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.

Well folks, the end of 2020 is in sight. 

We’ve made our way through all 100 months of the year, wave after wave of Covid-19, and one massive election counted and recounted a dozen times. 

Working from our homes and closets, we’ve moved our whole fundraising, communications, and event strategies online with a combination of brilliant strategic maneuvering and absolute freestyling. 

Over here on the Campbell Communications team, we’ve worked with our colleagues to navigate as many different client quandaries and creative challenges as there are stars in the nonprofit sky, thrown together this article series on an educated whim, and put out 25 or so articles and a half dozen webinars. 

So, what have we learned? Apart from the fact that we all need a nap. 

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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.

“I’m not sure if our campaign is sexy enough.”

I can hardly count how many times I’ve heard this worry from a client over the years—a potentially self-defeating apprehension that their campaign isn’t exciting, sparkly, or new-and-different enough to attract serious consideration from donors.

We can all picture the kind of campaign they’re imagining—the glitzy temple-building project where you get a name-brand architect, recruit all the biggest names in town to your committee, print a 30-page brochure with bold statements over gorgeous renderings, and build a landmark new building that you probably can’t afford to operate and might glimmer-glamour you to the brink of insolvency in the next recession.

Those campaigns sure can be fun. But they were never more than a highly visible fraction of successful campaigns to begin with, and their true heyday was probably all the way back before the Great Recession.

They certainly aren’t going to be the norm when we emerge from our bunkers and cautiously begin planning the first wave of post-pandemic campaigns.

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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.

Whatever your fundraising plans for 2020 were, they probably didn’t involve this much videoconferencing. Today, many nonprofits are struggling with how best to continue cultivating and developing their most valuable donor relationships without in-person contacts…yet the show must go on!

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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.

In addition to working with clients on case development, campaign branding, and all manner of fundraising communications projects, our Communications team also pitches in to help write the firm’s final reports for campaign planning studies and development assessments. That means that we get a front-row seat to all the strategic guidance our fundraising colleagues are giving to nonprofits every day.

Want to know what’s in all those reports? Alas, confidential. But I’ll tell you what’s in none of them.

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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.

One perennial curiosity of the nonprofit world is: why—in a sector full of missions that change lives and lift up communities, unfold the limitless potential in every person, and channel our most humane instincts into profound impact—do we write so much boring stuff about excellence?

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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.

If we needed a slogan for the Campbell & Company case development methodology, we might think about borrowing from the rich intellectual tradition of pizza delivery and promise clients a piping hot case for support in six messages or less.

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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.

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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