Category: Financing & Loans

The “Lowest-Rated” prospects are those who are left after the (“higher-rated”) prospects from all the other Divisions have been assigned; and, considering that condition, this segment of your constituency should not be solicited until all of the “higher-rated” prospects have been solicited. As noted, these are the prospects for whom you have no idea of the likely amount of their commitments.

In one small community, all of the newspapers serving that area carried stories about the need for the Campaign. Each story included a pledge form the reader could cut out, fill out and send to a specific Community Gifts Campaign address.

This is a don’t-hold-your-breath-waiting-for-the-commitments-to-roll-in situation, but it is good public relations, good marketing and it does give “everyone” a chance to be part of helping their community.

In another small community, the Chair of the Community Gifts Division, with others helping, recruited 50-60 volunteers (who first made their own gifts/pledges) to go door-to-door in their neighborhoods. We used the local high school auditorium and conducted a training session to educate them about all aspects of the Project the Campaign will fund. We suggested wording they might use to “Ask” for the gift, provided blank pledge cards for their use, described how the pledge cards should be filled out, and answered everybody’s questions.

The Division Chair worked with a large number of Co-Chairs and Captains to make sure that there was someone to knock on every door, and to be sure that there’d be no duplication of effort.

In one community, the banks comprised a separate Division that was solicited by a Chair and members of a committee representing each of the banks. When it was time to take the Campaign to the Community, all of the banks included a small Campaign brochure and a pledge card in the mailings of their monthly statements to their customers.

For a national/statewide organization, face-to-face solicitation is impractical/unlikely, and the constituents of this Membership Gifts Division can be solicited by mail and/or telephone – a combination of both would be best. (Watch for my posting on Mass-Solicitation.)

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your basic fundraising program, your major gifts fundraising program or a capital campaign? Email me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com. With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, we’ll likely be able to answer your questions.

“Lower-Rated” refers to those prospects whose gifts/commitments will fall outside of the definition of a “major gift.” (See: What is A Major Gift?) That doesn’t mean that the total giving from those prospects would be an insignificant dollar figure … it just means that there’d be a relatively large number of prospects, requiring a large number of solicitors/volunteer workers … and that you may not be able to solicit all of these prospects on a face-to-face basis.

These are the prospects whose support you shouldn’t need to reach your Campaign Goal. But, as this is likely to be a large segment of your constituency — a large number of prospects, there are some strong reasons you’d want them to be part of the Campaign:
  (1) The more strongly your community is “bonded” to your organization,
  the more likely they’ll $upport you on an ongoing basis;
  (2) The greater the number of community members who support your
  organization, the more likely foundations will be willing to $upport you; and,
  (3) The more support you get from the broad community, the more likely
  Major Donors will want to be (visibly) associated with you … on an
  ongoing basis.

I referred earlier to Divisions tasked with obtaining gifts in various specific dollar ranges (i.e., $3,000-$5,999 and/or $6,000-$9.999). Prospects for these ranges of commitments are often assigned to the Special Gifts Division.

And, prospects for whom you have no idea of the likely amount of their commitments would be assigned to the General Gifts, Membership Gifts or Community Gifts Division (whatever name works best for your circumstances and that segment of your constituency).

Ideally the Special Gifts prospects will all be solicited on a face-to-face basis – the example (in my previous posting), showing the breakdown for 186 prospects, is typical for this particular Division.

Prospects in the General Gifts Division, the largest segment of your constituency, can be approached in many different ways, depending on the size of the group and their locations. (See my posting this Thursday, December 10, discussing some possible methods of soliciting these large constituencies.

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your basic fundraising program, your major gifts fundraising program or a capital campaign? Email me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com. With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, we’ll likely be able to answer your questions.

There are a number of rules for the solicitation of gifts/commitments to a campaign:

A solicitor…
(1) Must make his/her campaign commitment before s/he can solicit commitments from
others;
(2) With few exceptions, can only ask for commitments equal to or less than that which s/he has made; and,
(3) Should be the best person to be asking a particular prospect for his/her commitment.

