Capital Campaign Fundamentals

From the Perspective of a Founding ED

Starting up a children’s museum takes some serious multi-tasking. As a founder, there’s such a wide-ranging list of priorities and focus areas that vie for your attention all at once, and it can be somewhat crazy-making. One minute you’re the CFO developing the business plan and proforma, next you’re head of PR making a pitch to the city council, and then you’re working with an interior designer on selecting bathroom fixtures. That’s all before grabbing lunch with your next prospective Board Member! 

Founders find themselves learning and leading all aspects of starting up a children’s museum, but the one responsibility that sits heaviest on the founder’s shoulders is fundraising. There’s no escaping that money must be raised, and a lot of it. 

The Capital Campaign

Since most start-ups focus on establishing a brick-and-mortar children’s museum facility, fundraising for a start-up means taking on a major capital campaign. Capital campaigns are a fundraising effort designed to raise funds for a specific project over a defined period of time.  They can run from several months to several years, depending on the scale and scope. A capital campaign should be very organized and deliberate, and it's often multi-layered, paying for all the costs associated with the capital expense project. Once the new museum is open and operational, your accountant can capitalize all the expenses that went into the start-up in one lump sum.

Not every founder has experience with capital campaigns. In fact, most do not. Since it takes a lot of capital expense to start-up a children's museum, and lots of money needs to be raised, many founders see the expense of contracting a campaign consultant as a worthwhile investment. I’m not trained in fundraising, nor do I consider myself a professional fundraiser, but as a founding Executive Director, I’ve led two start-up capital campaigns where we did not use a campaign consultant and yet we still met our goals.

Conversely, I’m currently helping an organization discern whether to expend precious resources on a campaign consultant or to invest their campaign seed funding elsewhere. A campaign consultant can often provide the necessary planning, strategy, structure, and support that a start-up organization cannot. Regardless, it’s critical to have the Board and staff-leadership (if you have staff) fired-up to carry out the capital campaign until the goal is reached. They are the ones who are forming long-term relationships with your prospective donors, whereas a contracted temporary consultant is not. 

I’m sure there are many ways to structure a campaign, but the campaigns I’ve been involved with all followed a similar pattern of feasibility, planning, a quiet phase, a public phase, then transitioning to annual campaigns. Here’s a top-line overview of each segment: 

Feasibility

The Feasibility is one spot where a campaign consultant comes in handy. Before the campaign is a go, it’s important to gauge interest of the donor community. Either you’re doing the groundwork of meeting one-on-one with all the prospective donors to share the vision of your museum and how it will transform your community or region, or you’re contracting a campaign consultant to take it on. The consultant can keep the conversations confidential and leave the meeting with an indication of the financial level the donor could see themselves contributing in the future. These feasibility meetings are not solicitations, but they are an early relationship-building step in cultivating prospective donors for pledging their donation in the upcoming quiet phase. In addition, the feasibility phase gives you input about your messaging and how to communicate a compelling vision most effectively to prospective donors. 

Campaign Planning

This is another area where a campaign consultant can offer a leg up. Planning out the entire campaign is a critical step that cannot be skipped or glossed over. It includes identifying prospective donors, developing a cultivation plan for each donor, setting a strategic communications plan, and building out your volunteer campaign committee (these are supporters of the museum with the relationships to bring in prospective donors and are often donors themselves). With data from the feasibility study, you can set your campaign goal and giving pyramid to map out how many donations will be needed at each level. This is also when you set the Board-approved recognition policy and recognition levels. 

Quiet Phase

During the quiet phase, you and your team implement the campaign plan, with the goal to raise 70% to 80% of your entire campaign goal. By the time you launch the public phase of the campaign, it’s important to demonstrate there’s community-wide momentum and the goal is in reach. Often, the quiet phase starts with one-on-one meetings with your list of prospective donors. These meetings may start as a follow-up to the feasibility study to show progress and to introduce giving opportunities and recognition levels. It’s been my experience that connecting specific aspects of the museum to the prospective donors’ specific values, hopes, and dreams is the number one selling point. In addition, it’s important to be ready with the recognition opportunities. 

Public Phase

The public phase is often the hardest part of the entire capital campaign. It’s when you’re doing the largest amount of work for the smallest gifts. You’re close to the finish line, but the major gifts are already in place, and now every dollar counts. Campaign fatigue from the grind of it all is about to set in. But at the same time, the public phase brings a new energy from opening up to the public for their broad-based support. Campaign events and media appearances become frequent. Commemorative bricks are sold, and local celebrities get involved. A Kickstarter campaign might be launched to purchase some high-tech equipment for the maker shop. You host community group hard-hat tours and make direct appeals to service clubs. Mom groups get involved and elementary school classrooms do fund drives. While it’s important to avoid burnout, the public phase should be an exhilarating momentum builder across the campaign finish line and right into grand opening. 

Annual Campaigns

Now that the ribbons have been cut, the museum is open and fully operating, and you’ve had a few good nights of sleep, it’s time to start transitioning from the capital campaign to annual campaigns. A capital campaign is not always a good fit for every single prospective donor. This is the time to share new donor opportunities to support programs, initiatives, and annual campaigns. But the donors who contributed to the capital campaign are already invested in a major way, and likely want to see their investment continue to have impact. Supporting annual campaigns at whatever level builds upon their original capital campaign donations, ensures sustainability, and helps to grow impact year over year.

While it would be a mistake to go back to any donor too soon, it’s important to plan out strategic communications to keep donors aware, engaged, and in cultivation to continue donating when the time is right for them. Being intentional about stewarding donors from the start-up capital campaign to annual support is critical to your museum’s sustainability and future growth. 

As you can see (and surely knew already), fundraising is no small undertaking, but the relationship-building that forms in the start-up capital campaign will be essential for your museum’s long-term success. You may choose to invest in a professional campaign consultant for all, some, or none of the capital campaign process, but whatever route you take, you will never go wrong with taking a deliberate and intentional approach that lays the foundation and sets the tone for your ongoing operations.