By Amanda Macdonald, Managing Partner, The Monument Group
A couple of years ago my daughter’s soccer team was in the championship game of an end-of-season tournament. My daughter is a defensive player, and in that position, she will often go a whole season without scoring a goal. With just a minute left, she kicked the ball with everything she had straight at the goal, and it sailed in right over the goal keeper’s head. They won! Afterwards, I asked her what gave her motivation to try to score from so far back. She said that the team decided that when they got down to the end, everyone would do everything they could to score a goal. I thought to myself, shouldn’t they always be trying to do that?
Every year, we development officers and directors come up with an annual fund plan that includes a typical sequence of mailings, events, and meetings that will get us to our annual fund goal. Much like a soccer team passing the ball and progressing down the field, we follow our tried-and-true calendar of mailings and events that get us to our annual goal.
But this annual fund cycle can often feel repetitive, can lack a sense of urgency and excitement, and have many development directors feeling like they are the only one kicking the ball down the field.
This is the opposite of a campaign. With a campaign, an organization comes together around a shared goal that is often bold and somewhat scary. Time is spent perfecting the case, months of research is done to see if what you envision is even possible, and volunteers get excited and engaged. The entire organization is laser focused on raising major gifts, because you must hit your campaign goal in a specific amount of time. Everyone has leveled up. It’s exciting just thinking about it!
But here is the secret – you don’t have to be in a campaign to be in this campaign mode. An annual fund is just a mini campaign. You have to raise a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time. And the stakes are high. Depending on the size and financial health of your organization, the consequences of not making goal can impact the current operations of the organization and your ability to raise funds the next year.
So, what does it mean to be in campaign mode? It means adding a layer of strategy and urgency to your annual fund. It means looking at steps you traditionally think of as campaign planning steps and applying them to your annual development plan.
- Case for Support – Take time each year to refine your case for support and involve staff from all areas of the organization. Focus on specific goals for the year and connect those goals to the long term goals of the organization. Involving all departments in this process helps create a team approach to reaching the goal.
- Scale of Giving – When planning for a campaign, a scale of gifts is often used to determine how many leadership gifts you need to hit your goal. Using this same tool for the annual fund will help keep you in the campaign mode mindset throughout the year. Create a scale based on your major donors from the previous year (this could be $500 and up or $1,000 and up, depending on the size of your organization). Then, determine how many more donors at each level you will need to hit the increase in your annual fund goal. Line those up with actual donors whom you think have the potential to increase their gift. Then set a personalized cultivation and solicitation plan for these donors based on their interest and passion. You could craft an ask for an increased annual gift, a multi-year gift to support a program, or even a capital request for immediate needs or maintenance. You don’t have to be in a campaign to make a campaign-like solicitation.
- Event Strategy – Many organizations have a large fundraising event as part of their annual fundraising strategy. How many times have you seen this used as a campaign strategy? Not many, right? This is because of the amount of staff time required to make this event successful, making the return on investment quite small. When an organization embarks on a campaign, they are doing this on top of ongoing annual operations. The return on investment for each strategy has to be high because time and capacity are limited. So, you won’t see a big fundraising event in a campaign, but you will see small cultivation events for targeted groups of donors. This is an excellent way to get many donor cultivation conversations completed on one night, getting you one step closer to a major gift solicitation. These events don’t bring in gifts the night of the event, but they can be a catalyst to increased annual donations.
- Weekly Meetings – Many campaigns utilize weekly strategy meetings to make sure cultivation steps and solicitations are happening regularly. This framework is essential to keeping your annual fund effort in campaign mode. A weekly meeting with everyone who has fundraising assignments – including your Executive Director – will keep the team accountable. Use this meeting to report on recent donor meetings, next steps that should be assigned, and strategy for upcoming donor meetings. It also gives you the opportunity to pull in program staff or finance staff that are vital to certain solicitations and proposals.
Implementing these campaign strategies to your annual fund plan will ignite passion into your purpose and bring your team together around your shared goal, so that you are fighting to get that goal in the last minute, no matter what.
