Avoiding Common Capital Campaign Mistakes

Full Transcript:

Steven: All right, great. Well, good afternoon to those of you on the

East Coast, and good morning, if you are on the West Coast.

Thanks for joining us for today's webinar "Avoiding Common

Capital Campaign Mistakes." My name is Steven Shattuck and I'm

the VP of Marketing over here at Bloomerang and I will be

moderating today's discussion and today I'm joined by our guest.

He is Brent A. Hafele, M.A. Hey there Brent.

Brent: Hello.

Steven: Thanks for joining us. Sorry, I didn't mean to ignore the

people between coasts so if you are between coasts, also welcome

to you. Thanks for you for being here, Brent. Thanks to everyone

who's joining us. This is going to be a great conversation about

capital campaigns. It's actually one that Brent and I have been

planning, I think for a few months. So I've had it on my

calendar, and I've been really excited about the presentation,

and I had a chance to peek at the slides a little bit this

morning. You're all in for a treat for sure.

For those of you who don't know Brent, he provides counsel through

his practice, NewDay Nonprofit Solutions. He's working with a

variety of nonprofit leadership areas, including capital

campaigns, general fundraising, strategic planning, board

governance relations, vibrancy planning. As a practitioner,

Brent's got some boots on the ground experience. He worked in

the nonprofit sector for almost ten years, serving as executive

director of the Chippewa Valley Free Clinic and development

director of Hope Gospel Mission where he successfully led a

capital campaign to open a women's shelter. That's great.

So he's got some real life experience with all the things he's going

to talk about. Brent also has a Master of Arts degree in

Philanthropy and Development from Saint Mary's University in

Minnesota. He's a faculty member of the University of Saint

Thomas' Fundraising Certificate Series where he actually teaches

courses on capital campaigns and nonprofit marketing. He's also

a regular speaker at national, regional, and local conferences

on nonprofit leadership. So Brent, this is real treat to have

you. Thanks again for taking an hour or so out of your day to

share all of your knowledge with us. We really appreciate it.

Brent: Well, thank you guys. It's great to be here and I appreciate

the opportunity to speak to you about really a passion of mine,

capital campaigns, and talk a little bit more about how to

really propel nonprofit organizations further and help them grow

forward. That's something that I'm really all about so thank

you, I appreciate it, Steven.

Steven: Yeah, I can definitely tell you are. Well, good. I'm not going

to take up too much time. I know I want to get Brent started on

the presentation, just some housecleaning items. I will be

sending out the slides and a recording of the presentation a

little bit later on this afternoon. So look for an email from me

with all those resources. So if you have to leave early or

perhaps you'd want to revisit some of the content, you'll be

able to do that.

And as Brent's presenting, please do feel free to send some questions

through the chat box there. We're going to stick around for a

Q&A session at the end where Brent's going to be here as an

expert for you to answer any and all questions you have. So

don't be shy. Send any questions our way and we'll get to those

a little bit later on in the presentation. So Brent, why don't

you take it away?

Brent: All right, let's get to it. So today I want to talk to you

about capital campaigns and specifically I want to share with

you four common mistakes that I've found that nonprofits make on

a regular basis. And avoiding these four mistakes is really a

solid way to make sure that your campaign has a higher

likelihood of success. So in today's agenda we're going to start

with what is a capital campaign and what are the different

variations of that? Then from there we're going to talk about

those four mistakes and then how to fix them, strategies for

that.

Then we're going to have lots of time for questions and answers and

so you'll see on your screen, there's a chat box, and I

encourage you throughout the webinar to send lots of questions.

That way Steven can ask me all of your questions and we can do

everything we can to help you in this webinar. Because really

we're here for you and to help you have a better understanding

of this process. So what is a capital campaign? Bob Duncan has

probably the most simple, elegant definition of a capital

campaign. It's a large dollar goal against a very short

timeframe.

So big money in a very, very short period of time and more

specifically though, a capital campaign is a very intensive,

highly coordinated fundraising effort. You're going to put an

army of people together and coordinate the group of people

through the capital campaign process and help them move forward.

The reason you're putting this army of people together -- it's

almost like setting up a separate organization when you're

running a campaign for just a short period of time -- is because

you have a very large goal.

Typically three to ten times the annual income of your organization,

and so this is substantial money for a nonprofit to raise in a

very short period of time. Then point three is that it's over a

defined period of time. Typically a capital campaign will run at

the shortest, probably 12 to 15 months, but campaigns can go as

long as four or five years, depending on the structure of the

campaign, how big your goal is and what you're trying to

accomplish in that campaign itself.

Now what types of campaigns are out there? Well, campaigns have a

number of goals that you can go for and the most common is

probably bricks and mortar, getting a larger facility, adding on

to your current facility, remodeling, acquiring property. That's

usually the most common. But campaigns can also be used for a

number of other means that people don't recognize as much.

Sometimes they can be used to expand a program or you can add

funding to actually help. You want to do some bricks and mortar

and then you also want to do some program upkeep or some cash

reserve, upgrade equipment, to do endowments as well.

And so once again, it's that large capital goal or that large dollar

goal that really defines what a campaign is and ultimately the

goal of the campaign is to provide better services to more

people. And really no matter what nonprofit we are working in

our ultimate goal is, we're serving people in some way, form, or

fashion. Even in an animal shelter, seemingly the animals are

the beneficiaries, but people are also those beneficiaries. And

so the goal is to improve those services to whoever values those

services and what they're going to do. So let's get right into

the four mistakes that I see nonprofits make and in the way that

they approach fundraising.

