You Don’t Need a Building Project to Build a Great Campaign

It’s a funny paradox in our work: When you introduce the idea of a campaign without a flashy building project as a centerpiece, voices around your organization will often act like you’re playing at a disadvantage. Obviously, this would be easier if we had a big building project, but we’ll have to make it work.

Yet when you start a building-focused campaign, everyone is at pains to say that the campaign isn’t just about bricks-and-mortar—it’s about all the program and mission impact the building will support. We’re not just building a building—we’re building the future of our mission.

Both of these perspectives touch a piece of something larger and more important: You don’t need a building project, but you do need your campaign to feel like it’s building something.

We’ll get into how to do that in just a minute.

But first, remember: Campaigns are about moment, vision, and impact. Building projects can make certain parts of that story a little easier to bring into focus—but you can get there just as effectively without one.

Are you sure you need a building?

We love splashy facility projects as much as anyone, but all those temple-building campaigns might have created a bit too much mythology around buildings as a fundraising focus. Let’s let a little air out of it:

• They’re an awfully expensive way to change lives. With your $10 million gift, you could endow a dozen full-ride scholarships that will change hundreds of lives over time and transform the futures of entire families. Or you could cover one tenth of the cost of a new dorm to replace the one that was good enough for you when you were a student.
• Not everyone digs them. Despite their crowd-pleasing reputation, building projects leave some donors cold. To some, they don’t feel like impact – they feel like infrastructure.
• Sometimes the building you really need isn’t all that exciting. It’s one thing to build a gleaming new hospital that promises better care for a whole community, or a landmark educational facility that fills alumni with pride. But what if the building you need is office space to support a growing case management program, or a new storage facility for the 90% of your art collection that isn’t on display? You can still raise money for these, but you know it won’t be the majesty of the full-color renderings doing the work for you.
  

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Thriving without a building

When we talk about non-building campaigns, we’re usually talking about campaigns organized around some combination of the following funding priorities:

• Major new programmatic investments that either take proven programs to greater scale or introduce innovative new program concepts
• Endowment investments that put key pieces of your mission on a permanent financial foundation
• Smaller capital projects that don’t have that “centerpiece” quality (renovations, updates, expansions) and often sit in the mix with other non-facility investments

We’ve seen and worked on plenty of campaigns like these that triumph:

• A scholarship organization that blew past its $300 million goal by rallying donors around the enduring power of making college possible for the most committed and capable students
• A conservation organization that raised over half a billion dollars to protect habitats, increase public access to wild lands, and bring conservation education and outreach to more places
• A leading independent school that raised $50 million for endowment with a message focused on how endowment supports the people, programs, and places that make for an extraordinary education

Each is unique, but they share a common thread: Even without a centerpiece building project, they felt like they were building something.

Build something greater than a building

So how do you make your campaign feel like that? You can actually just borrow what people like so dang much about building campaigns and achieve it with your campaign vision and case:

• Help your donor see the before-and-after. Building-focused campaigns play on the power of a future state you can easily picture in your mind. Even without a building to imagine, how can you get your future state down to a sentence or image so clear and simple that everyone can see it?

“We will double the number of families we serve.”

“At a time when theaters around us are cutting back and shutting down, this is about ensuring that we can stay bold, stay adventurous, and keep creating the most unforgettable nights of theater for our community.”

• Capture the lasting impact. Buildings unlock major gifts because they make your gift feel like it will last for a generation or more. If you’re raising money for a program or endowment, how can you convey the long-term legacy of those investments?

“This campaign will launch this innovative new program and support it through its critical first five years, during which time we will be able to build the funding stream and operating model to sustain it far into the future.”

“New endowed funds will ensure that we can keep showing up for our community with healthy food not just today and tomorrow—but forever.”

• Make it simple. Buildings lend themselves to concrete, simple explanations—this much new space, these new features and benefits—it goes down as smoothly as a house-hunting show on TV. That means your task is to explain your program and endowment investments with the same level of clarity: no jargon, no unexplained concepts, just direct human language that walks your donors through with ease.

“Our scholarships today provide full tuition support. But so many of the experiences that make an education life-changing happen outside the classroom—an internship, a study abroad journey, the chance to present research at a conference. All of these come with costs that can keep our scholarship students from participating. We believe these extras shouldn’t be extra, and every student deserves an equal shot at them – that’s why we’re expanding our scholarship to cover the full XYZ College experience.”

All in all, you can make your program- or endowment-focused campaign every bit as visionary, compelling, and concrete as the glitziest building campaign—it just might take a little more discipline and persistence in clarifying your core ideas and ultimate impact.

And you can knock it out in the hours you aren’t spending in value-engineering and facility planning sessions because the rising cost of construction just blew up your whole campaign plan!