Podcast: Unlocking the Secrets to Capital Campaign Success: A New Consulting Model for Nonprofits

Season 3, Episode 58

In this episode, join Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt as they reveal a groundbreaking approach to capital campaign consulting that empowers nonprofits to take control of their fundraising efforts. Discover the transformative formula that steers away from traditional, costly consulting methods, and instead, leverages technology and community to provide a scalable, more effective form of support.

Amy and Andrea dive deep into why traditional consulting often falls short, emphasizing how their method focuses on equipping organizations with the tools and knowledge they need to succeed independently. They detail their innovative online toolkit comprised of over 130 resources, designed to guide nonprofits through every phase of a campaign, from planning to execution.

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Amy Eisenstein:
We’ve come up with a formula for success for capital campaigns.

Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder, Andrea Kihlstedt. And today, we’re going to talk about how we’ve changed the model for campaign consulting and really come up with a formula that organizations can apply, no matter what kind of campaign they’re doing or what kind of organization they are, that will be successful. And it’s by no means a cookie cutter approach, but it is a formula.

A New Campaign Consulting Model for Nonprofits

Andrea, let’s talk about our formula and why it’s significant and why it matters.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, I think it’s really a formula for supporting people through campaigns. For many years, getting a campaign consultant meant was that someone dressed in a suit would show up at your doorstep and would spend half a day or a day with you working with you on your campaign. And that was it. Then they’d go away, they’d leave you with some to-dos until they came back next time.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, usually a month later. Sometimes a month later.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Usually a month later, exactly. And often, you really had to schedule your campaign in accordance with their schedule. They weren’t dealing with your schedule, right? You were dealing with their schedule.

So it was all somewhat awkward and fairly expensive because you were paying for their travel and they were showing up and spending several hours. It was what we had to do because the technology to do anything else didn’t exist.

But Amy, when you and I put our minds together now some seven years ago to try to figure out whether there wasn’t a better model for providing people with a formula to support them really in a more robust way, we realized that technology had changed everything, and that we really could put together a package of services and support that would make people feel as though they had what they needed to do a successful campaign.

And that’s what we’ve done, right?

Amy Eisenstein:
That’s so interesting that you say that. Where my mind went was the old model of campaign consulting is almost fear-based, right? The consultant holds all the knowledge. They secretly and confidentially and anonymously interview your donors. They dole out little bits of information and strategy as you need it. But the assumption is:

[T]he nonprofit leaders, the team on the ground, doesn’t know what they’re doing, and the consultant holds all the cards and all the power.

And when we were first creating Capital Campaign Pro, which was Capital Campaign Toolkit when we started, our idea was to pull back the curtain and let out all the secrets and connect all our clients. And what’s happened over the last four, five, six, seven years has been magical.

So talk a little bit about some of that magic formula and the way we now serve our clients, but really the new model for campaign consulting.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I think it’s such an interesting point, Amy. Really, it used to be, I’m not sure if it’s fear-based, but certainly the consulting model was that the consultants knew it all and they would share it with you little piece by little piece. And you and I came along and said:

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We really want to work with people so that we share the much broader batch of information and we make them campaign experts. And we do that by providing several services.”

So the services that we came up with, and really it was all empowered by the changing technology, by Zoom, by being able to meet virtually as individuals and as groups and to be able to provide a robust online library of resources.

3 Pillars of the New Model for Campaign Consulting

Our model contains three kinds of resources. First, and perhaps most obvious, is this amazing toolkit of material that we’ve put together. It’s a remarkable online toolkit of about 130 documents, all downloadable, with explanations that people can use through the seven phases of a campaign. It’s like they’re resource library provided in a fashion that it’s actually usable.

It’s not like a book where you just read about it. It is a well-organized set of information that people can download and begin to play with and make their own and have it fit their organization. So it’s like, okay, here are the puzzle pieces.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. Yes. Let’s break that down a little bit more.

1. Online Toolkit: Templates, Worksheets, and More

So to me, the value in the, we call it a toolkit, it’s an online portal. It’s a resource library. But the documents are set up in a way that they fall into different categories. One is templates.

And we encourage our clients to download the templates to put their own logos on, to modify the tools so that they work for their campaign. So you’re not starting with a blank page, you’re never starting from scratch. There are also sample documents. So it’s not just that you have a template of campaign policies, let’s say, but that you have a sample of campaign policies.

And you also, in many cases, have an explainer video or an explainer document that says, “How do you think about developing your campaign policies?” It’s not one-size-fits-all. You start with a template and you think about with your board, with your committee, why this would work or how it applies to your organization.

So it really is customizable in that sense. It’s so not a cookie-cutter approach. You’re starting with best practices and you’re modifying it for your organization. So the online toolkit is the first pillar of support. Number two, of course, is peer support groups.