The very first mistake is that I see that they expect uniform gifts

and the easiest way is to say "Well, if we need to raise a

million dollars, let's get 1,000 people to give $1,000." Or

sometimes they'll say "Let's get 100 people to give $10,000 and

we'll find that." Really that doesn't work. It's not an

effective strategy and to some of us who are veteran

fundraisers, we know this. But there are a lot of board members,

and there are a lot of volunteers, and there are a lot of lay

fundraiser and newer fundraisers, that haven't quite experienced

this yet. "So let's spread out the dollar amount so that it's

equal to everyone, that's the best way to do this."

And why do we do this? I think it's because we're really all about

fairness. We want it to be equitable to everyone. But the

problem with this type of solution, $1,000 from 1,000 donors to

raise a million dollars is twofold. Number one is it doesn't

rightly match the appropriate gift amount to the individual or

to the donor's capability of giving and their interest in

giving. So there may be some donors' who a $50 gift is the best

that they can do in that campaign. And a $1,000 gift, they just

can't touch it, so they're not going to give to you.

There may be other donors that have the ability to give you $100,000

gift or a $500,000 gift, but you're asking for $1,000. So then

you're asking for less. The other problem with this type of

strategy is that when you're asking for many, many, many, many

gifts from many people for very large dollar amounts -- the

problem with doing a strategy like that is that it's incredible

amounts of work to go out and find 1,000 donors that can give

$1,000, so the structure of it is even more work than the

classic capital campaigns. So how do we do it in a capital

campaign? Well, we'll go back to our friend, the donor pyramid

and in the donor pyramid -- Steven can you see my cursor here?

Steven: Yes, I can see it.

Brent: I'm still learning this webinar stuff.

Steven: Yeah, beautiful.

Brent: And the universe is anyone who might have interest in your

organization, in giving a gift to your organization. So in that

universe then, what the goal is, it's to help get donors or

people from the universe to actually give to your organization.

And what you see is there are many, many, many donors that give

very small gifts and there are very few donors at the top. You

can see the surface area of these lead donors, there are very

few of them.

What's interesting though, about the donor pyramid is that donors

actually give in the inverse. I'm trying to get to the slide

here, just a second. Okay so that slide's not going to work.

We'll try this other way. What we'll actually see then -- I'll

just draw it. What we see is that donors will give in the

inverse, and so when you're looking at dollars, you get a lot of

money from very few donors. And at the bottom you get a wee

little bit of money from many, many, many, many givers and

that's the way the capital campaigns are structured.

You've heard about this before, it's called the Pareto Principle, the

80/20 rule where 20% of the donors give 80% of the money or 20%

of the volunteers do 80% of the work. So we've heard of this

before, it applies to capital campaigns as well. And in fact,

more and more we're going in that way where now it's not just

80/20, but sometimes 90/10. And I've even heard of campaigns --

I believe the University of Florida just did a capital campaign

that was 97/3.

So 3% of the donors gave 90% of the money for this multi-- I believe

it was a billion or $2 billion capital campaign. So that's the

direction of this. So how does do you raise a million dollars?

Here's the start of a gift range chart. What you see is the very

first gift that we need is one gift of $150,000. Now that's

roughly 14% of the total goal.

This gift is really critical and how you read this is the number of

gifts you need. What are the dollar amounts and then how many

prospects do you need? You need three people who have the

ability to give $150,000. Statistically one of those three who

are interested in your program will actually give it. Dollars in

range and then total dollars, this first tier what you'll see

here now is nine donors are going to give 45% of the total

gifts. And so it's really important to be able to connect with

the largest donors and to be able to understand whether they

have the ability to give and whether they have the interest in

giving.

I had the unfortunate circumstance of working with an organization

that wanted to build a pool and this group they were very

interested in building a pool, so they had hired me to do a

campaign preplanning study. Some of you have heard of that as a

feasibility study. And when I came in to do the study I spoke

with individuals who had the ability to give these types of

gifts, these very large, either upper five-figure gifts or lower

to midrange six-figure gifts. And while the community was very

excited about a pool and they had lots of surveys saying "We

should go forward with this pool idea," the major donors were

not a fan of the pool.

Unfortunately it shut down the project, because we couldn't find the

people at the top to give those dollar gifts. So as you move

down the gift range chart or the table of gifts needed, you can

see that we go all the way down to we need 150 donors to give

$250 each and that gift is to our $1.1 million goal in this. But

at the end, the most important gifts are these top gifts. If you

can't get those very top gifts, the top ten to top 15 gifts,

you're not going to have a campaign. And so it's very critical

to think about that and to make sure that you're not worried

about equity. But you're more worried about making sure that

you're asking for the right size of gifts for your campaign.

The next mistake that I said -- you heard me allude to a preplanning

study, campaign planning study and the next mistake that I see

is actually skipping the campaign studies. And what a campaign

study is you hire a consultant and yes, I realize that I am a

consultant, so there may be a couple people that think that's

self-serving.

But really it's a research project that needs to done prior to a

capital campaign for probably 90-95% of organizations. Those

that fit into the 5-10% typically are very, very sophisticated

fundraising operations, like very experienced universities that

know their donors extremely well, have giving officers in the

range of 100 in their development staff and some of those

organizations can skip the study. But the capital campaign

planning study or feasibility study is a critical aspect of a

capital campaign and here's what campaign studies do.