Simply, a solicitor, to be credible, should be able to tell a prospect that s/he has already made his/her commitment, and s/he must be able to avoid having the prospect ask, “Why should I make a gift that of that amount when you didn’t?” And, the solicitation is more likely to go smoothly/successfully if the solicitor and prospect have a prior (positive) relationship.

(4) There is also a rule that limits to 5-6 the number of prospects assigned to any one solicitor at any one time. Volunteers should feel that it’s relatively easy to solicit the few prospects they’ve been assigned … and you want to avoid solicitor burnout.

The number of volunteer solicitors needed in any one Division depends on the number of prospects in that segment of the constituency. For example:

If a Division has 186 prospects, approximately 36 of those
individuals would need to be recruited to be solicitors.

That’s 1 Division Chair … who recruits/educates/solicits
6 Division Co-Chairs or Vice-Chairs … who recruit/educate/solicit
30 Division Captains … who solicit the remaining 150 prospects.

There are, of course, exceptions – any number of prospects can be assigned to a solicitor (a few at a time), depending on the willingness of the solicitor, his/her level of success in prior solicitations and the quality of his/her relationships with other likely prospects.

It’s also possible that you can have some solicitors with only 1 or 2 prospects to approach – simply because of the relationship (or lack of such) between the volunteer and prospective donors.

5) Each solicitor should have a pledge card/form for each assigned prospect … with the name of the prospect already on the card. During the solicitation, after the specific dollar “Ask” has been made and agreed to, the solicitor brings out the pledge card and asks for a signature.

(6) If, for whatever reason, a prospect is not ready/willing to sign the pledge form, it should never be left with the prospect. The solicitor must make another appointment to come back to get the card signed. Leaving the card risks never seeing it again.

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your basic fundraising program, your major gifts fundraising program or a capital campaign? Email me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com. With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, we’ll likely be able to answer your questions.

While most grant maker guidelines — foundation, corporate and certainly government — specifically exclude capital campaigns, there are some few that will consider a proposal requesting campaign support.

Applicants need to identify those in their funding source research. The proposal will be a restatement of the case statement and should be formatted according to the funder’s guidelines.

Before applying for grant funding, it is wise to have completed the silent phase and include fundraising progress in the proposal. Grant funders to campaigns generally don’t like to be first and they don’t like to be the largest contributor. Showing them that lead gifts are in hand and that the campaign has generated at least 50% of goal is an important strategy consideration when including grants in a campaign portfolio.

What about all those grantors that exclude campaign funding? Many campaigns today are not just for “bricks and mortar.” They are structured to include programmatic themes. These may include scholarships, endowment support, special projects of many types, as well as general support — and also buildings.

In applying for support to funders that exclude campaigns, the proposal writer should focus on the specific components contained in the overall campaign, and structure the request for the specific project or projects. As long as the proposal is consistent with the grant makers’ guidelines, it may be considered even though the program is part of a larger campaign.

As always, the applicant should try to make personal contact with the funder to discuss the project. It’s fine to mention the overall campaign in that conversation, and that reference can be echoed in the proposal.

Will grants “count” toward the campaign goal if the funder is not making a grant to the campaign itself, but is supporting a project within the campaign?
A review of the CASE* Standards will provide guidance. Most grants can be considered if the campaign is of the “count everything” variety. Even some government grants may qualify — especially if they are NEH type challenge grants. Gifts made in response to the challenge, and the NEH payments will count.

* (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education)

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..

Leadership is the key factor in any capital campaign – leadership that energizes the process from its onset. So, to start a campaign, the first donors must be Board Members.

These individuals must set an example with their level of giving so they have the credibility/leverage to solicit the other Board Members and so they can legitimately recruit and solicit the Campaign Chair.

