Podcast: Your Biggest Capital Campaign Donors After the Ask: What Happens Next Matters Most

Season 5, Episode 25

Your largest capital campaign donors often give early, generously, and then quietly disappear from view. That silence can cost you far more than most organizations realize.

In this episode, hosts Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt talk candidly about what strong stewardship looks like during the long middle stretch of a capital campaign and why the period after the initial gift is where future success is decided. Andrea and Amy explain how capital campaigns are built on a small number of transformational gifts, why those donors are usually secured early, and how easy it is for even well run organizations to lose momentum with the people who matter most.

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
How long has it been since you’ve been in personal touch with your largest campaign donor? Today, we’re going to talk to you about what you should be doing.

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder, Andrea Kihlstedt. And today we’ve got a super-interesting topic. The gist of it is stewardship, but much more importantly during a campaign, it’s really about how do you stay in touch with your biggest campaign donors throughout the campaign and beyond so that they continue to be involved and engaged and give generously long into the future?

What Happens After the Ask Matters Most – Good Stewardship

All right, Andrea, why did this topic come up for you and why do you think it’s important?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes. So Amy, this is one of these topics that we don’t cover often enough because it’s super-important and it’s kind of hides.

So let me set the stage for this topic. Let’s all remember that capital campaigns take a fairly long, long time, often three years, sometimes four years from the beginning when you’re planning the campaign to the end when you have been successful. And they are set up in a way that you involve and ask your largest donors in the early part of the campaign, probably in the first 12 months, maybe 18 months. After which the campaign keeps going, you keep asking more and more people at smaller and smaller levels until you fill in all of your campaign.

Now, the consequence of that, well, the other thing you need to remember is that pretty much every campaign is made or broken in 20 or 25 gifts, big gifts from important donors. And those gifts are solicited early, as I said. So what happens often is that people will solicit those gifts early and get some of those large gifts in, and then they turn their attention to the next people they have to solicit, and that’s very stressful and makes them very busy and they’ve got lots on their mind. And after the initial thank you to those largest donors, it’s very easy to put their names aside and to check them off to say:

“Well, we’ve already solicited them. They’ve already given. We don’t have to worry about them anymore.”

And that sets up a problem. That makes perfectly good sense that this is what happens. But think about it. If you are a really large donor and you made an early gift to a campaign, maybe you pledged a million dollars to be paid out over three years or maybe longer, and you realize that with the exception of a sort of perfunctory thank you note and maybe a call and maybe some initial really nice thank you’s —

Amy Eisenstein:
Or a pledge reminder.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Or a pledge reminder, you haven’t heard from anybody and it’s a year later. How would you feel?

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes. Making that second pledge payment and you got thanked nicely, but now you haven’t heard anybody for six to 12 months or longer, 18 months, and it doesn’t feel good.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. And it’s really easy to make this mistake because the staff and the committees are really busy trying to solicit the rest of the money for the campaign. It’s not like anyone’s just sitting around. Everyone is very busy. The stress is high. You’re moving on to other donors, but we advise you to take a different route. There is great advantage to doing stewardship really well with those top 20 or 25 donors. These are the most important donors you have and we’ll stay the most important donors if you treat them well.

How to Do Proper Campaign-Focused Stewardship

So Amy, how would we like people to do this work?

Amy Eisenstein:
So number one, we want you to create a system or I guess a system, a mechanism I was going to say, to remind yourself and your committee and your leadership team that you want to take a look at the names of your top 20 to 25 donors every month and remember to reach out, making sure that they are high on your priority list to be contacted regularly.

And it’s not going to be the same touch every month. Once in a while, it can be a campaign update or report, but it’s really about making sure that you are reaching out to them, giving, okay, I’m going to say number one, giving them a campaign update.

• Where are you? What’s the progress in terms of both the campaign, the fundraising itself, and also the project?
• Maybe there’s construction on a building, maybe something else is happening in terms of the project itself, but what’s the update on the project and what’s the update on the money?
• There’s, of course, also advice to be asked throughout the campaign. As you are thinking about approaching other donors, do they know them? What advice might they give you? How can you improve your outreach or your connection or your solicitation strategy?