First of all, they test the case. You're able to ask the questions

"Do people resonate with this case, with the project that we're

trying to do? Is it compelling? Is it something that is exciting

and that donors resonate with?" When I had mentioned the pool,

unfortunately the major donors did not find the pool as

something that's compelling, even though they had the capacity

to give. So really finding out is the case compelling is

something that's really important and how to structure that.

There are other projects that as you go through, you find out "Wow,

there's just overwhelming support for this. They're really

excited about the case." The next thing you're looking for is

assessing the capacity, so financial resources are out there to

be given to this campaign. So for that million dollar goal, who

has the capacity to give $150,000 gifts? And really looking at

that population and finding out who has the capacity and who has

the inclination as well, and really gauging that to be able to

see "Do we have enough donors and do we have donors of

sufficient capacity to be able to reach the goal?"

And the reason this is important is that within that study -- at the

end of the study -- once the research is done, you're consultant

will come back to you and give you some pointers, give you some

suggestions, and be able to say "I think that $1 million is a

little bit steep. Maybe we should go for $750,000." Or they

might say "I really think you should go for $2 million. I think

we should add an endowment to this because when I'm looking at

the capacity and the interest, this is a campaign that's really

going to go well."

The third thing that the campaign planning study is looking for is

leadership and who will lead this campaign? Capital campaigns

specifically are best run when they're run by volunteers

Specifically when they're run by volunteers who are peers, or in

that cohort group that have the capacity to give a top ten gift

because it's much easier for Phyllis on the steering committee

to talk to Hazel and say "Hazel, I put $100,000 of my own money

in this. Would you give a gift of $75,000" than it is for a

staff person who doesn't really have a relationship with Phyllis

and be able to ask that question of her and say "Would you give

a $75,000 gift?"

When you're asking from peer to peer while technically the ask may

not be as elegant, it's certainly much more effective when it's

a peer to peer situation. The other thing is that when you're

adding, a lot of times staffs don't have the time ability to do

as much work as needs to be done. Certainly we want to have the

staff involved, the executive director, the development

director, if there is one and other staff people, as possible.

But you definitely need to find out who are the people that are

the best to provide that leadership. And here's the key question

that I ask when I do a campaign planning study.

I ask "Who can you think of that if they were part of this campaign,

doggone it, it's going to succeed?" Because there are certain

people that come to mind that "If Harold and Millie are leading

this campaign, the community's going to be behind it." And if

they're not part of the campaign, you're not going to be likely

to get the community to come with you. There are certain thought

leaders and influencers that have that capacity and so who are

those people for your campaign? The final thing that we evaluate

in a planning study is "How ready is your organization to

succeed in this campaign?"

Campaigns are like running a marathon and if I were to say "We're

going to have a marathon tomorrow, are you ready to run it?"

Well, many of you may not be ready to run a marathon tomorrow

and myself, included. But if we said "We're going to run a

marathon in a year," then perhaps you might be better to do

that. So checking that readiness to make sure that you are ready

for the marathon that is the capital campaign is something

that's really important and making sure that you have the

systems that either can be fixed while we're in the middle of

the campaign, or that may be delaying a little bit, so that your

organization can be stronger is a good step.

The final real benefit of a capital campaign planning study is that

the planning study can help prepare your donors and your

leadership for the campaign itself. It gives those donors the

opportunity to start thinking about your campaign and thinking

about their gift. In an environment where they don't have to

worry about being asked right away and so they can start getting

excited, getting interested and moving forward with that. So

it's a really valuable tool that is very important to be done.

So we're about halfway through the mistakes that I see nonprofits

make and I'm hoping that you're thinking of some questions right

now. So I want to encourage you in about 15 minutes, we're going

to start taking questions and so I would encourage to start

putting your questions into that chat window, so Steven can

start organizing them and getting ready.

And Leah just asked "What is the study called?" It's called a

preplanning study or a feasibility study and by the way --a

feasibility study is going out of popularity as far as the term.

And the reason is, is that most nonprofits, they don't want to

know whether the project is feasible or not. They want to know

how to do it and so many nonprofits are going to go forward

whether the consultant thinks it's feasible or not. They want to

know how to structure it and they want to know what the goals

should be. So a preplanning study is really a much more

appropriate statement to go by.

All right, the next mistake is going public too soon and this is a

mistake that makes me smile and makes me sad all at the same

time. I have a capital campaign that I'm leading up in Bemidji,

Minnesota for an art center. I was driving up there and I drove

through Duluth, Minnesota and as I was driving through Duluth I

saw a thermometer on the wall.

And I wish I would have had the chance to take a picture of it, but

it literally was at 10? and we're throwing a campaign and they

even said their goal was $2 million and it had 10? on it. I

don't know any thermometer that's exciting when it's got 10?

whether it's a real thermometer that actually takes temperature

or whether it is a thermometer that is for a capital campaign or

any campaign for that matter. It's just not very exciting and so

when you think about a $2 million goal or a $5 million goal and

we have $50,000 in the bank already and we're raising $5

million, donors look at that and they say "Well, what is my

$1,000 going to do when you don't have that money?"

Whereas, when your thermometer looks like this, we're raising $2

million. We've got 75% of the goal in already. We need everybody

to come and put their pennies together. We need every brat fry,

bake sale. We need donors to give their $1,000, their $5. We

need everyone to get involved and do a great big push to go

public. Then you have that psychology and you have that

excitement that really can bring a campaign.

