This story is a companion piece to an article on a community-driven campaign. Both were featured in our April package looking at new ideas in fundraising.
The Knoxville Habitat for Humanity in Tennessee is in the midst of a capital campaign, the first in its 37-year history. But you’d never know. Unlike traditional campaigns, this one will never exit its “quiet phase.” There’ll be no balloon-drenched launch event, no GIF-driven blitz on social media. Donors who make small gifts year in and out probably won’t even hear about the effort until it’s over.
After improvising to adjust to pandemic life, fundraising is unlikely to return to what it was before. Here’s how fundraisers are charting a new course. Read more:
“We’re doing our dead-level best not to even use the word ‘campaign,’” says chief development officer Angie Sledge.
Rather, Sledge and her staff are focused exclusively on winning the support of major donors for two goals: a new neighborhood for 36 families and the creation of a standing fund to snatch up property as it becomes available to create an inventory of land to build on. The strategy is paying off. With months to go in the campaign, the organization has reached its $4.5 million goal and then some. A final tally well north of $5 million is within reach.
Campaigns that court only major donors are perhaps inevitable in 21st-century philanthropy. Since 2000, giving to charity by middle-class households has fallen off as donations from the wealthy have swelled.
Fundraisers, however, often follow 20th-century conventions. They declare that when funds raised reach an arbitrarily selected threshold — perhaps 70 percent or 80 percent of the goal — the campaign goes public and starts to reel in small gifts.
Why? “That’s just the way we’ve done it,” says Kathryn Gamble, a veteran gift officer and consultant. “It’s been drilled into our heads.”
The result, Gamble argues, is inefficient and expensive. At the North Carolina Museum of Art, Gamble helped lead a campaign that eschewed special events and broad appeals to home in on big donors. Ultimately, the museum raised $50.6 million from 297 contributors.
Some of those dollars would have been left on the table, she says, if fundraisers had been distracted by the task of generating hoopla and energy around a public launch. Better still, staff freed from that work had time to create a data-driven plan to tap the potential of new major-gift supporters. Interestingly, more than 60 percent of campaign donors, while supporters of the museum, had not previously made a large donation.
Transition to Planned Gifts
Even before Habitat for Humanity’s campaign, Sledge thumbed her nose at some fundraising conventions. “It’s stupendously stupid to raise money through special events,” she says. Early on, she vetoed one idea to attract small gifts in the campaign: a sidewalk in the new neighborhood with donors’ names on bricks. “I said, ‘That’s a lovely idea, but it is a very expensive, time-consuming effort that’s going to have relatively small results.”
Campaigns that court only major donors are perhaps inevitable given the falloff in giving by average Americans.
Instead, Habitat will use the campaign’s close to transition to a planned-gift effort: This summer, the organization will invite longtime annual donors — excellent planned-gift prospects — to join campaign donors at a celebration. The new homes will be announced, as will the new fund to buy land and the opportunity to ensure the organization’s impact for years to come.
“We have donors who have given $25 a year for 25 years,” Sledge says, and they will be accorded the same fanfare and attention as the campaign donors. “We are absolutely going to recognize them and make sure they understand that we’ve reached this pinnacle of success because of what they’ve done.”
