Preparing for a Capital Campaign - Part 3

When a campaign isn’t successful, it usually comes back to a handful of common mistakes that organizations make. One pitfall is not looking closely at the feasibility of the campaign: What will our givers support?

In this blog series, we’re outlining the stages of preparing for a campaign. Today we’re exploring the critical step of a feasibility study. The goal of that study is to help you understand if your donors are on board with the project, the extent to which they’re prepared to help fund it, and the timing of a campaign.

Assess Your Organization’s Financial Picture

It’s important to begin first by taking a close look at your organization’s financial picture:

• What’s the recent history of giving?
• What are your financial obligations?
• Are you paying off debt?
• Are you struggling with cash flow or to make your budget?
• Are you growing or shrinking right now?

A deep dive on these financial questions will help you frame your trajectory and inform any decisions about the viability of doing a campaign in this season.

Conducting Feasibility Assessments

Long before we put together any videos or design any brochures about our campaign project, we have to conduct feasibility assessments. Many organizations undertake a formal feasibility study that can take several months. It includes:

• A look at donor data and trends.
• In-depth interviews with key leaders and donors.

These conversations yield insight into:

• Where this campaign project is on the priority list of our givers.
• How they would handle a three-year pledge commitment.
• Their level of enthusiasm for the project.

Insights from Donor Discussions

Those donor discussions during the feasibility phase can flag if donors would move their ongoing giving commitments toward funding the campaign goal, which would hurt your operating budget. These interviews also alert you to any concerns about the project or funding models that should be addressed in campaign meetings and materials.

Equally importantly, these conversations provide a chance to ask top prospects where they see themselves in the funding pyramid (the levels of donor gift commitments you’ll need to be successful).

Finally, these feasibility conversations reinforce how important each giver is to our campaign and allow for feedback and buy-in:

• How much do they know about the project and its expected outcomes?
• Do they believe in it?

We should come away with a clearer picture of what’s needed in our campaign communications.

The Outcomes of a Feasibility Study

A thorough feasibility study can sometimes tell us we have a great project but the timing is wrong. It can help us reassess and determine multiple phases, slow or scale the project down.

But this study can also reveal that we can do more than we’d imagined. Sometimes we discover this is the very season in the life of our nonprofit—and the right timing—for a larger goal or bigger vision than we’d originally planned.

Intentional Planning and Stewardship

Successful campaigns have to be scaled to the outcomes of feasibility. In those steps, we will have done our part in intentional planning, being good stewards of our givers, their time, and resources.

What’s Next?

In the final blog of this series, we’ll walk through the last part of the preparation process, which is an assessment of past wins and losses.

Timothy L. Smith