Podcast: Why Capital Campaigns Should Start with Ideas Instead of a Campaign Brochure

Season 5, Episode 32

Many organizations assume a polished campaign brochure is one of the first things they must create for a capital campaign. That assumption can slow down the most important work of building a compelling campaign.

In this episode, Andrea Kihlstedt talks with Sarah Plimpton, Vice President and Chief Happiness Officer at Capital Campaign Pro, about campaign communications and why the traditional campaign brochure is often the wrong place to start. Drawing on conversations with many campaign leaders, Sarah explains why organizations frequently rush to produce glossy materials and how that instinct can interfere with stronger donor engagement.

For nonprofit leaders preparing for a capital campaign, this conversation offers a practical reframing of campaign communications. Strong campaigns begin with clear ideas and collaborative thinking. The brochure can wait.

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
Have you created your campaign brochure yet? Well, I hope not, because after today’s podcast, you’re going to rethink whether you even need one.

I’m Andrea Kihlstedt, and I’m here today with my wonderful friend and colleague, Sarah Plimpton. Sarah is the Vice President and Chief Happiness Officer for Capital Campaign Pro. And among other things, Sarah gets to work with just about all of the Capital Campaign Pro clients. So she hears their problems and their successes and their stories and their misconceptions. She hears all kinds of things. And one of the things she hears a lot about is campaign communications. So that’s what we’re here to talk to you about today. Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Plimpton:
Hello, Andrea.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So nice to see you.

Sarah Plimpton:
Nice to see you as well. Thank you for having me.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You are most welcome.

Should You Create a Capital Campaign Brochure Early On?

So Sarah, how many people start working with Capital Campaign Pro and think that they better buckle down and get going on their campaign brochure?

Sarah Plimpton:
Many, Andrea. It’s a common idea that that is one of the first things you need to do when you begin a campaign.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I mean, the idea is that I think a lot of people have is that you go into a campaign and you need a fancy, glossy brochure so that you can bring it with you when you talk to major donors and they’ll know how sophisticated you and your organization are. And often board members are pushing that agenda. They want a fancy brochure to be able to show their friends and take around. But you and I know, Sarah, we’ve been in this business a long time. You and I know that that’s kind of a misguided notion.

Create a Compelling Case First

Sarah Plimpton:
Yeah, it’s an understandable notion. I think people want to have a crutch sometimes that they can fall back on, but the reality is a single all encompassing piece of collateral that is going to serve all the days of your campaign is just not really how it works. What we believe at Capital Campaign Pro is that your case for support is really just a set of ideas that when articulated well and clearly are compelling enough to inspire philanthropic support.

And when you begin your campaign, there is a great deal of work to do on figuring out what those ideas are, how they connect, how they can become ever clearer and simpler, and that requires work and time.

So one of the first things that we recommend to clients is put aside the notion of the end product and what it might look like and really dig into the process of figuring out what those ideas are and how they connect to eainach other and involve many brains in that process. You want your board members to be grappling with those ideas. You want your staff and your senior leadership and your CEO or executive director to be involved in that process. And really the process of figuring out what those ideas are in many ways is the point when you get started on a campaign. And I wonder, Andrea, what you’ve seen of that process when you’ve worked with clients.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. Sarah, I think you raised such an important point, which is that in developing the ideas that you’re going to use to be the anchor, the intellectual anchor for your campaign, you have an opportunity to get other people involved in helping to figure it out. And as they are involved, they not only learn what the campaign is about, because some of them may not yet really fully understand it, but they can begin to convince themselves.

The task is, let’s come up with ideas that are convincing for what we’re going to do. And sometimes you can work with a committee for several sessions and the people on the committee gradually become more familiar and more committed to the ideas and the campaign that is going to carry them out. So as you say, Sarah, the process is at least as important as whatever product is going to happen from it. And I’ve really found that to be true.

I mean, I’ve found that sometimes it’s frustrating for groups to work on, well, what is the case for support? Why are we doing that? Why does it matter? And to realize how challenging it can be to come up with the ideas and order them well and be able to discuss them well. But as you fight through that, people’s relationship to the campaign changes and becomes more committed and more excited. And it really is the first big step towards moving a campaign forward is to figure out what are the ideas that are going to underpin all of this fundraising that we have to do. Is it that we need more money? Well, probably not. Is it that we have a big waiting list of kids that need our services that we can’t support? And when we can’t support them, here is what happens.

Those ideas are probably about the difference your organization makes in the world, not about the money you need to raise. And once you start really talking about that, okay, what are the challenges that you’re facing and what are you going to do to alleviate those challenges? And then how much money do you need to raise in order to make those things possible? Then you’re starting to arrive at the basis for your case for support, for this set of ideas. So it sounds sort of simplistic, but if you really get away from the idea of creating a document and into the idea of having free-range discussions about why what you’re doing is important, what you’ll find is that it’s magical really to do that. And we see that over and over again.

