Campaign Services:
Feasibility, Management, and Implementation

Our campaign feasibility and planning service begins with an internal readiness assessment, which consists of the following:

Immersion in strategic, master, program, and financial plans to both understand your campaign goals and their impact on your organization; and to also prepare ourselves for discovery interviews (if that is the route we ultimately take). We take particular care to understand your diversity, equity, and inclusion plans and initiatives.

Formation of an ad hoc planning committee (optional) to guide early planning and discovery and to be a sounding board for ideas and assumptions (beginning in this phase and convening periodically throughout the study). Often members of this ad hoc committee become members of the eventual campaign committee when you are ready to shift from planning to implementation.

Examination of a five-year baseline to understand data trends that have contributed to your fundraising and prior campaign success, new donor acquisition, donor retention, gaps in programming, and to create assumptions that form a springboard for looking ahead to a campaign. This deep analysis examines results from four important angles: audience contributing, gift levels being realized, effort resulting in dollars, and purpose of dollars. From this baseline, we also look at return on investment and cost per dollar raised.

Building of a data-driven prospect model that scaffolds over what you see as your foundational capacity data and extends it to a useful model that blends giving behaviors and patterns (loyalty and gift levels), engagement (where useful), assignment, and moves management to assess capacity and identify various types of campaign prospects. This model, in turn, informs a gift table and other tools necessary to guide early campaign planning.

Formation of a staff-to-opportunity analysis that combines prospect opportunity with an understanding of each job function on your team such that we can build a staff investment plan that may be required to optimize success in a campaign.

Engagement of organizational leaders and volunteer stakeholders through one-to-one interviews to gain an understanding of how they engage, when they engage, whether they are advocates for fundraising and whether they have what they need from your development team to succeed. Further, this engagement helps illuminate their perceptions of the fundraising program from their vantage point.

Support for the development of a campaign pitch book that can be shared and tested in the external discovery phase. This pitch book is an informal, yet polished, piece that places funding priorities within the context of overall school strength.

Identification of prospects and/or influencers for external discovery. You will be active partners in the selection of interviewees so that we can test a campaign model from varying perspectives (potential top donors, support from leaders that will serve as examples to the larger donor community, loyal donors who may not yet be giving to their potential, community leaders or influencers, donors supporting other area nonprofits, etc.). This includes preparing the interview questions and sharing feedback that will be useful in either a traditional or guided interview approach.

Following the assessment is the external discovery phase, during which we focus on conducting interviews with an appropriate number of prospects to determine their level of endorsement and enthusiasm for your organization and the proposed campaign, their likelihood of giving, their likely level of giving, and their likelihood of volunteering leadership. Increasingly, our clients are trending away from conducting traditional feasibility studies; in recognition of this, we offer a few options. Development Guild will prepare staff and potentially volunteers to engage in a guided set of interviews. In this case, we will prepare interviewers for their role through a training session and the development of materials to present and capture interview learning and outcomes. For a guided approach to provide the most useful information, it is important that we use a shared framework and have a strategic survey tool for capturing the essence of conversations. Alternatively, we offer the option of a hybrid approach to discovery wherein Development Guild conducts some interviews, and you conduct some of the interviews. 

In the final phase, you will receive our findings and campaign recommendations regarding the goal, case for support, proposed timeline, volunteer and staff structures, interview summaries, and evaluation of conditions needed for success.

The vast majority of campaign planning clients remain with us throughout the full life cycle of their campaign endeavor, as a deep partner during launch and early implementation and ebbing back as you build the momentum and capacity to take on most aspects of the campaign implementation yourselves.

During the early stage of implementation, you are, with our partnership, moving from recommendations to a full campaign work plan, and simultaneously to solicitation of lead donors, onboarding of campaign volunteers, putting recommended practices in place, establishing metrics to track progress, and addressing other conditions for success. From there, you move your campaign to a more public forum, through to celebration and post-campaign plans.

Following implementation, our role shifts to management and is designed to provide breadth and depth to existing counsel. This may include resident counsel; often it replaces a staff role during recruitment or leave, or while building to a degree of success and momentum that supports staff investment. You can also call on us to augment campaign counsel to address other pressing roles; for example, to oversee the annual fund for a period of time.