Podcast: Unveiling the Quiet Phase: Strategies for Success in Capital Campaigns

Season 3, Episode 49

In this episode, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt delve into the often misunderstood quiet phase of fundraising campaigns. Contrary to its name, the quiet phase doesn’t mean complete silence. Instead, it’s a strategic period where organizations focus on soliciting major gifts while keeping the campaign goal discreet.

Amy and Andrea demystify the quiet phase, emphasizing the importance of discussing project details while keeping fundraising targets confidential. They highlight the significance of flexibility during this phase, allowing for adjustments to campaign goals based on early donor responses.

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
Shh, don’t say anything. We’re in the quiet phase.

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder Andrea Kihlstedt, and today we are talking about the quiet phase of your campaign and the confusion surrounding the quiet phase about what you can and cannot be saying and what’s quiet about it.

So Andrea, kick us off.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes, this is such a great topic. I love the quiet phase of the campaign, and it’s a funny expression because sometimes people call it the silent phase and it’s far from the silent phase. You can be talking about a lot of things that in the early parts of your campaign, you want to be talking about the project. What is it that’s moving this whole fundraising ahead?

What is a Capital Campaign’s Quiet Phase?

Let’s imagine you’re a private school and you’re going to be building some new classrooms and a new field and a new theater, right? You want to be talking about those things as they are being planned. Your families in your school are going to be incredibly interested in knowing that that’s coming to your school. Now, that doesn’t mean that you have at the same time to say:

“And oh, by the way, we are going to be raising $60 million to fund this, and we’re coming to you sometime soon.”

You can separate those messages and in the quiet phase of the campaign, this early phase of the campaign, when you’re in your planning and you are soliciting the largest gifts during the early phases of your campaign, you want to be focusing your communications, your broader communications on the project rather than the amount of money to be raised.

Now, one more thing, and I’ll turn it back to you, Amy, but one more thing is that you of course, will want to be talking about the campaign to your largest donors as you solicit them, but you can even tell them:

“We’re not going public with this yet, but we’re hoping to get some of the largest gifts online before we go public with our campaign, and we hope that you’ll be one of some of those early donors.”

Amy Eisenstein:
Okay. You said the word online. You don’t mean online.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
No. That’s right. Secured. Not online in that sense, I mean secure. That’s exactly right. Thank you Amy.

So the way capital campaigns work is that you first figure out what the project is and why it’s compelling and why it’s important, and then gradually you’re figuring out how much it’s going to cost, and you’re planning a campaign and you are starting to solicit the largest gifts, and you talk more about the project generally broadly in these early phases while you are soliciting those largest gifts.

That is the quiet phase. The only thing you are being really quiet about is that you are not the campaign goal right from the start.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. So when you are using the term campaign in this context, you are talking about the fundraising. We’re talking about the fundraising, and I think that lots of times that’s the root or one of the roots of the confusion is that the project and the campaign are sort of intertwined and used together.

And here we’re suggesting that when you talk, the quiet phase is an opportunity to keep the fundraising aspect, the goal specifically, and how you’re soliciting gifts more on the quiet side. One-on-one, you’re not doing any marketing, you’re not doing any advertising, you’re not doing any mass solicitation. You’re not asking for gifts in a public or broad way.

So the quiet phase of the campaign does not necessarily mean you’re quiet about the project. It means you’re quiet about the [campaign] goal and who you’re asking and how you’re asking. And that’s being done in a one-on-one way. So that’s a really important distinction, I think for people to help understand this concept of quiet phase, which is really confusing.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. It can be confusing. Until you understand the lingo, it is downright confusing.

The Quiet Phase vs. The Public Phase

So we have, of course, when we have a quiet phase, we also have, we don’t call it a loud phase, we call it a public phase, talk about language right? We have the quiet phase and we have the public phase. One would imagine it would be a loud phase.

In the public phase, you actually are announcing the campaign goal. That typically happens at the campaign kickoff when you’ve already raised maybe 70, 75% of your goal, and you just have a relatively little amount to raise after that, and you’re announcing the goal and you’re whipping up a lot of energy for the entire community to come in and make their contributions to your campaign.

But in this first phase, this hush, hush, quiet phase of your campaign, you need to understand that it is only quiet in the sense that you are not announcing a campaign goal to your broad community.

Why Keep Your Campaign Goal Quiet?

