Podcast: When Your Campaign Plan Changes: Turning Roadblocks Into Opportunities

Season 5, Episode 46

Think your capital campaign plan is set in stone? Think again. The most successful campaigns aren’t the ones that unfold exactly as planned — they’re the ones that adapt when reality has other ideas.

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt explore one of the most important — and least discussed — truths about campaign fundraising: campaign plans change. Whether it’s unexpected zoning challenges, rising construction costs, delayed approvals, shifting project scopes, lost funding sources, or entirely new opportunities that emerge along the way, nonprofit leaders must learn how to navigate uncertainty while keeping their campaigns moving forward.

If your campaign isn’t unfolding exactly as planned, you’re not alone. This episode will help you approach challenges with greater confidence, creativity, and optimism — and may inspire you to see opportunity where you once saw obstacles.

Listen Now:

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Amy Eisenstein:
So you think you have a plan? Well, the universe may know better.

Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my co-founder and colleague, Andrea Kihlstedt. And today we are talking about the ever-changing nature of campaigns and projects. Andrea, how did this topic come up for you?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You know, Amy, in all the campaigns that we work on, and we work on a lot of campaigns, some of them seem to just smoothly roll along. You start with a preliminary campaign plan. You find that you can raise the money. The zoning gets approved. The prices come in where you thought they were going to come in. Construction goes smoothly. You have a ribbon cutting. You raise all the money. And it’s all is well.

Isn’t that wonderful?

Amy Eisenstein:
The dream scenario.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes.

Amy Eisenstein:
It happens sometimes. It does happen sometimes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
But it sure doesn’t happen all the time. And we have a bunch of examples of organizations in which, in one way and another, it didn’t happen the way they thought it was going to happen. And we thought it would be interesting to share some of those stories with you and then talk about how how to approach them, how to deal with them.

Encountering Radical Shifts in Your Capital Campaign Plan

You know, what are the things that you might do that enable you to be stronger even after you have encountered these sometimes-radical shifts in your campaign plan?

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, let me just add, you know, the reality is that when you make a plan, and you’re executing it for the campaign and for your project, two, three, four, five years go by, your plans morph and change and get better and get stronger. And the more rigid you are, and the idea of sticking to the original plan, the harder time you’re gonna have with your campaign and your plans. But if you go into it knowing that things will change and evolve and grow and get better and improve, you’re going to have a much easier time, both, you know, with the fundraising, but just, you know, there’s a little bit of a go with the flow nature to campaigning and campaigns.

Okay, I cut you off. Keep going.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So let me just remind you that when you go into a capital campaign and you do a feasibility study, you’re not just seeing how much money your organization can raise in general. You’re actually testing a plan. So you are pushed to come up with a preliminary plan for what it is you want to do, what you want to accomplish, and what that project is going to accomplish for your community.

So right up front, you have to draft a plan. And notice the word “draft,” right?

Amy Eisenstein:
We use a lot of draft stamps in campaigning.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
But you have to say, all right, we want to build a new building. The building is going to be on the corner of Walnut and Spruce Streets. It’s going to be, you know, 10, I don’t know, 20,000 square feet, and it’s going to cost X number of dollars. And by the time we add the other things we want to do, we think we are going to need to raise $15 million for this project.

Now, that’s a bunch of specific items that are going to be in your preliminary campaign plan, and you’re going to test those with your largest donors to see if they think the plan’s a good idea and to see if they’re going to give the kind of money that you need in order to carry it off, right?

Changing Capital Campaign Plans Are Part of the Process

So right out of the gate, you have put your… what is it, your spade in the ground, your whatever it is you put in the ground to say, here’s what it is, the shovel in the ground, here’s what it is we want to do, right?

And you do test that and you do come back from your feasibility study with a sense, well, we do have the donors, donors are excited about this, everything is copacetic and let’s move into a campaign. But you go along for a while, you raise some of your largest gifts, only to find, for example, that the zoning change that you needed to have happen, though it was all looking pretty positive when you planned this project, that some neighbors got hot under the collar because they thought there was going to be more traffic than they wanted in their neighborhood.

And they created a whole wave of people to stop the zoning change or the… you know, to stop the local municipality from approving the project. Maybe it’s not zoning, maybe it’s something else. But what you thought was going to be clear sailing for that piece of property and that plan turns out wasn’t. And you are stuck. You’ve already raised some money, maybe a significant amount of money, and the project as it was configured isn’t going to be possible anymore.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. So listen, the good news is, I’m just going to jump ahead and then we’ll come back, is that, you know, this happens all the time. And it’s part of the process. And your campaign doesn’t come to a screeching halt. There are things that you do and new plans to be made and hurdles to jump over. And it’s part of the process.

