Your Campaign Needs a Moment

The path of enlightenment with fundraising campaigns takes a funny course. You start out thinking they’re about money. Hopefully before too long, you realize they’re about mission. And then if you stare at them long enough (50 years in our case), it starts to stand out: Campaigns are really about time. 

The clues were right in front of us all along:

• Why are so many campaign names built around time language—today, tomorrow, future, now? (Nobody steal that name –Today Tomorrow Future Now will raise $10B the instant it’s announced.)
• Why does the campaign case so often begin from the 5-10 year vision statement in your strategic plan?
• And is it even a real campaign if we don’t find ourselves saying “now more than ever” at some point?

When you nail the time dimension, a campaign creates a moment around your mission—and invites everyone into it. When we talk about the enduring value of campaigns, this remains one of the greatest arguments.

The Moment Makes The Campaign… 

You don’t have a campaign until you have a sense of moment—until your prospects, leadership, and staff all internalize the sense that now is different, this isn’t business-as-usual, and it’s time to think differently about giving to your organization. 

Why? 

Moments overcome inertia. In major gift fundraising, the enemy isn’t usually competition from the nonprofit down the street – it’s inertia. Think about it in terms of Newton’s First Law: The donor who gives you a nice $1,000 gift every year will most likely continue doing so until you give them a specific reason to think about the $25,000 or $100,000 gift you know they could make. (And the prospect who doesn’t give—well, they’re on a decades-long streak of not giving – what’s going to change that?) You need an entry point for a new conversation that begins with gratitude for all they’ve given and pivots to the new reality you’re facing and preparing to take on—you need a moment. 

Moments concentrate attention. Campaigns are communications vehicles as much as fundraising vehicles, and if you want to rally your broader community around your mission with a new embrace of philanthropy at the heart, you need to tell a specific kind of story that says “people like us step up in moments like this to do big important things like ___.” 

Moments change dynamics. This one plays out inside your organization: Your greater fundraising potential probably depends to some degree on getting your leadership to engage with fundraising in new ways, your board to embrace their fundraising roles, and your staff to change how they work week-to-week. Shouting about “best practices” only gets you so far—at some point, you have to draw a line in the sand: “This moment calls for all of us to work a little differently. We’re all going in together, and we’re all going to support each other.” 

…And The Campaign Makes The Moment 

So how do you find your campaign moment? 

You don’t. You create it. 

This is a bit paradoxical: While the moment you invoke to justify your campaign is typically anchored in outside realities (new challenges your community faces, new opportunities on the horizon), it is not something that just happens to you. 

Your campaign moment is a rhetorical construction that you hone for maximum impact. It is crafted as intentionally as the inciting incident in an adventure story or the pivotal turn in a mystery novel. 

This crafting work is called case development, and our entire approach – the Six Elements of Your Case for Support – begins with two pieces (Context, Impetus) that combine to create a crystal-clear sense of moment. 

When we start down the case development journey with organizations, we don’t ask first about their track record or their big plans. We start by asking about the world around them: 

• What is going on in your community or the broader world that makes your work matter? 
• When you listen to the stories of the people you serve, what do you see and hear now that you didn’t see and hear 5, 10 or 20 years ago? 
• What trends or changes do you see that others might not? What might someone in your community be surprised to learn? 

That gives us context—the first element of your case for support. Then we get to work on shaping the “why now.” 

This is a whole topic unto itself (How To Craft a Fundraising Case That Sparks Action), but there are two key decisions that matter most: 

External vs. internal framing: Is the call to action coming inside the house or outside? Are we framing our moment around external factors (urgency) or internal drive (agency)? 

Positive vs. negative framing: Is the moment we’re invoking framed around fear/threat/risk or hope/aspiration/opportunity? 

There is no universal answer to these questions, and each combination of them produces a different kind of moment with a distinct emotional valence. The key is to assess your unique situation and determine which kind of campaign moment will serve you best. For a deeper dive, read further here.

The moment makes the campaign—and the campaign makes the moment.