Amy Eisenstein:
So Andrea, why don’t you talk about why it’s important or what the strategy is behind keeping the campaign goal quiet? Because I think that that will help listeners explain it to their boards and to their leadership teams because there is a method behind the madness and there’s a reason to keep your campaign goal quiet during the quiet phase.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes, so thank you, Amy. Here’s why. Sometimes these lead gifts, these largest gifts can be surprising. Sometimes they surprise you in a remarkable way that you actually are able to raise more money than you ever imagined from these top 10, 20, 30 donors that you’re going to first, and sometimes unfortunately, they surprise you in a less exciting way, and the people you thought were going to give or someone who you thought was going to give the lead gift, gives a gift that is lower than you thought they were going to give.

Now, if you aren’t talking about your campaign goal during this period, you have the opportunity to raise or lower the goal before you actually start publicizing it, start going to your whole community. And it honestly happens with remarkable frequency that the goal is raised before you go public rather than lowered.

Everybody assumes that you have to keep quiet because you’re going to lower the goal if you’re not successful. You’d be surprised at how many times people raise their goal, maybe sometimes two or three times when they have people who step up at a higher level than they would’ve imagined. So that’s the primary reason that you don’t want to announce your campaign goal too soon.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. So at Capital Campaign Pro, we talk about a working goal. You can think of it as a draft goal in the quiet phase.

So it’s not that the people you’re talking to and asking for gifts don’t have a sense of how much you’re trying to raise. You’re working towards a working goal or a draft goal of $10 million, and then though you have an opportunity towards the end of the quiet phase to decide either to raise or lower that goal based on how you are doing. Because the reality is you don’t want to announce a number publicly that your goal is 10 million and then you get to it super early, and then what happens? Do you raise more? Do you not?

You can quietly raise the goal and keep fundraising, and that’s a great campaign. And if for some reason you’re coming up short and you haven’t announced a goal, you can scale back the project or your ambitions and then you can still have a successful campaign having raised $8 million, which is a goal, you’ll announce a goal that you’re confident you can get to.

Avoid the Trap of Creating a Fancy Campaign Brochure Too Early

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, the other thing that people are surprised about, and it fits with this topic, is that we don’t want you to create a fancy campaign brochure early in your campaign during this quiet phase because things might change.

So the idea of early on creating a fancy brochure that says:

• Here’s the campaign;
• Here’s the building;
• Here’s the campaign goal;
• Here’s our fancy brochure.

Before you have actually solicited some of the largest gifts is foolishness. You might have those campaign brochures sitting in a box in the corner of your office all for nothing because you’ve had to make so many changes.

Now, that means that during the quiet phase of the campaign, you are using draft materials — not full on glossy, fancy campaign materials — and it turns out that you raise the largest gifts with the least fancy, with the least fully developed materials.

Amy Eisenstein:
So listen, yeah, imagine a folder, a folder of information that you can just print off different documents as they apply to each donor, so you don’t have to have a static brochure, which ultimately gets out of date. I mean, if a campaign lasts three years, which many do, things change over that time, things evolve, things morph. The project doesn’t go in a straight line.

So in order to give yourself the most flexibility, having a folder of material as opposed to sort of this finalized fancy, highly produced brochure, which is out of date a few months after it’s printed or the day after it’s printed — that’s what Andrea means by draft materials. It’s not that they’re going to be unprofessional, they’re not. They’re going to be professional, but you’re able to print them off and change them as is appropriate and necessary through the duration of your campaign.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And they can be very simple. They really can be very simple. They don’t have to be highly designed. The higher the design level, the less impact donors feel like they are having on with their input into your project planning. The more these are fancy, elegant materials and look that way, the less donors are really willing to have confident and easy discussions with you about your campaign. So don’t worry, they should be professional. You don’t never want to send out things with spelling errors or things that aren’t written well or things that don’t have headings. And I mean, you want them to be quality, but they don’t need to be fully fleshed out by a graphic designer either.

And I think it’s super important for people to realize that the process of soliciting the largest gifts is usually a multi-stage conversation between your organization and the donor, someone or some people in your organization and the donor. And these are conversations. They’re not just solicitations. So if you approach these conversations from that point of view saying, this is what we are working on, this is what we are thinking about, this is what we’d like you to consider, and open that up to a real conversation with a donor who might give a million dollars or 3 million or $5 million or more, that’s a much better strategy than to go in with everything all buttoned up feeling very high style.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes. Excellent.

A Real-World Example of the Power of Staying Quiet

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, let me just bring up this week. There was this amazing gift given by a woman to a school here in New York City. She gave a billion dollars to Einstein Medical School.