The First Thing to Do When Your Campaign Plans Change

So what’s one thing that people can do when… the plans, whatever it may be, the government funding falls through, the property falls through, some plan changes.

What’s one thing or maybe the first thing that nonprofit leaders might need to think about doing when there’s a wrench in the plans?
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, well, certainly you can’t hide your head in the sand. You can’t pretend nothing’s happened, right? You have to take a deep breath and you have to pull together your largest and most and closest contributors and friends and members, you know, whether they’re board members or campaign committee members or donors, and say, here’s what’s happened. Let us brainstorm and figure out what our other alternatives are. What are the other options?

So you have to put the problem on the table and invite people to help solve it.

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, Andrea, that’s interesting because, you know, you sort of threw out this notion of put your head in the sand. But I think that more realistically what the inclination is, of nonprofit leaders is to do is to circle the wagons, to not share with their donors that there’s an issue or a hiccup or a glitch or whatever it is, and to say, you know, we’ve got to solve this before the donors find out. So I think, you know, it’s not that they’re sticking their heads in the sand, you know, But that, you know, don’t tell anybody there’s a problem.

Don’t Hide; Communicate With Your Donors

And we’re encouraging you to do the opposite. In fact, to to go to your biggest donors and say:

All right, here’s the roadblock we’ve encountered. How might we think about getting around it? What you know, what alternatives are there? How might you help? What can we do? What might we not have thought of yet? You know, here are the three things that we’ve thought of, but we’re looking for none of them are perfect solutions. So we’re looking for more options.

And that’s when the magic really starts to happen.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, you know, and that’s I think that’s a wonderful, wonderful way to frame it, Amy, because because that really that’s exactly right. It’s very hard when you hit a problem, right? To immediately say, well, let’s go to our largest donors and tell them.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. You feel sort of, how could I have let this happen?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I feel incompetent. I feel like they shouldn’t have gone wrong. They’re going to hate me. They’re going to pull their money. You know, all the worries that you have when something goes wrong. And it’s remarkable, as I think about the organizations we support, how many times these things have turned into – have had silver linings, both big and little, right? The silver linings.

Real-World Example #1

I mean, I’ll give you a small example. So one of the organizations we worked with had been conducting its business in a storefront property near the new facility that they were going to put up. And they were putting their all into raising money for this new building. I mean, they really were going to have to raise more money than anybody ever thought they could ever raise.

So it wasn’t like that was going to be easy. And in the middle of the campaign, they got a message from the owner of the storefront property where they were conducting their business saying, I’ve decided I’m going to sell this property. You have the right of first refusal. It’s going to cost, I don’t know, half a million dollars to buy this property. And it was clear that this organization should own this property, right? It was right near where they wanted to be. They were going to need more space.

They had been thinking about artist housing. It would provide that. But they were afraid of adding it to a campaign which they… were already worried was going to push them to the edge of what they could do. So what did they do?

They scheduled a meeting with the largest donor to their campaign, which was a family foundation that had been involved with them for decades, actually. And they said to them, you know, here’s what’s happened. We heard from so-and-so who owns the building and he wants to sell the building and we have 60 days to… to get back to him to say if we want it, otherwise it’s going to go in the market, right? What do you think we should do? Well, this conversation went on for a bit, but the upshot of it was that this family foundation gave them the money they needed for a down payment so that they could actually get a mortgage and buy the property.

And the foundation did it without affecting their very big gift to the other campaign.

Amy Eisenstein:
And we see that again and again. I mean, it sort of sounds like an outlier, but we’re telling you this story because, you know, when things come up, if you consult with your top five donors, top 10 donors, they want you to succeed. Right. And they generally step up, even if you’re not asking them and you’re just asking them for advice. And, you know, unforeseen things happen all the time, especially when you’re project is taking two, three, four, five years to come to fruition. Things come up.

And so the more creative, innovative, flexible you can be and work with your biggest donors and consult with them and really treat them as partners that they are, they’re going to help you figure it out.

I think that’s sort of the point.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, I’ll give you another example. And this is the favorite of mine.

Real-World Example #2

So one of the things that’s affecting everybody now is across the country is that prices, construction costs are going up. I mean, sometimes heart-stoppingly so, egregiously. So every time you get a contractor, you know, you think you’ve raised enough money, the contractor redoes their bid. And lo and behold, it’s twice what it was the last time they redid it. And the money that you thought you had raised all of a sudden isn’t anywhere near enough.

