Campaigns: The Fundraising Gym

Who doesn’t love a good before-and-after photo?

When someone’s been on a fitness journey, put in the hard work over weeks and months, and feels proud enough to share the results—what’s better than that?

In the long lives of fundraising programs, the most dramatic before-and-afters come from campaigns.

If you took snapshots of a typical development program the day before and the day after a successful multi-year campaign (focusing just on the program itself, not the pile of new money sitting off to the side), you’ll often see healthy transformations in almost every area.

Campaigns take your fundraising program to the gym. With a solid strategy and sustained effort, you build strength and range in every major muscle group: leadership and board buy-in, staff capacity and skill, communications and culture, and operations.

This is one of the sturdiest reasons we still love the campaign model: not because we just can’t get enough of the committee meetings, but because we love to see fundraising programs build functional strength, and nothing spurs that growth quite like a campaign.

But why is that? If you poke your head into the campaign gym, how are all those fundraising programs in there building lasting strength and capability?

1. Campaigns shift your focus to higher-value activities.

In a campaign, your goals are going to grow faster than your headcount. That means you’ll have to take a careful look at how your team is spending time and trade out lower-return churn for the highest-impact work – almost certainly by spending more time on major gifts.

The most common forms this takes:

• Rebuilding your portfolios around the most promising prospects. Nearly every campaign we work on begins with fresh analytics to identify your most promising prospects, followed by a wide-reaching qualification effort to figure out who’s for real, and a full refresh of portfolios to focus your best energy on your best prospects.
• Making events work for you instead of the other way around. They can be the highest-effort and lowest-ROI way to raise a dollar (and a significant time-sink for your staff). Or, they can be selective, well-planned moments to make dozens of major gift cultivation contacts in a single night—with strategic follow-up that moves you closer to a successful ask. 
• Getting out the dang door! In regular fundraising, it’s all too easy for some of your best relationship-builders to get bogged down in other activities, and it can be hard to sustain the full pace of external engagement that your team is capable of. But when you start to feel that campaign goal towering over you, you realize everything depends on getting your frontline folks out the door – and you start to organize every aspect of your program around that imperative.

2. Campaigns unlock the budget your program needs to grow.

Regular fundraising goes through regular budgeting, which means you’re usually angling for a share of a set pie – and you’re going to feel more pressure to tie every investment to a return in the same budget year.

In a campaign, you can argue for a campaign budget—and what comes with that is doubly powerful: Not just a goal number that puts the investments you’re asking for in perspective, but a multiyear timeframe that gives your boldest investments (usually around major giving) time to bear fruit.

Many of the most important program-building investments you need are easier to get approved and activated in a campaign. Some of the most common and critical include:

• Frontline positions for the gift officers to cultivate all the prospects your campaign gift table needs
• Prospect research, qualification, and prospect management roles that equip your frontline folks to spend their time engaging the best prospects with the best information and follow-up
• Big-ticket non-personnel investments around database, capacity analysis, prospect research, case development and communications that you’ll use well beyond the campaign

3. Campaigns make you work smarter.

If it’s been a while since your last campaign, you’ve probably accumulated some practices and habits that patch together well enough during business-as-usual but can’t scale in a campaign.

When you wrap your head around the sheer scale of qualification and cultivation activity that you’re going to have to manage in a campaign, it quickly becomes worth your time to build some smarter systems.

That can mean:

• Bringing metrics from the periphery to the heart of your strategy for managing goals, organizing frontline effort, and tracking activity (visits, asks, closed gifts, yields)
• Developing better reports for tracking progress, pipeline, and portfolios, with better automation and not so much manual finessing required
• Building better practices for cultivation strategy from regular meetings to review progress and manage portfolios to a broader culture of collaboration to help remove obstacles when progress stalls

4. Campaigns remind you to eat your vegetables.

Admit it — there are some things you know your program needs that keep getting put off for another day. In a campaign, it’s time to eat your vegetables!

• Modernizing your policies and procedures for everything from gift acceptance, counting, and recognition to bigger fish like endowment management and reporting.
• Optimizing your prospect management system to align both your operations and frontline teams around how you’re using fields and managing relationship stages, and ensure you get the fullest value from that database you spend a king’s ransom on every year.
• Getting in the room with your Finance team to align how you book and track gifts and iron out the inevitable differences in how both teams recognize and talk about philanthropic revenue.

Oh, and one more thing—

Campaigns aren’t just the training gym for fundraising programs – they’re also where individual fundraisers grow the most. It’s when you’ll discover what you can really do as a leader and builder, and you’ll see who on your team is ready for the next level.