Sarah Plimpton:
Indeed, we do.

What Should You Do Before Creating a Campaign Brochure?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
But once you’ve come up with a set of ideas, once your committees, your board, your staff, once everybody is pretty comfortable with knowing what the argument is for this campaign, then what? What do we do with those ideas?

Sarah Plimpton:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think at that moment, it can still be tempting for clients or organizations and campaigns to want to put those beautiful ideas into a glossy brochure. And even then we say, “Hold on, probably not.” And the reason for that is campaigns are long, they are multiphased efforts. Many things shift and change and morph over the course of a campaign.

And if you, and this is just one reason, there are many reasons not to put everything in a beautiful, glossy, buttoned up brochure early in your campaign, but if you were to do that, you’d have this beautiful thing that’s probably professionally printed, cross an arm and a leg, and then things are going to change in your campaign, right?

Elements of your case might shift in the sense that your project costs might go up or they might come down or you might have an opportunity to add an endowment component or there might be a piece of your campaign that really hasn’t gained traction with donors and you decide, we’re going to pull it out. If you have a beautiful finished buttoned up document, it makes it much harder to absorb those changes.

Another Reason to Hold off On Creating a Campaign Brochure

The other reason I think, and this is perhaps the more important reason, I think, not to do the brochure, the glossy brochure, you really want your donors to feel like insiders. They are partners in figuring out this set of challenges that you are trying to meet through this campaign. And if you think about the psychology of sitting down with a donor with a glossy, beautiful, finished looking brochure and saying, “This is what we’re all about and this is what we’re doing, help us.” You’re sending the message that you figured everything out without them. You figured out how to do this without them. And the conversation at that point is really just about money, their money. It’s not about, these are the ideas that we are pursuing and this is the insider look at how we’re proposing to get there.

You’re sending a message with something that’s very glossy and buttoned up, that you are glossy and buttoned up and you figured it all out and you don’t need your donors to help you in the figuring. And in fact, you do need them to help you in the figuring and you want them to feel like they are needed and valued as partners in the work.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. Sarah, my old partner, Gail Perry, used to have this wonderful phrase that I have borrowed from her, which is that your donors should be partners, not pockets, and I’ve always thought that was a terrific phrase. And when you approach a donor with a fancy buttoned up brochure, you’re treating them as pockets.

When you approach them with a draft document that still has some wiggle room and some changes and you’re asking for their opinions and their suggestions about that, in addition to an indication of their support, then you’re treating them as partners. So that just restates what you were talking about, that it is important in the early phase of a campaign when you’re talking to your largest owners to still have enough space so that things can morph and change in the campaign to reflect the realities of your lead gift process.

Capital Campaigns Happen in Phases: Don’t Jump the Gun

Now, that brings us to this notion that campaigns happen in phases. At Capital Campaign Pro, we break campaigns down into seven phases. And as we look at a larger campaign communications plan, what we see is that each phase requires a different aspect of communications. And in the early campaign planning phase of the campaign, then we’re just working on these, coming up with a set of compelling ideas. As we move into the lead gift solicitation, then we’re putting together draft documents to talk to our largest donors about. As we move later in the campaign, we’re perhaps tying down what the final campaign goal is going to be, and we’re starting to have campaign communications that apply to and are meant for a broader constituency.

When you do a capital campaign, you develop a communications plan based around the needs for each phase of the campaign. And it may or may not include a fancy brochure, actually. It may or may not include a campaign video. It may or may not include other elements, but as you lay it out over the seven phases, you’ll start to see better what you might use. Have you had an organization you’ve worked with, Sarah, that’s done a particularly good or bad job of this?

Sarah Plimpton:
I mean, I can think of many organizations that have done a good job with this in that they surrendered, if you will, to this way of thinking. And I think when they did so, quickly came to find that it just made sense, particularly when they got into the quiet phase, I think, which is the phase of the campaign where you are really actively soliciting your lead and major donors. And I think that organizations, when they hit that phase and start to get into those conversations, realize, “Oh, John and Sally are the type of donors that really want to understand the budget of the projects and the campaign.”

And so we’re going to put together supporting materials for that conversation that really focus on the budget and maybe have one page of bullets about the impact that this project is going to have. They’re not big readers. We’re not going to be asked for a voluminous documentation from John and Sally.

You get ready for that visit and you prepare those pieces of information, pulling, of course, from the set of ideas that you’ve developed with your campaign team, but then you might be going to meet with Jim and Susan. And Jim and Susan are more likely to want to understand the human element of the project, right? So we know that going into that conversation, we’re not going to lead with the budget, we’re going to pull something that really focuses on voices from program participants to tell the story of the impact here, not bullets, not budget, but voices from the people.