So let me take a minute and walk you through the steps, the phases of

a campaign, because capital campaigns are one of the few areas

in fundraising. They're very structured and regimented and

almost every campaign goes through the same steps whereas annual

giving, you know the number of letters you might send. Or there

are a lot of variables within how you do annual giving or online

giving, or any of those types of things. Events management,

they're all different. Capital campaigns tend to be very, very

similar.

So let me walk you through those steps. The first step is to do the

preplanning and preplanning is really the process of getting

ready to get ready for the campaign, if that makes any sense. So

preplanning is the two to three years prior to the campaign

itself and getting your organization ready. That might be

preparing your architectural documents. It might be doing your

strategic plan. There are a number of things that you do in that

preplanning phase.

Then you enter the planning phase and the planning of the campaign is

when you do your planning study, your campaign planning study.

That's when you usually will bring on counsel, retain a

consultant who can help you through that campaign and walk you

through that planning stage, do the study and say "I think this

should be your goal. I think this is who your leadership team

should be" and how you move forward.

The next step is when you actually start doing fundraising and that's

called the quiet phase. In the quiet phase you are taking very

quiet efforts to raise between 60-80% of your goal in cash or

pledges. You're meeting with those who would if they could give

a top ten gift and asking them for the big money, so a six-

figure gift, an upper five-figure gift.

Sometimes it's a seven-figure gift. You're asking those donors to

give big money and what you're doing is you're working quietly

to raise that thermometer. So that when you go public, when you

go out to the community you've got 60-80% of the goal already

achieved, and that's a statement to the community that you are

ready. So that's what that quiet phase is all about and how that

quiet phase works. Once you have the 60-80%, then you enter the

public phase and you do that by going public or launching the

campaign.

Now you've been quiet for many, many months. The quiet phase could

last six to nine months, sometimes 12. But you had this quiet

phase where you don't even have press releases about doing a

campaign. You're not talking to the community about a campaign.

You don't have any brochures or literature. All of sudden there

is an explosion of energy that goes out to the community and

says "We're having a campaign. We are raising $2 million dollars

and we've got $1.5 in the bank. We need everyone to come out and

help."

You might do a press conference. You might do a big kickoff event.

You might have an army or fundraising teams going out to meet

with different groups. You have a lot of public presentations

that go and meet with church groups, and social service groups,

and work groups, and employers, and employees, and grants, a

flurry of energy that happens in the public phase. And most

people think that once you reach your goal, the campaign is

done. But I think there's a final phase to that, that I think is

really important, and that is the celebration phase.

The celebration phase is when you throw -- there are a couple of

things. But number one you throw a big party that's appropriate

for your organization. If it was a Boys and Girls Club, you

might throw a community carnival and invite the community down

to the new center to see the facility and there'd be games for

kids to play and music and popcorn and other types of things for

the community to come.

Really the reason that you're doing this celebration is a few-fold.

Number one is you want to thank the donors for their support and

you want to show them what you did with their support. What you

did with their gifts, how you were a wise steward of the

resources they trusted to you.

You also want to show to your community that your organization is a

success. It's a great big PR opportunity to marry your

organization with the concept of success. So when they think of

your art center, when they think of your environmental center,

when they think of the school that you run or the homeless

shelter that you operate, they think "Wow, what a great

organization. They did an awesome job with their campaign. They

have a beautiful facility and I really want to continue

supporting them."

That's the final reason that the celebration is really important is

that it's an opportunity to continue stewarding the relationship

with those donors. Because research shows that capital campaigns

well-run will actually boost annual giving over time, so annual

giving will improve, if you steward those donors right. And the

celebration is a great tool to steward the donors and start the

process of bringing annual gifts in. All right, that's mistake

number three is going public too early.

Now here's the last mistake and this also has to go with timing. The

last mistake is launching your campaign prematurely. I've seen a

number of organizations that have launched early or they weren't

ready to launch and really a bad campaign is worse than no

campaign. Because just like you want to come out to the

community and demonstrate "We're successful. We did it," to the

community -- you don't want to go and launch a campaign and then

fail because that marks your organization with failure and we

don't want to do that. That's not a good brand for your

organization.

I'll remind you that brand is not just your logo and what you put

out, but it's the total sum of the stories of everyone in the

community that think about your organization. So half here is I

see really two types of organizations out there. There's an

organization that lives in what I call the campaign cycle, where

they live for a long period of time with no campaign. No

campaign, no campaign, no campaign, and they really are not

thinking ahead into the future, and all of sudden one day "Oh,

my goodness, we're overwhelmed. We're slammed. We need to do a

campaign and we need to get going with our capital campaign."

And they find, "Wow. Our donor systems and our development systems

are not in the right shape. Our case is just really not well

setup." There are a number of problems that come in with that,

so there's an alternative and this is what I see as a better

alternative. There are organizations out there though, that work

under a growth cycle. They assume that "We're going to continue

to grow. We're not quite sure when our next campaign is, but

we're going to grow. We're going to take the time. We're going

to plan ahead."

So these organizations, they start with a plan, and then they move

into a preparation stage. So they say "In three years we're

going to launch a capital campaign, therefore we're going to get

our donor database in order. We're going to work with expanding

the number of donors that we have. We're going to beef up our

PR. We're going to improve our board members and we're going to

get everything all set. And then we're going to launch the

campaign, and we'll go through this growth phase right here and

we're going to grow for a period of time."

