Baltimore
Why do capital campaigns fail?
M. Kent Stroman, a consultant in Bartlesville, Okla., and Phil L. Lakin, chief executive of the Tulsa Community Foundation, described the top seven reasons in a session today at the annual Association of Fundraising Professionals conference.
They are:
Not setting priorities correctly. “If you’re going to be successful, you have to have a sense of sequence,” said Mr. Stroman. “The results are rarely better than the plans.”
He described showing up at a meeting with trustees who were organizing a capital campaign. He was surprised to learn that the campaign had already begun, even though the organization had just approached him to provide consulting assistance. Worse, the trustees had kicked off the $1-million campaign with a bake sale in a city park. “A bake sale may be the right thing for a campaign, but it’s certainly not the first thing,” said Mr. Stroman. “There is no way you can eat enough cookies to raise $1-million.”
“Crazy goals.” Do a feasibility study, the fund raisers said. Know your prospects, and learn if previous donors are ready to increase their gifts.
One big-gift syndrome. “Just because you’ve got one big gift,” said Mr. Stroman, “doesn’t mean you’re ready.” He also said that a “can’t do approach” and confusion over an organization’s mission can keep it from being ready for a capital campaign.
Thinking you need to know everything. “We can be paralyzed,” said Mr. Lakin. “There can be a tendency to think you need to know it all before you go out there and run the campaign.”
Impatience. On the other side of the spectrum are groups that jump in before they do enough planning, the fund raisers said. And there are no do-overs, they said. Said Mr. Stroman: “Can you imagine going back to your lead donors and saying, We kind of messed this up, can we start over? We’re going to go back and ask you for gifts that are two to three times as much.”
“Fuzzy goals.” Everyone with the organization needs to be clear about the timeline and the financial goals, they said. Mr. Stroman recalled interviewing board members of an organization about its previous capital campaign. None of them gave the same answer about what the campaign goal was and whether it had been met, he said.
“Leadership deficit.” The chief executive, the board chair, and the campaign chair are the three most important people to the success of a campaign, the fund raisers said. With a board chair, “you can patch, you can cover up” if that person is not ideal, said Mr. Stroman. “But with the campaign chair, you have to hire up.”
The fund raisers stressed the importance of getting the right person as campaign chair, particularly if some other leadership was weak. Mr. Lakin said to watch out for people who are “overused, overworked, who’ve had their hands out too many times.” But also be careful about campaign chairs who’ve never led a campaign before, he said. It can work, he said, but it’s risky.