Ideally, the Campaign Chair makes the largest commitment … so s/he can legitimately solicit commitments from anyone else, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

The largest donor, in any case, should be one of the first few to make his/her commitment, and should be available to lend his/her “clout” to the recruitment and/or solicitation of the top campaign leaders and (possibly) to that of some highly visible community leaders.

(Recruiting leaders includes educating them as to their responsibilities in “setting an example,” recruiting other leaders to participate in the process, asking others to make commitments of specific dollar amounts, and adhering to the campaign timetable.)

Sticking with the hospital as the example, once the Campaign Chair has signed on and made his/her commitment, s/he and (possibly) one-or-two Board Members will recruit the Hospital Family Chair. They will then work with that Chair to identify and recruit the Chairs for the “campaigns” for the Board and the Administration.

Then, with the advice and counsel of the Administration, the Hospital Family Chair will recruit and solicit the Chairs for the Medical Staff, Nursing Staff and each of the other Sub-Divisions of the Family.

When the time is right, the Campaign Chair (often with “assistance” of one or more Board Members) will recruit and solicit those individuals who have been identified as the best candidates to be Division Chairs – keeping in mind that no Division Chair should be recruited until close to the time when their “services” will actually be needed.

The Campaign Chair, the various Division Chairs, a representative of the Board (to ensure compliance with Organizational Policies) and the NPO’s CEO (to advise on matters relating to the Hospital Family and the NPO’s mission) will comprise the Campaign Cabinet – which will have total responsibility for conducting the Campaign.

[In addition, one other member of the Cabinet should be a Campaign Treasurer – a non-Organizational-Family person whose stature in the community will lend credibility to his/her oversight of Campaign income.]

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Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving,
I’m taking a few days to do nothing more than enjoy my family.
See you next Tuesday.

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your basic fundraising program, your major gifts fundraising program or a capital campaign? Email me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com. With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, we’ll likely be able to answer your questions.

Once the “Quiet Phase” has been completed and the various “campaigns” for the Hospital Family are well under way, solicitation can begin in the next group of prospects – corporations, small businesses and the individual prospects assigned to Divisions tasked with obtaining gifts in various specific dollar ranges (i.e., $3,000-$5,999 and/or $6,000-$9.999). But … there is still no public/media mention/evidence of a campaign-in-progress.

In doing your pre-campaign planning/analysis, you would have come up with realistic dollar goals (and, for some, dollar ranges) for each Division … goals that you know, based on research, cultivation and knowledge about the people in each Division, will be attainable.

Only after commitments (from the Quiet Phase, the Hospital Family, and other Divisions tasked with raising significant percentages of the campaign goal) have reached the “Safety Point” (80% or more of the goal has been committed and you know where the rest is coming from) can the Campaign go “public.” But … “going public” doesn’t mean that everything you know must instantly become public knowledge !!

A good rule under which to operate an extended campaign is that you should be able to reach your Campaign Goal without gifts/pledges from the “lower-rated” groups of Individuals, but you proceed with each individual “campaign” until everyone you want to have involved (and everyone who might want to be involved) has become involved.

Remember, no matter how well planned and how well led your campaign might be, there’s always a chance that something can go wrong; and, since the large base of lower-rated prospects is the group you know the least about, you can’t rely on any particular outcome of that “campaign.”

Some years back (too many for me to want to count) in counselling a capital campaign for a hospital, the person recruited to chair the Division responsible for soliciting pledges from $5,000-$9,999 made the decision that all of the people assigned to that Division as prospects weren’t going to be solicited.

We had prepared pledge cards for each of those 150 prospects, the Chair took those pledge cards … ostensibly to assign prospects to his various team leaders and solicitors, then informed the campaign leadership that he wasn’t going to do what he had agreed to do.

It was a good thing we had Plan B in the safe. Luckily/happily, the campaign reached its goal. The point being: The more extensive the Planning Study and the greater the depth of campaign planning, the more likely you’ll be able to ensure success.