And after you grow then you enter into a sustainability phase. In

each of these phases you are planning ahead and so in the

prepare phase you are assuming that after the campaign is done,

we're going to have to keep this thing sustainable. And as

you're in the sustain phase where you just finished a capital

campaign, but we're getting ourselves ready for the next one.

Because maybe its ten years down the road, but we're thinking

ahead so that whenever that demographic grows, whenever the need

increases, when the environment changes, we're ready. That's

something I think is the hallmark of a really strong

organization.

So I have a pre-campaign checklist that I produced for nonprofit

organizations that are thinking about doing a capital campaign

and want to avoid this trap of launching prematurely. So this

checklist is available to you. If you go to my website

newdaynonprofit.com and if you sign up for my blog in the upper

right-hand corner, I will send you the checklist. So I'm happy

to give you the checklist. The checklist its self goes through

and talks about six different areas of preparation and the first

area is "Do you have a strategic plan?" And "What does your

strategic plan say? Do you have a track record of actually

implementing or creating goals and then successfully

implementing them, successfully achieving them?"

It also goes through fundraising. For example, do you have a good

relationship with your top 50 donors? If you don't know who your

top 50 donors are and have good notes on your top 50 donors, in

your donor database, if you haven't talked with them and done

donor reports, then you might not be ready for that campaign.

You should make sure that you're ready with that. If you're

fundraising systems, like the receiving systems are not in good

shape, it might not be time.

Staff, if your executive director's likely to retire in the next year

it might not be time for a capital campaign. If you don't have

the right executive director, it might not be time. So it's

making sure that you've got the right staff people in place. If

your development director's not there yet, I have one

organization that I'm working with right now that they have a

very young development director. In fact, he was just hired

three months ago and this is his first fundraising job. Very,

very capable young man, but I advised the organization not to

move forward for a year so that they can really solidify this

young man and their executive director.

So I'm going to be working with them and coaching them through these

stages to help them strengthen their organization and get their

staff upright, so that when they hit the campaign, they do it

very successfully. Is the board right? Have you got good board

members on the board? Are they engaged? Are they all giving? Are

they types of board members that can be helpful in the campaign

its self? So planning that ahead is really helpful as well.

So this is as much a checklist to help you understand what you need

to do to be ready as a checklist to say "Are you ready? Is the

project well-developed? Do you have a budget for the project? Do

you have a budget for the organization once your capital

campaign is done and you've built your building, do you have a

budge pro forma for the next five years or ten years?"

Then finally counsel, capital campaign counsel. Have you started to

talk with the different capital campaign consultants to find the

right one for your organization? It's important to start

talking, especially before you launch into your campaign. As you

get to know the folks that are the right fit for you and for

your organization, you'll be very comfortable moving forward

with that campaign counsel and asking them questions.

Sometimes you can even get free counsel from them on a limited basis,

but sometimes they can help you get started as you're moving

forward. And so really connecting with the right counsel, I

think is wise for your organization. So please sign up for my

blog at newdaynonprofit.com, upper right-hand corner and I will

be happy to send you a copy of the campaign preplanning

checklist and I'll do that next week, Wednesday. So anyone that

signs up by Wednesday they will get that campaign checklist.

One more recommendation and then after that I'll take your questions.

I have a book recommendation for you, "Capital Campaigns:

Strategies That Work," the third edition, by Andrea Kihlstedt.

This is in my opinion the book. There are lots of books. I have

a shelf of probably 20 different capital campaign books out

there. This is the one, so if you're going to buy one book, this

is a buy. Yes, on Amazon its $65 or sometimes it's up as high

$80. You're going to invest a lot of money in a capital

campaign, likely anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 in

fundraising itself.

So it's a book that's only $80. When you think about it, it's well

worth the expense. It takes your through step-by-step. It's very

clean. I think Andrea does a phenomenal job and no, I don't get

any proceeds from the books that I promote for her. I just

really like the book. So with that, Steven, do we have questions

that I can help you with?

Steven: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks Brent that was really awesome.

Hopefully everyone enjoyed that as much as I did. Great

information and I think you really got people's juices flowing

because we have quite a bit of questions. So thanks to everyone

who sent a question in and was a good sport about that. Brent,

I'll just go through these from the top here.

So let's see. We've got a question here from Sarah. Sarah's wondering

how you approach corporate partners in order to expand outside

your local market? So what advice did you have for Sarah who's

maybe wanting to approach some corporations for help with this?

Brent: Well, Sarah, I think one of the first things to be reminded of

is that when you look at the total dollar amount that

corporations give to the philanthropic sector, in comparison

with all the other entities -- and so when you take all the

nongovernment money that was transferred from some other sector

to the nonprofit sector -- corporations only gave 6%. And when

you look at individual donors they gave roughly 83%, when you

include bequests and estate gifts and planned gifts.

And so one of the first things that I think is important to consider

is that corporations are not in the business of giving money

out. They're in the business of making money so that's why they

only give 6%. So be very cautious as to how much energy you put

into them.

Now there are certain businesses that you may have a corporation in

your city that may be willing to give a significant gift, and in

those cases, it's important that you understand number one "Is

the philanthropy of that company a good fit for your

organization?"

