Now that we've talked about whether or not you're ready for a campaign, let's talk about the various phases of a successful fundraising campaign. Regardless of the type of campaign, all campaigns share various stages or phases that are very typical in executing a successful campaign. These include pre-campaign planning, a quiet phase, sometimes referred to as an advanced gift phase of a campaign, the public launch or public phase of a campaign and then the campaign close, how we end the campaign. Let's talk about each of them separately. First, pre-campaign planning. Typically, steps and activities during this phase will include some or all of the following. As I already mentioned, setting very specific priorities. What are the priority projects? Are they identified? Are they well thought out? This is the time to do this pre-campaign planning before you officially launch your campaign or even start counting towards your campaign is the time to identify your priorities, set what they are, set reasonable fundraising goals around those priorities and identify them in a way that is compelling and exciting for donors. So identifying them is one part but also being able to articulate how these priorities will change or positively influence your organization or cause. Very often, organizations will do what's called a wealth screening. This is taking all of the donors and their donor database and sending them off to an outside company to screen for wealth. These are publicly held assets such as real estate or stock holdings, data that's readily available in the industry but it's all synthesized together to give an actual screening of your individual donors or prospective donors and assigning a general sense of how much that individual should be able to give to your organization during the course of your campaign. It's in essence the first best guess at what an individual might contribute to you during the length of your campaign or the time frame of your campaign. These screenings are important because it is one of the ingredients for us to identify: are we setting reasonable goals? Do we have enough donors or prospective donors to actually fund our projects and actually reach our overall fundraising goal? This work of a wealth screening is just one step though. It identifies wealth but it doesn't necessarily identify an individual's inclination to make a gift to your organization. That's where a capacity analysis comes in. A capacity analysis is another process that many campaigns will go through as part of the pre-planning efforts, and this is where we take a look at the wealth of our donors and prospective donors and figure out what their real capacity is during the length of our campaign. We know that not all of our donors will make campaign gifts. In fact many will decline or say no. This capacity analysis is a deeper dive into our donor database to really figure out what's the right ratio or formula that we might achieve during the campaign and how many major gifts will we need to reach our goal. And often once we've done this level of modeling and analysis, it allows us to set a working goal, what is reasonable. And then what's also very important is to take a look at what our working goal is or what the possibilities might be for how much money we can raise during this period of time and going back and matching it up to our priority projects. Obviously, if we have priority projects that are worth $100 million but our working goal based on our capacity analysis says we can only raise 50 million during the campaign, we have a disconnect, or sometimes the opposite occurs where our capacity analysis points out that we can raise more money than what we have priorities set for. This gives us more wiggle room and more opportunity to think even bigger, set more bold priorities or develop new projects to add to the campaign as we move forward because we actually will have the ability to raise more money than what we thought. And this often leads us to develop what is very commonly referred to in our industry as a gift table or a gift pyramid which again takes our wealth screening and looks at how many donors we need at what giving levels to ultimately reach our working goal. Let me share with you an example of a giving pyramid. It demonstrates the number of donors that you would need at any given dollar level or range in order to hit your ultimate goal. This particular pyramid shared here is actually a pyramid used for $1 billion fundraising campaign. The idea being that you would need many, many donors giving small gifts that you would need in this case 1,000 donors giving between 25,000 and $49,000 and so on. You also can see that at the top of the pyramid, you need a small number but an important number of individuals making the largest gifts to your campaigns. These type of pyramids allow us to see where we may have gaps. Are there certain giving levels where we don't have enough donors or where we have more than we really need? And in true form, campaigns rarely follow these pyramids in reality. When a campaign concludes, often we go back and look at our donor pyramid to find out that we were stronger in certain bands than others but it is a great way to set up a campaign and a great pre-campaign element that allows us to begin to target our prospective donors into categories by giving levels, and it helps us identify the donors that we must get at the highest levels in our pyramid. Occasionally, a nonprofit may be top heavy in a pyramid where they have plenty of prospects at the high ends but they don't have a broad enough donor base at the lower ends. This too can create a problem for the organization and those gaps can become goals for the campaign to actually increase the donor base. Additional pre-campaign planning elements that are important and that we alluded to earlier: budget and staffing needs identified and secured, establishing naming guidelines or minimum levels of giving. For example, if you're building a new building and having a capital campaign, how much will a donor have to give to put their name on the building? Or how much will they have to give to name a room inside the building? Or if it's an endowment campaign, what are the minimum endowment levels for them to get naming recognition? These minimum level should be set during the pre-campaign planning phase, announced when the campaign starts and be maintained throughout the entire campaign. Changing giving levels or naming guidelines in the middle of a campaign can confuse donors, frustrate donors or even in some cases, offend donors particularly if they gave at a level higher than what the new guidelines would indicate they need to give that in order to establish a naming or put their name on an endowment or part of a building. So it's really important to establish them prior to the start of a campaign and maintain them throughout the campaign and to be very transparent and public about these guidelines. Also during the campaign phase of a campaign, you should be identifying volunteers. Who among your donors, who among your volunteers do you want to recruit and have them be part of the campaign? Very often campaigns have a steering committee or an external volunteer group that help advance the campaign. Sometimes these volunteer groups have their own structures. In fact you can have a campaign chair or cochairs or multiple chairs or cochairs of a campaign. But identifying how many volunteers you need, who they are, what role they will play, will they be chairs, cochairs or lead various committees within your volunteer structure. Establishing the structure, identifying who you want to lead the campaign, recruiting them and getting them excited about the campaign are all very important pre-campaign planning elements. Additionally, you're going to have to decide before your campaign begins: how you will count? What will be your counting guidelines? What will or will not count in a campaign? Many professional organizations in our industry help set industry standards for what should count or not count in the campaign but there is some gray area in these guidelines. For example, do you count bequests or not? These are gifts that have not yet been realized and very likely will not be realized during the timeline of the campaign. But do you count them towards your overall goal or not? Some organizations do, some do not. You will have to decide upfront what will count, how you'll counter it and follow those guidelines throughout the time of your campaign in order to ensure accuracy towards your goal attainment. And then also training. You can never do enough training. It's not something you only do before you start your campaign but it certainly is an element of a pre-campaign planning process that every organization should at least consider. Training for the staff and training for the volunteers that we talked about earlier to make sure that they are ready for the campaign, they know what the accounting guidelines are, they know what the naming guidelines are and they know what the priority projects of the campaign are on day one of the campaign so they can successfully launch, they can successfully discuss and represent the campaign to prospective donors.