And you’ll start to see over the course of your quiet phase that there are different types of materials that you kind of have in, say, a folder maybe that you can kind of interchange depending on who you’re talking to, so you can really customize it. And I think clients that surrender to this way of thinking and approach their campaigns in this way, find it actually very freeing.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, I think that’s right, Sarah. And I think in the beginning, when they’re first starting up, it feels daunting because they don’t have any of it yet. So they’re building their folder of material as they go, depending on the donors they’re going to see, but it doesn’t take very long before the key elements are there, before they have a budget, before they have a written document or set of bullet points, before they have photographic evidence of what they’re going to be doing, before they have architectural drawings, etc.

Gradually, they build what it is they need. And then by the time they solicited five or six or seven people, all of a sudden it becomes easy because then it’s a matter of just pulling what you’ve used before and putting it together into a unique package for that particular donor or set of donors. But it does feel daunting in the beginning. You mean every donor is going to need a different case for support, right?

Sarah Plimpton:
Yeah, and of course not. It’s just pulling from the mothership of ideas and really … And it also, I think, forces you to really look at your donors, look at their patterns, look at their questions in past meetings, look at their giving histories, and have they directed their gifts to certain areas of your mission? All of that helps you sort of intuit what might we put forth that might be more likely to interest and inspire this donor rather than going in with the same old thing for everyone.

Being Consistent with Your Campaign Ideas

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Now, of course, what is consistent throughout and throughout the campaign is a summary form of the ideas that you know are the argument for doing this. Why are you raising this money? What’s it going to accomplish? Whose lives is it going to make better? And why does it really matter? You’re going to have, because you worked on it in the beginning so hard, you’re going to have that set of information for all of your solicitations. And that actually includes what you say in a solicitation visit. It’s not just the room material, it’s also what you say and how you think about your campaign.

So when you use a consistent approach to this, all of a sudden it starts to make sense. It starts to feel natural. Your solicitors start to feel natural about it. They know what material they have available, but they know what the underlying argument is and they know how to make it. The language starts to feel easy and comfortable and confident.

Now, as the campaign goes on, the people you are talking to for your campaign broadens. It starts out a very small group of people in the solicitation. And gradually, as you get down through the middle of the campaign and the end of the campaign, you’re talking to your whole extended community. And as you do that, the nature of the communication you use is going to change.

You’re going to be developing things that you can easily send to a lot of people. You’ll develop a website, for example, have a video you can send to people, or you may have a small brochure of some sort that you can send to everybody. So as your audience broadens, the message in many ways stays the same, but the media that you use to communicate it is going to change, until you get to the very end of the campaign when you’re really waving flags from the rafters about it. Maybe you have swag or t-shirts or flags or who knows, so all kinds of things that make the community aware of what it is you’re doing and why it matters. But again, it’s the same core of ideas, just the way you talk about them has broadened, the mechanisms by which you talk about them have broadened. So it somehow all makes sense, I think.

Sarah Plimpton:
I agree. I think so.

Developing a Capital Campaign Communications Plan

Andrea Kihlstedt:
All right. Sarah, if you were telling a new client one or two things that where should they begin in developing their campaign communications plan, what would that be?

Sarah Plimpton:
I would say, first and foremost, your case for support is a set of ideas, not a single document. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is I would say spend time on those ideas early and with as many brains as you can gather around the table. And by that I mean board members, campaign volunteers, senior leadership, development team members. Get everyone thinking about the ideas. And I think the ideas that you want to be crystal clear on fall into three camps.

• Why are you doing this?
• What is the biggest, most important, meaningful reason for this project or these projects that your campaign will fund?
• What is it that you’re doing?
• What is the impact it will have?
• Whose lives will be changed?

And then I think the third camp is how, right? How is this going to come to fruition? And that’s really the campaign, that’s the gift range chart. And I think the notion of your donors as partners and not pockets, to use your friend June’s wonderful saying, let that mantra guide you in how you think about relating with your earliest campaign supporters and donors in the way of campaign communications.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Sarah, that’s great. I think anybody listening should at least have an understanding of how campaign communications work that may well be different from what they started out thinking. And we would encourage you all to go to capitalcampaignpro.com and look in the free resources section. I can’t remember, there may well be something on the case for support there. Nose around, see what you could find. I can’t recall, but you may find something quite interesting.

And if you want to consider working with us, when I know in our Toolkit, we have a lot of material on campaign communications and developing the case for support, so if you consider working with us, you would then have access to a whole treasure trove of material and experienced people to help you through this process.

Sarah, my friend, thank you so much for unfurling this complicated topic with me today.

Sarah Plimpton:
Thank you, Andrea. Always a pleasure.