If you're a faith-based organization, don't apply to Target. You're

just not likely to get support from Target if you're faith-based

because that's not what they're into. If they're into education,

if you're an education organization, then Target might be a

great place to apply to. If you're faith-based though, Wal-Mart

might be a great place to apply. Now the thing that you need to

understand though is Wal-Mart is in every city in the country,

literally. So you may not get very, very large gifts from the

Wal-Mart Foundation, unless you have, for example, a

distribution center locally or a large volume of volunteers

involved, or if you happen to be in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Other than that it may not be a wise investment of your time and so

really the first thing that I recommend is go to the corporate

website and look at what they give to and what they're

interested in. Often, corporations will have their own

foundation and foundations happen to have 990s and so go to that

foundation's 990 and take a look at what they're giving has been

and what their types of gifts have been and do some research

that way as well. So those are some strategies to get involved.

The other thing is find a local champion within that business. The

more employees you can have involved in your campaign the

better. And if you can find a local champion -- the local

district manager or the local vice-president or local president

or some sort of C level employee, chief financial officer, chief

operating officer, chief marketing officer like Steven is,

someone like that to really be a champion for your organization

within their company -- that's another good strategy. Because

then they can help make the phone calls that can get you around

some of the gatekeepers. So I hope that helps you, Sarah, with

corporate questions. What's next, Steven?

Steven: We've got a question here from Connie. What about startups and

capital campaigns? So a very new nonprofit, perhaps a very small

nonprofit that's just getting started. Are the capital campaigns

something that's feasible for them? Is there a certain minimum

age of a nonprofit before you should start thinking about this

kind of thing? What would you say to Connie about being a

startup nonprofit?

Brent: Well, Connie, startups, and capital campaigns are especially

hard. It certainly is not undoable though, because how does a

homeless shelter start and get a facility if it doesn't do a

capital campaign to raise the money for the facility? So when

you think about something like that or a museum that opens for

the first time. So usually there's some form of large capital

drive at the beginning for a nonprofit. That said, they are very

tricky and they can be a lot of work. Because you're not only

building a nonprofit, you're also building a capital campaign.

Like I said when you're running a capital campaign, it's like running

two organization s. Now that said, I'm not trying to scare you

and I'm not trying to tell you that they can't be done because

they can and I've seen example of that happen successfully and

really developed their organization. It's very important though

that number one, I think it's critical that you get counsel and

have capital campaign counsel walking with you through that. And

actually it's a real benefit to have counsel in that case

because the consultant can not only give you some counsel on how

to run the campaign, but how to set up your organization and

really get that going as well.

It's also important to get some really significant champions at the

beginning, and so that's where some of those large donors, if

you have some large donors, the philanthropist in the community

behind your efforts and behind what you're doing, then your

campaign is likely to succeed and your nonprofit's likely to

succeed as well.

There's a local example in Eau Clair of the Eau Clair Children's

Museum started with a capital campaign. Pat Redman had a vision

of getting this done and he connected with some various very

influential and high capacity donors and said, "We need a

children's museum. We've got to have a place for kids to go and

learn, and to play with their hands and grow."

They went ahead and they launched a great campaign. They had the

right people. They had the right systems. They just did a bang

up job of their campaign and the children's museums been going

strong for five years, and five years into their history they

launched a second capital campaign to expand and launch into

their second floor. So it certainly can be done, Connie. I think

that this is where wise counsel is really important. It also is

a lot of determination, as you know when you're starting a

nonprofit.

Steven: Great. We've got a comment and a question here from Angela.

Angela loved what you said about mistake number two. But she's

having trouble it looks like, getting some buy-in from maybe a

boss or a higher up about the need for preplanning. What advice

would you have for someone who agrees with everything you said,

Brent, but needs to get buy-in from the top on this kind of

thing?

Brent: About the planning studies, specifically?

Steven: Yeah, the need for preplanning.

Brent: I think the importance of that preplanning study and really

getting that part is one of the things that you share with --

number one you can share this video and walk through that and be

able to say "Hey, take a look at this." Another thing is I think

Andrea's book does a really nice job pointing that out and

explaining why that study is so critical.

By the way I have an article, Angela. If you want you can send me an

email, and signup for my blog, and you send me an email though

at brent@newdaynonprofit.com. I'll just throw that up on the

screen so you can get that. But you send me an email I will send

you a campaign study article that you can share as well that

goes through the explanation of why that's important.

Another thing that you can do and this is something that's always

wise to do too is to talk to other nonprofits that have

successfully led campaigns. You probably know of organizations

in town that have done campaigns. Go talk to them and find out

"How did you do your campaign? Did you do a study? Did it go

well? What went well? Why did you do the study? Did you find the

study beneficial?" And in most cases, you're going to find that

there was a study involved. You're going to find some examples

where there wasn't, but in most cases, you're going to find that

there were.

The last thing is to sometime set up a phone call with a consultant

and your supervisor and have them, talk to each other about

that. Because usually there are some questions that can be asked

that can suddenly reveal "Oh, we may not know as much about this

as we thought we did," and that can be very helpful to that

leader in pointing them in the right direction. So I hope that

helps you, Angela, and thank you for the compliment on step two.

I definitely agree.

Steven: Well, here's one from Leah. Leah's wondering "Do you publicize

all major donors?" So he's concerned, "What if two major donors

are competing in the sense that they may not both contribute if

they're aware of the other donor's contribution? So could you

maybe shoot yourself in the foot by publicizing who's giving

there?" What are some best practices for actually making that

information public?