So this is a theater, a little theater organization that was building a new facility. And the facility was going to have a basement. It was going to have a basement and then a main stage theater and a black box theater and a place for the education program.

And they were very tenacious and they raised a ton of money, right? They really did. But the prices kept going up. Every time they thought they were done, the prices would go up. And finally… They said, you know, we can’t just keep raising more money. It just isn’t feasible. We can’t just keep paying more money for this building. We need to think differently. So they took a moment and they actually started looking for different buildings that might be available.

Now, it was a little complicated because this was a public-private partnership with a parking garage that they were doing, and the city had, you know, gone all out. I mean, it was complicated. Always complicated. Always complicated. But they started looking, and lo and behold, they didn’t find sort of a warehouse facility not far from where they were.

And they decided that this building would be perfect for their costumes and their entire education program. And that… that relative to how much the new theater was going to cost, it was quite inexpensive, wouldn’t need very much construction to make it work for what they wanted. And the bigger part is that if they put the education program and the costumes in this new building, they wouldn’t have to have a basement in the building they were planning. And if they could redesign the building they were planning, they could do it much less expensively.

So lo and behold, if they didn’t get a twofer, right? If they didn’t get two buildings for the price, for less than the price that the new construction costs would have cost.

And to have the facility that they needed to put their education program where it made more sense anyway. And I think all their sets and set designs went out to this bigger… old building that they were buying. And they’re going to be much better off for having torn their hair out. This was really traumatic. Now, what made all of this work is that as they were doing it, they were talking to their donors, to their committee. They weren’t just making these decisions off the top of their heads.

They were having a lot of conversations. The decision-making was not just a tight, small group of people. They were running it by everyone who had already contributed to this organization. So by the time they made the decisions to do this, the group of people who were excited had even grown.

And the donors’ confidence in the organization had grown. And they could raise more money. Wonderful. Did anyone end up in the hospital with ulcers?

Amy Eisenstein:
Maybe.

Listen, you know, campaigning can be stressful and, you know, it’s an emotional roller coaster and hopefully there are more highs than lows and you come out with an amazing project. Somebody just asked me on a call, I was talking to a prospective client for Capital Campaign Pro, and she asked, you know, how do we know if we can be successful? And I said, well, how do you define success, right? I mean, you know, they’re thinking about a $10 million project. But the reality is, she said to me off the cuff, well, $6 million would probably get everything that we want.

I said, so if you raise $7.5 million but not $10, are you successful? She said, absolutely. I said, all right, let’s see how, you know, let’s try and raise as much as you can raise and do an amazing project that you will have.

You know, for a long time into the future. And so I just think, you know, staying flexible, working with what you have, improving the community, that to me is the definition of success.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And talking to the people who are engaged and involved, talking to donors as though they are your partners, which they are, of course, and not people that you need to be hiding from because things are changing on the ground, right?

Look for the Silver Linings Inherent in Changing Plans

Amy Eisenstein:
Change is not necessarily bad. And if you can find the silver lining, if you can find the opportunity, instead of making the, you know, jumping to the conclusion that changing plans automatically are bad, maybe, you know, let’s see, how can we improve this? You know, we, this forcing us into a corner made us think outside the box. And now we’ve got something even better than we imagined in the first place. You know, we see that time and time again. So, Andrea, I think this was a great and important topic.

I hope listeners are inspired and motivated and can communicate this. You know, share this podcast with your leadership team, with your board members, with your executive director, so that they know that changes will happen and it’s not a bad thing.

And the more open they are with donors, the more successful they’re likely to be.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You know, Amy, it strikes me that when we tell stories like this, it’s easy to think that these shifts were easy, that of course they just happened. But they’re not easy. You know, the organization that went to the major donor who then helped with buying the storefront property, there was a lot of anxiety about whether these donors would feel like they were being taken advantage of. There were a lot of people who said, well, maybe we shouldn’t do that.

In the other project, it wasn’t obvious that they should go and look for another building. It was anything but obvious that they should see if it was a radical solution, which would still give them what they want.

But their willingness to stay with that and to wiggle this way and that, and to talk to people about what might be possible really provided the openings that they needed to make, to create the success. So I don’t want to diminish the strain, the stress of doing that because these things are not easy to do. They’re amazing, but they’re not easy.

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent. All right. Well, but worth it in the end.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes, for sure.

Amy Eisenstein:
That’s the point. All right. Well, thanks for listening. And Andrea, thank you for your wisdom as always. And we’ll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.