2. Group Coaching and Peer Support

Let’s talk about group coaching and peer support. Do you remember how that came about?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, I think we thought, “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if people could come together and talk about their campaigns?” And then we were afraid of it. We weren’t sure we could make those work. So we tentatively invited people to these small groups. But over time, we really figured out how to run those groups. We really got good at it. We got so that we learned how to make small groups, six, eight, 10, 12 people in a Zoom room have real added value so that people felt like they weren’t alone.

They could bring their questions about their campaigns. They could put them out among this group, which was led by two experts. And they could see, well, what are the problems other people are facing in this arena? How have they solved them? What would the experts say about this? And those rooms, those meetings, these groups now meet weekly.

And everybody, of course, gets to know one another. They get to hear about other campaigns. They get to learn that they’re not alone, that their questions are not one-offs. That the questions they bring to these groups are questions that everybody has or has had, and that there can be robust and terrific discussions about solving them and how to approach them.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, that’s so interesting. So my memory is that we started these, I was thinking of them as drop-in office hours almost, like you’d drop in with your professor back in school and ask your questions. But as you described, they’ve really morphed into peer support networks and group coaching.

And the magic of them is that you may come with a question one day, or you may not, but somebody else will ask a question like:

“I have a donor that’s not getting back to me. What should I do?”

And then of course, there’s this magical it applies to everybody. So people who are in the room who didn’t bring a question go:

“Oh yeah, I have a donor that won’t get back to me, isn’t calling me back.” And then there’s this magical discussion that’s facilitated by our experts.

But also, there are people in the room all around the country that are farther along in their campaigns than you are, and they’ve had experienced and solved these challenges or overcome some of the challenges that you’re facing. So it’s a wonderful opportunity to network, learn from, grow with, share with other people going through campaigns all across the country. And I don’t think we understood the power of them. Well, I know we didn’t when we put them together.

But where else is there an opportunity to really gather with people who are going through campaigns in real time and they are open to sharing, they’re happy to share, they’re not in your immediate community necessarily, there’s no competitive nature or guarded nature? Because these people are not in your community. They may not be in your sector. But they’re having the same challenges, which is totally magical.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. And one of the interesting things that we’ve found, because the people who come to these calls, some of them work with big organizations and some of them work with very smaller organizations. And what we’ve found is that even the very small, the questions asked by very small organizations are relevant to the big organizations and vice versa.

So you get to hear how campaigns work, whether in one kind of organization or another. There is a pattern to how campaigns work. And through a discussion, through peer discussions, you start to understand what the process is in a way that you don’t if you’re just talking to a consultant.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right, which is back to the new model, old model discussion.

There’s traditional campaign consulting where one expert shows up in your conference room, and then our new model, honestly, where we are supporting people through a variety of ways. There’s different ways that we’re attacking this campaign challenge. One, of course, is this online toolkit of resources. And second are these weekly peer support calls.

We also, of course, provide intensive training, which I think is a must [that’s number three].

3. Expert Support and Training

Most good consultants provide training, but we’re able to do it leveraging technology so that we’re able to bring solicitation training, board training, CEO round tables right into an organization for very little cost because we’re leveraging technology to be able to do it effectively and affordably and efficiently.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I mean, what we learned about training is that we started out thinking that you had to go and be in the room to do a good training. And then we realized that we could get very good at doing virtual training, and that a bunch of virtual training is expandable. So we could invite all of our clients to come to a solicitation training and just create Zoom rooms where they got to practice and come back to the larger group.

So sometimes we have 30 or 40 people on a group training and everybody raves about it because they actually get to work on developing their case, articulating their case, practicing the solicitation model that we teach. And it doesn’t much matter that it’s the same organization or that we’re in the room. People get to come to a training, they get to send their board members to a training, and we’ve had remarkable success with it. We’ve gotten very good at it. It’s taken a while, but we’ve gotten good at it.

Amy Eisenstein:
I think one of the benefits to organizations is that, when a board member can’t make one date, there’s another training and there’s another solicitation training. So you can send your campaign committee members throughout the year, not just on the one day that you’re doing it live and in-person. And to me, that’s the power of being able to literally and figuratively zoom in to these trainings and these organizations is that it’s live, it’s in real time, and it’s repeatable so that you can get trained when you’re ready when it’s appropriate. And if somebody misses a date, there’s always another one.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, we talked about three of four systems of support that we provide. We’ve talked about the toolkit itself. We’ve talked about the small group facilitated meetings that people get to come to. We’ve talked about the trainings that people can send their staff and board to, which happen year-round, so they can do it on their schedule. But we haven’t yet talked about the core element that we also provide. And that is…

Amy Eisenstein:
All right. Before you get to that, I’m going to leave on a hanger. I’m going to invite listeners who want to talk to us specifically about their campaigns and see if our model of support might be right for them and their organizations to come to the Capital Campaign Pro website and sign up for a strategy session. There’s a, in the top right corner of the website, there’s a start or get started button, and that just signs them up for a meeting with one of us. And we’d love to talk to them. We’d love to talk to you listeners about your campaign to see if this model of support would be right for you.

