear from organizations like that. That, “The only fundraising we do is our gala, and can we have a campaign? We don’t have any annual fundraising.” Well, difficult to do that.

Campaigns favor organizations that have effective annual fundraising, that have built relationships with donors over time. The donors have come to trust them, to trust the organization, to know what the organization does and to like the organization. That then leads to their being ready to give bigger campaign gifts.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a robust major gift program, although certainly that is helpful. Often campaigns fuel major gift programs, but you do need to have solid annual fundraising. Whether it’s direct mail, online, email, combinations of various things, programs, events, those kinds of things that do generate repeat donors and loyal donors and increased donations amount over time.

Then you can start to work with those in more personal ways. That’s when a campaign also can be really effective.

Why Capital Campaigns Are Healthy for Nonprofits

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, successful campaigns — whether they’re big campaigns or smaller campaigns — are so healthy for an organization:

• They provide opportunities to strengthen your relationship with donors.
• They build excitement among board members.
• They push board members to be more committed and more involved in their organization.
• They push the staff, the development staff and the executive staff to understand real fundraising, to understand what it is to go out and ask someone for $1 million or for $5 million. To have the courage to deal with bigger numbers, and to get out of this poverty mentality that drives so many organizations and hinders their fundraising.

A campaign forces you out of that.

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, it creates an opportunity also to improve your systems and staffing and development infrastructure behind the scenes. It builds capacity. That’s what it does. It doesn’t just build the building or expand your programs. It also expands your internal fundraising savvy and expertise and ability and capabilities. All around good things. I guess if you’re listening to the podcast, you’re planning for a campaign or you’re in a campaign, but you may be working at an organization that’s thinking about it.

Hopefully this was helpful. Or maybe you’re ready for your next campaign and wondering on the timing. That’s what really this episode was about, the timing of the campaign. You might be asking, “Is it too soon?” Maybe it’s time for a smaller campaign, or maybe you are ready to start planning the next campaign. Either way, we hope you’ll reach out and talk to us.

Visit the capitalcampaignpro.com website, and sign up to talk to us. See how we might be able to help you with planning your next campaign. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.