So there’s also advice to be asked. What else, Andrea? What other outreaches and regular touches might they do?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
There are lots of opportunities to invite people. For example, if it’s a building project, to invite them to the site when the bulldozers show up, and you don’t have to do it in a fancy way. If Amy were a major donor to my project, I might call her up and say, or text her, say:

“Hey, Amy, tomorrow morning at seven o’clock, the bulldozer are showing up. I’ve got a hard hat for you. Will you come have a cup of coffee while we watch that happen?”

It can be that personal and that simple. You can think of lots of personal sort of updated private information:

“Thought you would like to know that we finished a phase, the next phase of this project. I want you to be the first to know.”

These people are really… I used to have a client years ago and they created a list of these people and they called them white glove people. It was the white glove list. These were the people that they treated really well. And the executive director made a handwritten list of their names on matboard and would tuck that handwritten list in his top desk drawer. And every day he’d open his desk drawer and he’d review the list and he’d think, “Okay, what happened today and who should I tell about it?”

So it was an active process. It wasn’t a list on the computer because those aren’t apparent. It was a list on his desk or in his desk drawer where it was always in front of his nose and it would trigger him. It would say, “Oh, John would be interested in coming to this meeting with the flooring people. He’s interested in what the building’s going to look like.” Or —

Amy Eisenstein:
Or with a foundation, the head of a foundation, you might bring one of these top people too. What you made me think of, Andrea, desk drawer, handwritten notes, some of that’s old school. So I was thinking a screensaver. Every time you turn on your computer or you open your phone, the list of 20 donors instead of your kids.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I love that. I love that. Really. I mean, that solves the computer problem where things aren’t in front of your nose unless you open them. So a screensaver is a great way to do it.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. So I think the idea that you haven’t talked to or you’re so relieved that you have finished soliciting these 20 people that you can now ignore them, I think the opposite is true. That’s the point we’re trying to make is that stewardship and cultivation, cultivation, stewardship becomes even more important in an ongoing way.

Examples that Highlight Excellent Stewardship

So let’s talk about a few examples and some stories that we have to bring to highlight these points, Andrea. The one I’m thinking of is an independent school that we worked with a few years back and they did a decent job, let’s say a decent job of keeping in touch with their biggest donors. And towards the end of their campaign, they were a million dollars short on a $10 million campaign. They had raised $9 million, but the last million, they really weren’t sure where it was going to come from.

And one of the strategies was to go back to these, their first 20 donors and say, “What do you think? What should we do?” And of course, those were the 20 donors that filled in that gap. They all pledged an additional gift, but probably because they had been kept up to date, they knew what was happening. They were aware of how it was going and the progress that was made over time, both on the project side and the fundraising on the campaign side.

And this is a strategy that we use again and again with campaigns that struggle at the end. And it’s not uncommon to go back to your donors, but if you haven’t talked to them for 18 or 24 months, that is a much more awkward conversation than if you’ve been in regular touch with them.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I mean, that happens, Amy, I would say, in at least one out of every two campaigns that we see, where an organization goes back to those donors before the end of the campaign. I mean, maybe it’s more frequent than that, but that story is a story that really everyone should pay attention to because it’s likely to happen to you. I mean, there are other things that come up during campaigns where really good stewardship of these top donors pays off.

A Great Story to Prove the Point

And I’ll give you a great story that we encountered with an arts organization that we worked with that was building a new building. They had been occupying a storefront property for years and they had outgrown it and decided they were going to have a real facility.

So the whole campaign was about this new facility and they’d raised a considerable amount of money. And one day the executive director got a call from the people who owned the storefront property that they used as their offices and for other things as well. And the owner said, “I’ve decided I’m going to sell this property and I want to give you right of first refusal. Would you like it?” Well, I mean, it caused some challenges if the guy was going to sell it to somebody who wanted them out before their new building was finished, that was going to cause a problem. And they had always talked about having a facility where they could house visiting artists, for example, or other people.

And this building that they were renting would serve that purpose nicely, but of course they hadn’t budgeted in their campaign. It would cost about a half a million dollars, something like that, and that was nowhere. So what did they do? They had done a very good job of stewarding their donors. They went to their largest donor who made the biggest gift to the campaign and they said:

“We just want to come to you for advice. You’re sophisticated. You can help us think through the options here.”

They went and they sat down with them, not asking them for anything other than:

“Should we do this? Should we take out a mortgage? What are the upsides and downsides of this? How would you advise us?”

So it was a good conversation. They went home and a day later they get a call from this donor saying:

“Well, we’ve talked about it. We decided we’re going to buy this building for you because we think you should have it.”

