Nonprofit News

The state of the world has made us want to connect with more of you, more often. For the rest of 2020, the Campbell & Company Communications team is sharing a new article every week that explores a topic in case development and fundraising communications, drawn from our work.

Whether it’s thinking about how to approach fundraising communications against the backdrop of current events or tackling an evergreen challenge we see time and time again in nonprofits across the sector, these articles focus on practical tips to empower fundraising leaders in their day-to-day work. Subscribe to the series here.

When we do our Fundraising Communications webinars every year, one of the most common questions we receive in Q&A is “do I need different cases for different donor audiences (alumni, parents, corporations, foundations, etc.)?

The answer to that question is “ehhhhhh”—basically, don’t waste time worrying about that until you’ve done all the work to produce one really great, really versatile case for support that works for a variety of uses and audiences. But there is another sense in which, yes, you do need multiple cases in your campaign. Not across audience segments, but across time.

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The state of the world has made us want to connect with more of you, more often. For the rest of 2020, the Campbell & Company Communications team is sharing a new article every week that explores a topic in case development and fundraising communications, drawn from our work.

Whether it’s thinking about how to approach fundraising communications against the backdrop of current events or tackling an evergreen challenge we see time and time again in nonprofits across the sector, these articles focus on practical tips to empower fundraising leaders in their day-to-day work. Subscribe to the series here.

Once you’ve labored through long weeks of work on your case statement, your campaign brand, or your annual report, and you finally arrive at a full draft that you and your core collaborators feel great about…congratulations! You’re at mile 13.

The second half of the marathon is committee review—our sector’s Olympic sport. Because we value consensus and inclusion, we put most significant organizational communications through an extensive process of committee review with staff and volunteers.

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The state of the world has made us want to connect with more of you, more often. For the rest of 2020, the Campbell & Company Communications team is sharing a new article every week that explores a topic in case development and fundraising communications, drawn from our work.

Whether it’s thinking about how to approach fundraising communications against the backdrop of current events or tackling an evergreen challenge we see time and time again in nonprofits across the sector, these articles focus on practical tips to empower fundraising leaders in their day-to-day work. Subscribe to the series here.

Alongside the six elements of your case for support, there’s one other foundational idea that shapes every case development project we take on:

The case lives in conversation.

Or, to be a tiny bit more metal about it, the case lives or dies in conversation.

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The state of the world has made us want to connect with more of you, more often. For the rest of 2020, the Campbell & Company Communications team is sharing a new article every week that explores a topic in case development and fundraising communications, drawn from our work.

Whether it’s thinking about how to approach fundraising communications against the backdrop of current events or tackling an evergreen challenge we see time and time again in nonprofits across the sector, these articles focus on practical tips to empower fundraising leaders in their day-to-day work. Subscribe to the series here.

We’re kicking off Fundraising Communications Weekly with a deep dive into the Six Elements of Your Case for Support—the foundation for strong donor messaging in everything from major gift cultivation to annual appeals. In Part 1, we introduced the six elements on a conceptual level—now it’s time to see how they work in practice.

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The state of the world has made us want to connect with more of you, more often. For the rest of 2020, the Campbell & Company Communications team is sharing a new article every week that explores a topic in case development and fundraising communications, drawn from our work.

Whether it’s thinking about how to approach fundraising communications against the backdrop of current events or tackling an evergreen challenge we see time and time again in nonprofits across the sector, these articles focus on practical tips to empower fundraising leaders in their day-to-day work. Subscribe to the series here.

As we kick off our new Fundraising Communications Weekly series, there’s only one place to begin—the idea we return to most frequently in our work and share most regularly with our clients. Here it is:

A robust and comprehensive case for support will have strong core messages in six key areas: Context, Impetus, Vision, Plan, Credential, and Appeal. These are the six elements of your case for support. This is a big topic, so we’re going to break it into two parts. Today we’ll introduce the six elements, and next week we’ll show how they work in practice with a sample case.

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In a recent conversation with a fundraiser, I found myself struck by a realization that’s been sitting right in front of me for years (it keeps you humble):

Case development is the only existentially significant part of fundraising that isn’t anyone’s job.

Think about it. A lot of factors go into a successful fundraising program or campaign—building donor relationships, engaging leadership and board, managing data and operations, the list goes on—and there are talented people who come to work every day with each of those as their top priority.

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