Brent: Well, when it comes to that type of situation, Leah, when you

need to ask the question "How much do you publicize these gifts

and how do you recognize donors?" There are two answers that I

have to that. Number one, that's the real value of having a

leadership team of volunteers. Because that leadership team of

volunteers are going to be able to speak to how to specifically

address those types of situations in your particular community.

With the counsel of the leadership of a consultant who can ask the

right questions and draw that information out of your steering

committee, the steering committee can tell you very specifically

"Yeah, I think we should keep recognition quiet in this

campaign. And we'll do it this way versus that way." Or

"Recognition, let's go all out. In this community it's really

important. We've got to beat that drum hard and get everyone, so

everybody knows that Dan Lawson gave a gift." And they'll know

based on that community's needs.

I worked with a lot of Christian organizations and a lot of the

Christian organizations I work with don't want to do any

recognition at all and they're very quiet about that. Because

from a faith-based perspective, that's just not something that's

consistent with their faith, they hold off. Whereas some of the

secular clients that I work with, they are in some cases, very

verbose. They really want to get it out. And so I think it's a

case-by-case basis.

The other thing is that there are certain donors that want to remain

anonymous and it's always wise to respect that wish and work

with them. So I hope that helps you, Leah. If there's anything

else I can help you with, please shoot me an email and we'll

talk about that.

Steven: Cool. I think we've got about five more minutes for questions

so if you've been sitting on your hands and been too shy to ask

Brent something, please do. We've got about five minutes left

for Q&A, and Brent, I'll just keep rolling through these.

Casey's halfway through her goal in a capital campaign. Good

job, Casey. But they've hit a lull, "How do we revamp the

campaign or find fresh new prospects?" So they've hit a lull and

need something to jump start that again? What advice would you

have for Casey there?

Brent: Well, Casey what you are experiencing is what every campaign,

just about every campaign experiences. You get about halfway

through it, and almost similar to running a marathon, you're

getting halfway through it and you're just out of breath, and

you need to get that breath caught up and reinvigorate. So one

of the things that can be is bringing the steering committee

together and trying to find some easy wins. Are there donors

that you haven't connected with yet and doing an all effort to

really get out and try to boost giving.

Because what happens is success breeds success, so as you start

bringing gifts in and as you start whirling in again, then that

energy reinvigorates and goes. I don't know if you're retaining

a consultant or not, but your consultant sometimes can help you

in understanding when is the right time to start building too,

because sometimes the breaking ground can be really helpful in

boosting fundraising as well. But you want to make sure you make

that decision with counsel at your side, because if you break

ground too early you can also really have hurt your campaign.

I know another organization I was not involved in this campaign -- so

I'll let you know that ahead of time -- but I know another

organization that they broke ground at about 50% of goal and

they left at 60% of goal and they still have 40% of their

campaign five years later to pay off. So they've got this debt

that they're trying to pay off and it's just rough on them. So

you want to make sure that you go public at the right time.

While we're at it, on the screen I have a free campaign checkup and

so whether you are planning a campaign, whether you're in the

middle of a campaign, like Casey is or whether you're after the

campaign and you want to talk about "How do we get

sustainability?" Or you want to talk about that growth cycle and

say "We want to get out of the campaign cycle and go into the

growth cycle." Shoot me an email and let's talk. I'd be happy to

do a quick campaign checkup and maybe there are a couple of

pointers that I can help you in or point you in the right

direction to help you move a little further faster.

So I think, again to just recap, Casey. Speaking with your campaign

counsel, getting your steering committee to really boost some

giving, and try to find the low-hanging fruit that's left.

Sometimes it's just a matter of fundamentals and going out and

trudging through it and saying, "Let's make five more calls, and

let's try to get that next gift in." Because once you get a

couple of gifts closed, then you've got that success to breed

more success.

Steven: That's great advice and we've got a question from Dana that

dovetails into that a little bit. Dana's wondering "How do you

successfully extend a campaign?" So she's got a match provider

that would like to increase the goal and extend the actual

campaign, any advice for Dana on actually doing that, extending

the campaign?

Steven: Well, what a great situation to be in, Dana. Wow. I guess there

are two things. One, in the ideal situation you have not gone

public yet. Because when you go public, that's when you announce

your goal and until you go public, your goal can be fluid. So if

you have a $1 million goal and you haven't gone public, well you

just adjust the goal and you say "Well, now we're $1.5 million,

because we've got a $250,000 match." So you just boost your goal

up.

In another situation though, when you have a match and they want to

boost the goal, I think that's one of those where you have to

communicate that well to your community. Your steering committee

-- and you're going to hear some themes. The consultant, the

steering committee, and making sure you're checking with them,

but verifying and speaking to your steering committee and

getting very clear with them and saying "How do we raise this

goal?"

And sometimes raising the goal means you go back to your top ten

donors and you say "Thank you so much for your gift. We're so

grateful for that. Something changed in the campaign and we want

to really communicate this with you. We'd like to ask your

advice about what to do." There's an old fundraising adage that

says "When you ask for money you get advice. When you ask for

advice you get money."

So going back to those major donors and saying "We have $1 million

dollar gift that is available to us as a match and it came at

the end of our campaign and we're thinking about extending the

campaign. But we don't know how to do this, but we want to take

advantage of this $1 million. Can you give us some ideas of how

to make this happen?" And engaging some of your top donors to

participate in that and you may be able to do a second campaign

somewhere in there.