Amy Eisenstein:
And I mean, I think the point of that is that, of course, when you do stewardship well, fundraising becomes so easy. I mean, that’s the takeaway is that this donor had been a thought partner. They weren’t going to him for money in this particular instance. But of course, that old saying that sort of cliche, ask for advice, get money in fundraising.

And the idea of stewardship is keeping your donors up to date, asking them for advice, having them as partners in this process, not just as, “Okay, you gave your gift, now we don’t have to talk to you anymore.” But I mean, I think that’s a great example of a specific need, but just in terms of ongoing fundraising, you want these people in your corner and to continue to support you long after the campaign ends. And so doing good stewardship is critically important.

Preventing Poor Stewardship

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, just a personal example about this, you and I are recording this in January and in December I gave away a pretty nice, tidy amount of money to a number of organizations. And I’ve been so interested to see who responds and who doesn’t respond and how they respond. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the people who have not responded are not likely to get another significant gift from me again. Now that’s more basic. But it’s the same thing.

If a donor has given a million dollars to an organization and they don’t hear anything for six months, anything personal for six months, it’s not good.

Now, Amy, there’s another part of this question. Some of you listening to this may be in a situation where you’ve come into an organization only to find that after a prior campaign, no one did any stewardship.

And now here you are coming in to organize and manage a campaign with donors who haven’t been appropriately handled or taken care of and you have a new campaign to do. What can you do about that?

Amy Eisenstein:
It happens all the time. I hear about it from development director after development director that are starting new campaigns that we haven’t stewarded our campaign donors from the last campaign. Okay, go ahead.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Makes me sad to think about this topic.
Amy Eisenstein:

You know I think there’s two things to think about here. Yes, but go ahead. Go ahead, Andrea.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, the first thing and perhaps the most obvious thing is if you’re the new person on the block, you’re the new development director and you have been hired and you know there’s a campaign coming up. Well, you can’t change the past, but you can set a new direction for the future.

Repairing the Damage of Poor Stewardship

So you can make it early in your list of things to do in the first three months, in the first six months to go and talk personally to every one of your top 50 donor prospects. You can just say, “Every week, I’m going to go talk to five of them. I’m going to get it done in 10 weeks.” And you can say:

“I’ve been reviewing all of the information and I see that we didn’t do a good job of staying in touch with you. And tell me about that. Tell me your thoughts about this organization. And it’s so important to me that we do a really good job of this, so I’d like to talk to you about how you would like to be treated.”

So you can repair relationships even when they haven’t been treated well just by actually addressing the fact, not covering it up, not pretending, but addressing it and saying how painful it is to you to realize that nobody’s been in touch with them and that you’re starting on a new course.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. I think that because this is so sort of in, I don’t know what the right word is, invasive, it happens all the time at organizations when there’s turnover. And there is a lot of turnover at nonprofits, especially after a campaign, a development director often leaves, so this is not uncommon at all.

And so to me, the question is, what kind of infrastructure can you put in place at your organization to help ensure it doesn’t? So maybe it’s a monthly stewardship meeting with the executive director, the development director, a board member, and an administrative person so that when one or two people leave, that meeting continues and you review the list of the top 20 donors for the last year, whether you’re in a campaign or not. And there is a process, a monthly meeting to say:

“All right, who’s going to outreach to these 20 people? And what’s the topic of the month? What’s the question? What can we do with each of them?”

And so that you systematize stewardship at your organization. So even after you leave, there’s a process in place so that it continues.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, that’s so important and so often overlooked.

Final Thoughts

And I also love ad hoc stewardship, in the moment stewardship where you see something and makes you think that somebody would enjoy knowing about it and you reach out to them, but it needs to be within the context of a system that would make sure that it continues on no matter who the staff is.

Amy Eisenstein:
And I think it’s about changing the culture, the culture at the organization so that there can be impromptu, spur of the moment, “Oh, this happened. Now we think of our big donors or we think of this specific donor or that specific donor.” So maybe it’s on every board meeting agenda:

“This is how we engage these people and who has ideas? Who knows this person? Who wants to reach out?”

It can be a 15-minute discussion at every single board meeting, put a process in place so that it doesn’t fall apart during, throughout the middle, or the craziest times of your campaign.

So Andrea, this was a great topic today, I think. So thank you so much.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
An important topic.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, an important topic. Great. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us and we’ll see you next time.