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your basic fundraising program, your major gifts fundraising program or a capital campaign? Email me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com. With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, we’ll likely be able to answer your questions.

As with the basic campaign, you must start with the knowledge of where the commitments will come from to achieve your dollar goal … only this time you are not limiting yourself to a relatively few major donors. This time, in addition to the major donors, you will need specific sums from different segments of your constituency.

In a campaign for a hospital, for example, at the top of the leadership pyramid are the highest-rated prospects — some major donors, prominent members of the community, some board members and (maybe) a few docs.

These individuals have responsibility for setting an example with their giving, and for recruiting and soliciting those who will be the leaders of the various segments of the campaign – including the overall campaign chair. This is the “Quiet Phase” — the solicitation of those donors whose commitments will ensure reaching the first “Safety Point” (60%, 80%, or more of the goal).

The overall Campaign is separated into smaller “campaigns,” one for each segment of the constituency – the board, the administration, the medical staff, the nursing staff, each of the other hospital departments, the auxiliary, local (large) corporations, local businesses and the various segments of the broad community.

Each of those segments/Divisions must have a Chair, a person who will set the example, and recruit and solicit those who will solicit others in their Division. The Chair of a Division must be someone who is respected by the members of his/her segment and who has the clout to successfully lead a “campaign” limited to that segment.

Typically, the Chair for each of the Divisions of the Hospital Family are members of the Division they will chair, but they are not necessarily the Heads of their Departments – great care must be exercised to avoid the appearance of a Department Head coercing members of his/her Department.

As a practical matter, the “campaign” for the Board of Trustees should precede the “campaign” for the Administrators/Executives, which should precede the “campaign” for the docs … otherwise you’ll have the docs saying, “If they didn’t, why should we?”

In that context, the “campaign” for the docs should precede the “campaign” for the nurses, and those previous four “campaigns” should precede those for the rest of the hospital staff. Realistically, because you can’t solicit one segment of a hospital family (other than the Board) without the hospital grapevine spreading the word fairly quickly, the various “campaigns” for the different segments of the hospital family tend to be implemented within the same timeframe.

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your basic fundraising program, your major gifts fundraising program or a capital campaign? Email me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com. With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, we’ll likely be able to answer your questions.

The “basic” campaign is active for a very short period of time, with relatively few donors. It is often said that if you have a $1 million goal, find someone with $1 million get them to give it to you … and your campaign is over !!

Since that doesn’t happen too often, there should be a group of prospective major donors … able to make gifts equal to and larger than one-percent of the campaign goal. This group should be large enough to ensure reaching the goal and small enough that the goal can be reached in the shortest period of time. #

If you do decide on the “basic,” no frills approach … and only involve those few major donors whose commitments will assure reaching your goal, you will be, in essence, dipping into your major gifts program. ##

The keys to a successful “basic” campaign are in knowing which of your potential major donors are “ready” to make their commitments, and knowing what amounts they are likely to commit. You can only know this if there is a relationship between the prospect and your organization, and if you have been cultivating them for long enough to know that they are ready to say, “Yes.” ###

In addition, you must know if the project for which you will ask their support is something that they feel strongly enough about to want to support it; and, those potential donors must also know that they will get the satisfaction and the recognition they want/need by supporting the campaign/project.

For the “basic” campaign, there need not be a formal campaign structure with a campaign chair and/or other designated leaders. On the other hand, if you select a chair who is well known, who is committed to the organization’s mission, strongly supports the project the campaign will fund, and who has the skills and willingness to actually solicit the other members of the small group, you will have a volunteer leader who will make-it-happen !!

Recognition for that volunteer leader, and for that small group of donors can take many forms, but all leaders/donors must be recognized individually in a way that is significant for him/her. More on “Donor Recognition” in future postings.

