Most Campbell & Company relationships start with a Campaign Planning Study, our five-to-six-month process for helping organizations chart a course toward their greatest campaign potential. Each of those studies results in a final report that includes a custom set of recommendations tailored to an organization’s unique goals and circumstances.
Want to know what’s in all those final reports? Alas, confidential. But we’ll tell you what’s in almost none of them.
Across hundreds of campaign planning studies, there are still a few spots on our “report bingo” card that we’ve almost never called. (Maybe once or twice, but these office legends are hard to verify.)
Herewith, six things we’ve never, or almost never, said to a client.
Some organizations are great at cultivating and soliciting donors. Some are great at stewardship. Some are rich with identified prospects. Yet very few naturally excel at qualifying prospects—analyzing and engaging the identified prospect list to determine which have the best capacity, interest, and inclination to move along to active cultivation—and almost none dedicate sufficient time and energy to it.
We get it—qualification is time-consuming and does not lead to immediate dollars. It’s exactly the sort of thing that ends up in the “important but not urgent” death zone.
The result is a pipeline with a core of top prospects you take very good care of, an ocean of potential prospects who might be viable but haven’t been qualified, and a yawning gap between.
The good news is that this challenge is usually more about process than prospects. Organizations often have great prospects hiding in plain sight; the difficulty is building a disciplined system for qualifying them. Our major gift qualification guide offers a place to start.
Events are joy-filled highlights of many organizations’ years and can fulfill many purposes beyond fundraising…but as a way to raise money, they’re about as staff-intensive and cost-intensive as it gets.
That’s not just how it feels in the exhausting lead-up to a gala…it also bears out in the numbers: Typical ROI for a mature major gifts program can easily exceed 500%, while most events programs generate returns in the 50-150% range.
Of course, events are also packed with opportunities to do meaningful major gift work: to introduce new prospects to your organization, connect with top prospects, open the door to a next conversation, and generate follow-up contacts that build relationships. In fact, from a fundraising perspective, that may be their best use.
The gold standard: Don’t do any more fundraising events than you can fully integrate into major gift cultivation. That means planning contacts for all key attendees, assigning staff and volunteers to engage with them at the event, and ensuring personal follow-up outreach for every major prospect in attendance.
If you don’t have the time to follow up strategically with that potential new donor your board member brought to the event, it’s possible you need more capacity for individual relationship building…or fewer events.
If we’re going to shell out for a Cadillac donor database instead of just chilling on an equivalently priced private island, we should probably at least try to get the full value out of it.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a database master to do this. Like all enterprise software, you can get about 80% of the possible value from about 20% of the features.
In particular, focus on making full use of the basic relationship management features—tracking the cultivation strategy, assigned partners, target solicitation and timeframe, past actions, and next actions for all of your actively qualified prospects—and set up simple campaign reports that allow you to pull up-to-date views of your overall pipeline, near-term projections, and relationship manager portfolios.
The rest comes down to day-to-day discipline with data entry and maintenance, consistent usage, and training across your team.
For ideas on what metrics to watch, check out These Three Dashboards Show You Where Your Campaign is Headed.
Every board contains between zero and three magical creatures who can knock a donor conversation out of the park using only their own instincts, knowledge, stories, and skill.
The rest need volunteer-friendly resources—distilled case messages in conversational language, talking points and FAQs—and training/coaching that includes practice with real-world scenarios.
No matter how impressive they are in their professional lives, your board members aren’t experts in communicating on behalf of your organization until you give them the support to do so.
The basic problem with case development is that it’s nobody’s job—in fact, it’s the only existentially significant part of a fundraising program that isn’t anybody’s job.
Like qualification, it also bears the cursed mark of the important-but-not-urgent. As a result, most organizations need the forcing event of a major campaign to get them down to the task of rethinking and articulating their case for support.
In truth, there’s almost always something that would benefit from a little work.
If you’ve got a powerful high-level vision already sorted out, you might still need to work on the concrete plans and details. If your plans are solid, you might still need more work on translating them into a complete case. And even the strongest case for support must answer one critical question: why now?
Almost every organization would benefit from putting a little more time and thought into the case messaging that drives all of their fundraising activities.
We’re not saying it never happens. We’ve all heard a few scandal cases in which massive fundraising infrastructures and lavish spending seem to absorb most of the giving they drive. And of course, sometimes the cruel hand of across-the-board budget cuts comes for all of us.
But the ROI on fundraising investment is so high that the vast majority of organizations fall into two categories: Those that should focus on driving greater return from their existing staff capacity, and those that could easily turn another position or two into returns that more than pay for themselves.
Most organizations are a combination of both, and almost no one ever reaches the actual point of diminishing returns on productive fundraising investment.
If you’ve got a big pile of identified prospects you haven’t had time to qualify; if half of your major gift portfolio doesn’t get regular attention and cultivation; if you’ve never gotten around to building out a robust planned giving program; or any other like scenario…you probably could turn additional staff capacity into greater fundraising results.
No matter what, the best way to make the case for further staffing is to drive strong returns with the staff you have, build a credible strategy for future growth, and remind your leaders that the ROI on a healthy fundraising program is vastly greater than any investment anyone can buy in the stock market!
Someday we’ll probably finally write the campaign report that delivers one of these findings to an organization—and if you’re that organization, drop us a line and tell us your story! But until then, there might be some lessons for all of us in the recommendations we’ve never written.
We’re ready to invest in your success. Are you?
