The Gifts You Can Only Ask For In A Campaign

F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” – so let’s put our fundraising brains to the test with the following two ideas:

1. You should not wait for a campaign to ask for major gifts. The mark of a mature fundraising program is an “always on” major gifts program that cultivates prospects year in and year out, and some of the most eye-catching transformational gifts get made with no connection to a campaign. (Plus, when you do start that campaign, you’re really going to wish you had spent the previous two years doing more major donor engagement.)
2. There are gifts you can only ask for in a campaign. Not every donor or every gift, but enough of them to matter—and enough that if you never do a campaign, there’s a very strong chance you’re leaving millions of dollars of mission funding in the topsoil.

Both true, both timeless—and when we talk about why campaigns still matter, that second idea carries a lot of weight.

So what is this phenomenon? If you conceive of fundraising as a year-round sport and philanthropy as a set of highly individual actions, why should the backdrop of a campaign make such a difference to any individual gift?

Campaigns force you to develop bigger ideas.

You might be able to cultivate a biology alum to make a $50,000 gift for a new electron microscope, but you probably can’t get a $5 million gift to buy 100 microscopes. And when you ask for $100 million for scholarships, you frame it not around funding XXX discrete scholarships, but around achieving one massive idea: making college possible for all families under $X income.

To unlock bigger gifts, you need bigger ideas—and campaigns challenge you to develop them. This is why campaigns often (though not necessarily) follow from strategic plans. They give you permission to dream, and they invite your donors to step into something larger than they could have imagined before.

Campaigns unlock the social dynamics of philanthropy.

Blessed are the idiosyncratic donors who follow their own compass, make decisions in a vacuum, and leave your buildings for someone else to name. But in general, philanthropy is a profoundly social activity—and the campaign model is ingeniously designed to build social proof and even a bit of social pressure.

This takes many forms, but it speaks in your donors’ minds in instantly recognizable ways:

• When a respected civic leader makes a legitimizing early gift that tells everyone else in town that this vision is real, trustworthy, and deserves a deeper look: “Did you see that the So-And-So gave $5 million dollars to that Landmark Park project? I’ve been hearing about it for years, but if they’re behind it, it might really get off the ground.”
• When one person’s gift sends a signal to others about what leadership in their community looks like: “If Dr. So-And-So gave $100,000 to the Foundation for this, then put me down for $100,000 as well.”
• When a campaign catches fire in a connected community: “They just announced new gifts from X, Y, and Z – it feels like it’s time for us to think about our gift.”

In short, campaigns spark gifts that spark other gifts. This factor matters more in more socially connected communities (a private school where all the parents see each other at parties) than in diffuse and cause-driven missions (a national organization where new board members meet each other for the first time at a meeting). But in most places, it matters enough to matter.

An ambitious goal unlocks bigger gifts.

It’s probably too far to say that having a big campaign goal drives anyone to give more, but a lower goal (or no goal) sure does offer an easy excuse to give less. If you have a prospect who could make a gift of $5 million, they surely won’t make it to a $5 million campaign—and even in a $10 or $15 million campaign, they probably won’t want to carry so much of the weight by themselves. But with a $25 million goal or more, you might be able to bring them in with a gift that identifies them as a leader and challenges everyone else to step up.

Campaigns focus leadership energy and attention on fundraising.

Whatever scale you’re at, cultivating and soliciting your next “biggest gift ever” will almost certainly involve your executive and board leadership in some meaningful way.

A campaign is an organizational decision that going somewhere huge in fundraising is a top two-or-three organizational priority for the next three to five years, and your leadership will be evaluated on its success. (Have you ever noticed that the average tenure of a college president and the average length of a higher-ed campaign cycle have both converged on about seven years?)

Executive and board leaders come to their fundraising roles with every level of experience and all kinds of idiosyncrasies, but on the whole, you’ll often have a better claim to their attention and more buy-in for their essential roles when you’re operating within a campaign framework that reflects the organization’s full commitment.

So there you have it. Again, none of this is a reason to wait for a campaign to build a major gifts program—but when you think about when that program will bear its greatest fruit, you’re more than likely imagining a campaign.