So Dana, I guess that would be my best advice, without knowing the

details of yours that would be my best thought. Is to go back to

your steering committee, and go back to your top donors, even

some of those that have already given a gift because they've got

skin in the game already. They're very interested. They want to

make sure the campaign is successful, so that's a way to get in

there.

Steven: Great. We've got a question here. Azeal was wondering "What's

the process of selecting a consultant?" I know you're a

consultant, obviously Brent, and I hope people will select you.

But what tips would you have for folks who are maybe vetting two

or three candidates to help them out with this kind of thing?

Brent: You said the name was Azeal?

Steven: I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. Hopefully, I am.

Brent: Pretty close, okay. All right, so Azeal and I would agree with

Steven on that too, I hope that you select me as well. But when

you're selecting a consultant there are a couple things that I

really think is wise to look for. Number one is you want to make

sure that you have someone that's obviously competent, who knows

what they're doing and can do it well, and hopefully has a track

record of success in what they're doing.

The second thing beyond competency that you're looking for is "What

is the quality of service that you're going to get? How does

that consultant treat you in the sales process? Are they

persistent? Are they calling you back? Are they checking in with

you? Are they polite when they do that?" Because that's the type

of service that you're going to get when you are working with

them later on hopefully and so you want to make sure that

they're persistent, because a good capital campaign consultant

is going to be pushing you throughout the campaign and will be

calling you regularly. If they can't do that in the sales

process they're not going to do it during the campaign.

The next that I think is really important when you're looking at a

consultant is checking their references, making sure that this

person is good to work with and they have great skills in

checking with them.

Then the final thing that I think is really critical and I think

frankly underappreciated is do you like the consultant? So once

you have verified that they're qualified, they're going to

provide great service, that they have good references, at the

end of the day "Do you like this person? Do you respect him or

her," because if you don't like them, if you don't respect them,

even if they're qualified, it's going to be a rough experience.

You'll be working with your consultant anywhere from 12-36

months, somewhere in that range, 12-24 months. If you don't like

them that experience is going to be really miserable because

you'll be working closely with that person.

The other thing though is that in virtually every campaign there's a

moment where the consultant is going to come to you as the staff

liaison of some sort and say "There's a problem and the problem

is you and we need to talk about this. We need to fix it." That

conversation is not going to go well, if you don't respect the

consultant that you're working with. They may be very talented,

but if you don't like them, you're not going to listen to that

counsel that is helping you in a constructively critical way.

And so finding someone that you can say "Yeah, I could receive

criticism from this person," because I guarantee you it will

come. There will be moments where there'll be tense moments in

that campaign and the consultant is going to have to step in and

say "I've got to work out the relationship between you and the

chair." Or "Sometimes you just need to watch your temper." Or

"Sometimes we've got to work on this." Or "This is something

that's got to be better organized."

And that just is in every campaign part of that process of learning

and growing and getting better because campaigns are so intense,

they tend to highlight our flaws. So being able to work with

someone who you can trust, who you like, and who you can

understand will help you is really the way to go. So I hope that

that helps you, Azeal, in understanding how to select a

consultant.

Steven: Cool. Well, great. I know there are a few questions that we

didn't get to and we're running close to the 2 o'clock hour here

and I want to be respectful of everyone's time, especially if

they haven't had their lunch. So Brent, I'm going to give you

the last word to just tell folks again how they can get in touch

with you and I hope some folks will take advantage of the offers

that he's made here. But Brent, how can people get ahold of you

to talk more about this?

Brent: Well, the best way to get ahold of me is by email and

brent@newdaynonprofit.com. Shoot me an email and I'm offering a

free campaign checkup to anyone who's on this call. And we'll

talk for 45 minutes or an hour about your campaign, answer your

questions in more detail, and really get into understanding how

to help ensure that your campaign is most successful. So if I

can help in any way let me know that. I also just want to plug

my blog one more time.

I have a lot of helpful tips. I'm not real annoying. I'm not going to

send you something every day. It's usually one or two, sometimes

three blog entries a month and so just go to

newdaynonprofit.com. My website and in the upper right-hand

corner, click blog and it'll take you to signing up. And from

there if you sign up by next week Wednesday I'll send you that

preplanning worksheet as well.

So I thank you so much and I really appreciated the opportunity to

share a little bit about campaigns and I hope that this has

helpful in preventing those four mistakes. Because if you watch

out for those four you have a significantly improved opportunity

to have a successful campaign and grow the impact of your

organization, so thank you.

Steven: Well, thank you. You're the one who shared all this knowledge

with us for an hour, so really we owe you the thanks. And thanks

to everyone else who attended and took an hour out of their day

to listen and hang out with us. We do these webinars once a

week. We're actually taking next week off, but there are some

opportunities for you to register for a couple webinars that

we've got coming up here in May.

We're going to talk about nonprofit compliance. We're going to talk

about video and infographic acknowledgements. We're going to

talk about how to get your board to fundraise. So if any of

those topics look interesting to you, do check out our webinar

page and register for those. They're totally free, totally

educational. We'll get some more expert advice like we did from

Brent here today.

So with that, I'm going to say a final thanks to everyone for joining

us today. Look for an email from me a little later on this

afternoon. It'll have the slides and a full recording so you can

re-watch this, if you think that's necessary. Do reach out to

Brent. Take advantage of his offer and check out our upcoming

webinars. So thanks again, Brent, for being here and thanks to

everyone for joining us and we will talk to you soon. Have a

great rest of your day.