Track and Report Capital Campaign Progress with 5 Simple Questions

While capital campaigns can be large and complex, there’s a simple tool used by our clients and campaign advisors to report on campaign progress.

As you’ll see in this post, reporting doesn’t need to be long and complicated, as long as it’s accurate.

5 Simple Questions to Track and Report Capital Campaign Progress

As you move through your capital campaign, you’ll want to pay close attention to five key metrics / questions:

1. How much have you received in gifts and pledges so far?
2. How much do you need to get to your goal?
3. How many gifts are in your pipeline and how much is likely to come through?
4. How many gifts still need to be identified and cultivated?
5. Is there a viable path to your goal?

Answers to these five questions are what you should be reporting on to your staff and campaign volunteers every month. It doesn’t need to be — and shouldn’t be — more complicated than that.

Questions to Ask Your Campaign Leadership Team

Ask your campaign leadership team:

• Who is in the pipeline and who is responsible for soliciting and following up with those gifts?
• How can we identify and cultivate donors and new gifts?
• How far is the delta between what we’ve raised, gifts we’ve solicited, and dollars we believe we can raise?

As the campaign progresses, it should become clearer where the gifts are coming from. You should be able to see the path to your goal based on the number of prospects you have in your pipeline and the range of gifts you believe those donors will make.

This tracking and reporting will help you and your team make strategic decisions in real time.

Making Adjustments to Your Capital Campaign

In many cases, organizations determine that they will reach and surpass their initial goal. This is a wonderful position to be in and you’ll have the opportunity to raise your goal and raise even more money than you initially planned.

However, if several of the big gifts you were hoping for don’t materialize, your leadership team can begin discussions about alternative funding sources such as government funds, using organizational reserves, or taking loans. As a last resort, you may scale back your project plans.

Tracking Can be a Capital Campaign Lifeline

One of our clients, a small independent school, used this set of five questions to help track their progress.

As they were preparing their campaign, several of their wealthiest families were getting ready to graduate and the campaign was slower than they hoped getting off the ground. Unfortunately, this meant some of their biggest donors didn’t end up giving the big gifts that they were counting on to the campaign.

The tracking system they reviewed each month became a lifeline and a reality check. The review forced the committee to have serious conversations. Additionally, it prompted them to work even harder than they might have to explore beyond their immediate families to look at grandparents and engage certain alumni.

Without a clear and regular system of evaluating progress, the committee might not have been as concerned as they needed to be to actively engage in the campaign.

The good news is that after many months and years of hard work, their pipeline is full and it looks as though they may even go over the goal.

Metrics are Critical to Your Campaign Roadmap

As with all things in life, having a roadmap to where you are trying to go (your campaign goal) will help you be more successful and make necessary course corrections along the way.

Remember — knowing where you are and where you’re going is one of the most important keys to a successful campaign.