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#(See: Constructing The Gift Table
##(See: What is a Major Gift ?? and, Who Is A Major Gifts Prospect ??
###(See: Cultivating Major Donors

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your basic fundraising program, your major gifts fundraising program or a capital campaign? Email me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com. With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, we’ll likely be able to answer your questions.

Back in the early days of my career – when high tech meant you had a fax machine – one of my proposals to the National Endowment for the Humanities for an elementary school enrichment project was rejected, and we wanted to find out if it made sense to reapply.

I traveled from New York to Washington to meet with our program officer. He said we lost it on the evaluation, noting that our pre-test/post-test model required too much testing. So I asked him what he considered a good evaluation design.

His response was that if the children looked like they were having a good time; it would be considered a good program. We rewrote it following that advice, and it was funded and renewed several times.

That would never happen today. Funders have become consumed with the notion of outcomes assessment. Proposals must be clear about what will be accomplished with the money granted by the funder. They must clearly distinguish between goals and objectives. Goals are a general statement of intent. In the example I gave, providing an enrichment experience to a group of fourth graders would be a goal. But the outcomes need to be much more targeted.

They must detail the exact result the program will achieve for a specified number of participants, within a limited period of time. The objectives also need to presage the mechanism through which the program will be evaluated.

So the objective in our example might be “As a result of this program, 50 fourth-grade students will increase their understanding of local history by being able to attain a grade of 80% on the XYZ Standardized test of historical understanding.” That’s a long way from our program officer’s response. By the way, that’s how we wrote the proposal the first time, but it was more than 30 years ago.

Success in getting funded depends very much on knowing exactly what the grant project will accomplish. That should be one of the first questions one asks oneself. “What will be different as a result of this program?”

Funders not only want their grants to make a difference; they want to know exactly what that difference will be.

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..

A basic concept of capital campaigns is that you shouldn’t need to go beyond the smallest number of major donors necessary to reach your goal.

Referencing Tuesday’s posting, however, the decision you must make is what you want to accomplish with your campaign.

If you want to keep it simple, and all you want/need is to raise a specific dollar amount, that’s at one end of the scale — nice, short, simple and really, really, inexpensive.*

At the other end of the scale is the involvement of “the whole community/constituency.” That’s where you create an elaborate campaign leadership structure, run your campaign over 6 or 12 or 24 months, involve as many volunteers as can be put to work productively, and get as many people as possible to become donors … at a significantly greater expense than the bare bones scenario.**

Depending on the organization and its community/constituency, there may be many good reasons for involving a greater number of people than needed to reach your campaign goal.

In any community/constituency there are likely to be more important/influential/wealthy people than can be appropriately fitted into the basic campaign leadership structure, but they are people you might want to have involved … just to get/keep them involved with the organization.

But, any time you recruit leaders to be part of a campaign, you must have a legitimate, productive, worthwhile activity for them to lead – an activity that will add significant dollars to the amount raised. And, those leaders must get appropriate recognition for their leadership and accomplishments.

To legitimately expand your leadership cadre, you must expand the numbers of potential campaign donors to be solicited. You might also want to expand your campaign donor base to get as many members of your community/constituency involved in the process/project. Community buy-in, a feeling of ownership in the organization and the project, engenders greater long-term community/constituent support.

And, any time you get people to give to a campaign, no matter the amount given, they must feel that their contribution is helping the campaign reach its goal … and helping the community being served by the nonprofit.

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*The vast majority of campaigns come in at a cost of under ten-cents-on-the-dollar-raised; most campaigns come in at under a nickel.

**When you calculate return on investment for any but the most basic campaign, dollars-raised is only one factor. There’s no real way to calculate how what was spent on staff, publicity, mailings and events will result in more/greater contributions in the future – but, without doubt, there will be a return on that investment.

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Watch for Part #6 of Capital Campaigns, next Thursday, November 12th.
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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your basic fundraising program, your major gifts fundraising program or a capital campaign? Email me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com. With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, we’ll likely be able to answer your questions.