Capital Campaign Pro’s Advising Team

Okay, Andrea, talk to us about our amazing advising team.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Because that, of course, is the fourth element, which is that we pair our clients with expert advisors, with people who really know the campaign world inside and out, people who have done 10, 20, 30 capital campaigns. They know their way around this business and they work virtually with clients. So through calls, regular calls, email support, texting, sharing of documents, I mean, all kinds of things. But they become like a-

Amy Eisenstein:
A partner.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
… friend, advisor, hand holder for people as they go through their campaigns. And when you combine that level of individual service with the other larger support systems, people feel like they are supported. They feel like-

Amy Eisenstein:
They are supported.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
… they can get what they need. They are supported.

Amy Eisenstein:
They are supported.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
But they feel that way too. I was just going to say, in all the years I’ve been in this capital campaign business, and it’s been decades that I’ve been doing this business, I think the changes and shifts in technology that enabled us to figure this out are utterly remarkable. They have changed the way we can provide service to people. And they enable us to give people the support they need so that they own their own capital campaign. They understand it, they know how they’re doing it, they know why they’re doing it. They can get their questions asked. They develop a friendship network in the process of doing that. And it’s utterly remarkable.

Empowering Nonprofit Leaders to Guide Their Own Campaigns

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. I think that the key differentiator about what we’re talking about is we are empowering nonprofit leaders to lead their own campaigns. Now, some consultants will come in and do it for you. If that’s what your organization wants or needs, then there are consultants who do that. And that’s one of the models and one of the options.

We have opted to go in a different direction. And really, our focus is on capacity-building. We want to strengthen the development office, the team, the board, the campaign volunteers, the staff so that they are much stronger fundraisers at the end of the campaign and throughout the campaign than when we started.

So if you’re looking for somebody to come in and do it for you, that’s not our model. But there are consultants that do that for you. If you are looking to grow as a team, if you want to be empowered, if you want to be supported, have a partner, have your hand held throughout the process, and have all the tools and resources at your disposal, that’s what makes a good match for us.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, as you know, I’m one of the facilitators for a lot of the Wednesday calls. We have two facilitators on these small group calls, which happen on Wednesday. We have a couple of them every Wednesday. And I have to say, every Wednesday I wake up looking forward to those calls because the questions are so good and the sharing is so robust.

And the sense of collegiality and comradeship is so powerful on those calls. I never leave one of those calls without feeling like we’ve created something really special and that the people who come to those calls have that sense too.

Amy Eisenstein:
What’s so interesting about the Wednesday calls is that some of our clients, we actually have different levels of support that are available, and some of our clients opt not to work one-on-one with our advisors. We call those our do-it-yourselfers. They sign up for our DIY Essentials package.

But many organizations today don’t want to work with a consultant. They want to do it themselves. And yet, they don’t want to start with a blank page. They don’t want to reinvent the wheel. And we don’t want them to either. And that’s actually why we created this do-it-yourself support system just for organizations that don’t want to work one-on-one with a consultant, but they love the opportunity to be able to come on every week, ask their questions, have resources at their fingertips, have access to expert training.

And then if they need more support, they of course upgrade to work one-on-one with an advisor. So I’m just so proud of what we’ve created over the past five years, six years, seven years. Oh my goodness, where does the time go?

And so that’s the magic model that we started this conversation around, that this magic framework for organizations to lead successful campaigns has been enabled by technology, truthfully. That’s where we started out. And it’s so interesting that we started with this remote idea, this remote model way prior to COVID. And COVID —

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, it —

Amy Eisenstein:
… just made it so much more real, yeah.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It really is using technology to increase the connection with people who are doing campaigns. It’s not using technology for technology itself. We have found a way to make use of the current technology so that people have a real support system of people who can help them and guide them and be friends with them and answer questions and discuss with them during their campaign. And that’s really a wonderful thing to have done.

Amy Eisenstein:
I think that’s —

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I’m proud of us too, Amy.

Amy Eisenstein:
I think that’s a perfect place to end.

All right. So if you are getting ready for a capital campaign and you would love to talk to us and see if this support model is right for you, please visit our website at capitalcampaignpro.com and we’ll see you next time.