Amy Eisenstein:
It’s been all over the news. If you haven’t heard about it, you’re sleeping under a rock.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Google it. I mean, it’s just amazing. And one of the amazing things about the story is that not only did the person from Einstein build a relationship with this woman and her husband over years, but when she was ready to give, when she was thinking about giving, she said to him:

“If you had a billion dollars, what would you do with it?”

And he said:

“I’d make our medical education free.”

Now, she bought it. That’s what she decided to do, and that was the ask. Now, after that, I’m sure the institution had all kinds of meetings to talk about how that was going to happen and what would happen about it, but it was never a fancy solicitation. It was at its heart a heartfelt conversation between a donor and someone in the institution who knew one another and wanted to achieve something for the institution. I always thought that it’s just such a great story about… He didn’t show up with a brochure, right? He showed up with an idea.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes, yes. Such a great way of putting it.

All right, we’re going to take a ten second commercial break, and I’m going to ask all our listeners to stop the podcast for one second and give us a five-star review. It does help us so much get access to other people listening to our podcast. So if you wouldn’t mind, not if you’re driving, but if you can, press pause for a second and go give us a five star review for this podcast, we would appreciate it so much.

Keeping Quiet Doesn’t Mean You Stop Talking to Donors

Okay, so let’s continue to talk about the quiet phase. So next time somebody at your organization is confused about the quiet phase and isn’t sure what they can talk about, to me, the simplest way to think about it is we can talk about the project and get people excited about the project and what we’re thinking about and what we’re doing, and let them know that you are planning a campaign and you will be in touch with them in the coming weeks, months, or year when you are ready to ask for a gift and to ask for support.

In the meantime, you’re working on it, you’re planning, and that is really all you need to say because in the quiet phase, you are going to be doing one-on-one solicitations. You’re not going to be publicly announcing a goal. You’re going to be working on a working goal.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, you’re so very clear today. I appreciate that.

Amy Eisenstein:
Sometimes. Sometimes.

So listen, I want to say a few other things that I think will help people really understand the quiet phase. In the quiet phase, you are asking for gifts individually from three groups of donors, and this will really help people at your organization understand what the quiet phase is. First and foremost, you are asking for leadership level gifts, so maybe the top 20 gifts to your campaign.

You are also asking your board members for significant and meaningful gifts over and above their annual fund gifts. You’re asking everybody for gifts for the campaign over and above their annual fund gifts. And the third group is any volunteers to the campaign who don’t fall into the first two groups. They’re not a board member and they’re not giving a lead gift, and that’s who you’re going to work through during the quiet phase, which hopefully gets you to 70, 80 or sometimes even 90% of your goal and then you will make a decision about a final campaign goal.

Once you solicit all those lead donors, your board members, your committee, and your volunteers, then it’s time to settle on a goal and say, “How far can we get with the public phase, which is coming up?” And then you’ll move into more broad solicitations. You will announce a final goal and listen, if you have to raise or if you get to raise your goal, if you have to lower your goal, it’s another opportunity to go back to all your lead donors, everybody you’ve already solicited and say:

“Hey, here’s where we’re at. We’ve solicited these groups of people. We’re either above where we thought we might be, so we’re going to raise the goal and keep fundraising and give the whole community a chance to participate, or we didn’t get as far as we hoped in the quiet phase. We’re thinking about scaling back the project or lowering the goal in some way. What do you think we should do?”

It’s another opportunity to go to your lead donors and say, “Can you help us sort this out?” Maybe they’ll give you another gift. Maybe they’ll help get you to that higher goal, or at least they’ll understand why you come out publicly with a goal that’s lower than you initially went to them with.

So you want to keep talking to your donors. But that’s the method to the madness. It’s the strategy behind keeping that goal quiet so that wherever you end up, you are going to have a successful campaign.

Look, if your initial working goal is $10 million and you wind up announcing a goal of nine or eight and a half, you’ve still raised millions of dollars more than you ever have before, and you’re still going to do a big chunk or hopefully all of your project. So it’s not a failure, but you do want to announce publicly a number that you can successfully achieve and celebrate as a community.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, I’m so glad we did this topic. Again and again people are confused about it. So I hope that we have finally made sense of it for you and that you can take it and explain it to your board members and your staff members in a way that makes sense, and it will stand you in good stead for your campaign.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yep. And if you want to talk to us about your campaign or think we might be able to help, visit capitalcampaignpro.com. We would love to talk to you about your campaign.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.