You’re ready to take your nonprofit to the next level, scale up its capacity, and make an even bigger impact in your community. It might be time for a capital campaign.

Capital campaigns are among the biggest fundraising undertakings that nonprofit organizations tackle, and they only come around roughly once a decade. They’re major investments of your time and resources with potentially huge payoffs—an increased capacity to drive impact, strengthened relationships with donors and partners, and tons of valuable fundraising experience.

But since they’re such big projects, capital campaigns bring inherent risks and challenges, and they require you to plan like you’ve never planned a fundraising campaign before. Thorough planning safeguards the time and energy you put into the campaign, boosts your chances of success, and creates a more positive experience for everyone involved. 

What are the key pitfalls to avoid when planning a capital campaign, especially if it’s your organization’s first? Let’s take a look at four critical “don’ts” and how to navigate them.

1. Don’t start without a clear and compelling reason.

Imagine this scenario:

Your organization has been operating smoothly with tight but consistent resources. You want to take it up a notch and increase your impact and feel like now’s a good time for a major campaign. But you can’t point to a specific project or set of investments that will take you there.

You start planning a campaign to generally grow your nonprofit’s capacity but immediately run into challenges securing your board’s buy-in and engagement. You start discussing your goals with donors, but they don’t understand why you’re asking for such large gifts. The plan feels pieced together, and your early efforts lose steam fast.

What should you do instead?

Clearly define your capital campaign’s objectives first—they should be the whole reason and guiding force behind the campaign. The objectives are what you’re seeking to accomplish by conducting a major fundraising campaign. Common examples include:

• Constructing or renovating facilities
• Purchasing land or a building
• Investing in new equipment or tech upgrades
• Hiring and training staff
• Starting new programs or services
• Contracting professional services or consultants

Capital campaign objectives can come in all shapes and sizes, but what they share is that they increase your ability to make an impact in specific ways. Something less tangible like growing your endowment should be framed in terms of the specific growth and program outcomes it will generate in the coming years.

Your campaign’s objectives create a foundation that sustains the campaign’s energy, shows others what it’s all about, and motivates donors to give. They’ll shape the entire campaign, from the specific fundraising goal you seek to raise, to the case for support you develop and discuss with donors. You must be able to speak clearly about what your campaign will accomplish and what the positive impacts will be before you can move forward.

2. Don’t underestimate the amount of time you’ll need.

Here’s another problem you may encounter:

Let’s say you can clearly define what you want to do with your campaign and why, so you jump into the planning process, skipping key steps like a feasibility study and prospect research and cultivation. You lay out a series of gifts of different sizes that will get you to your goal. Everyone’s excited to get started.

Unfortunately, your first solicitation falls flat for reasons you couldn’t anticipate. Thankfully, you secure your next gift, although it’s not at the expected amount. Another gift falls flat, you secure one more, and so on, feeling like you’re inching forward. Your board is already asking questions about whether you’ll hit the projected amount you’ll need to break ground. In short, things feel like they’re dragging along much slower than expected. Your board is losing confidence and your team is losing motivation.

What should you do instead?

Do your research to understand the structure and timeline of a typical capital campaign in advance. They generally last between two and three years, sometimes longer, and consist of these phases:

1. Pre-planning - 3-12 months: This is when you’ll establish your campaign’s objectives and goal. You’ll also develop guiding documents and resources like your case for support and preliminary gift range chart.
2. Feasibility study - 2+ months:  During a feasibility study, you discuss your plans with stakeholders and prospective lead donors to gauge their opinions and test your campaign’s current potential for success. 
3. Planning - 2+ months: You’ll refine your plans based on the results of the study and lay out a comprehensive plan for the rest of the campaign.
4. Quiet phase - 6-24 months: During this phase, you’ll secure the bulk of your fundraising goal (at least 75%) through major gifts from lead donors and board members without broadcasting the campaign to the broader public. 
5. Kick-off - one event: The kick-off event is when you announce your goal and objectives to the wider community, issue press releases, and celebrate to drum up broad energy and enthusiasm.
6. Public phase - 3+ months: During the public phase, you fundraise the remainder of your goal through smaller gifts from many donors and follow up on quiet phase solicitations.
7. Stewardship - ongoing: The final phase of the campaign involves thanking donors, collecting pledges, stewarding your donor relationships, celebrating your success, and getting started executing your funded projects.

For a deeper dive into each of these phases, explore Capital Campaign Pro’s ultimate guide to campaign structure and best practices.

The key takeaway is that successful capital campaigns take time and resources. Understand in advance that you’ll need two or more years to conduct it from start to finish and that you’ll likely need to invest in increased staffing, consulting or coaching services, new tools, and events along the way. Equipped with this context, you can lay out a more realistic plan, benchmarks, and expectations across your organization.

3. Don’t neglect to secure stakeholder buy-in early.

Consider this pitfall:

Your board loves the idea of ratcheting up your organization’s capacity and impact, and they like the shiny campaign objectives you’ve proposed. Everyone starts getting excited, you move ahead, and the campaign’s earliest stage is underway.

But the board has only generally expressed enthusiasm for the campaign’s big-picture purpose on paper. Once they see the actual details, timelines, and solicitations plan, they’re not so sure a campaign is a good idea. 

And what about your lead donors? A major donor was broadly supportive of a campaign when you casually mentioned it last year, but when you reach back out to discuss specifics, they don’t understand why you need to invest so heavily in your particular objectives. Your case for support isn’t landing well.

What should you do instead?

Capital campaigns need the support of many stakeholders—board members, staff, donors, volunteers, corporate and community partners—to be successful. However, if you wait until the campaign is practically underway to secure their buy-in, you may face resistance, lack of engagement, and all kinds of pushback.

To secure buy-in, follow these tips:

• Engage your stakeholders early and often. Seek input on your preliminary campaign plans from leadership, discuss the purpose of your campaign, and more. Loop in long-time major donors as appropriate prior to the feasibility study to lay the groundwork for their involvement.
• Clearly communicate your campaign’s objectives and how they align with your organization’s mission and long-term vision. Identify concerns or questions that stakeholders may have, and have a plan for discussing them.
• Always conduct a feasibility study. This exercise not only tests your campaign plans but is also a valuable opportunity to engage important external stakeholders early. We recommend conducting the interviews yourself with the help of an experienced advisor rather than fully outsourcing it to a consultant. 
• Seek donor involvement when refining your case for support. You’ll test your initial case for support during the feasibility study, but don’t stop there. Once a donor is on board with the need for the campaign, ask for their continued input on the ways you’re explaining and presenting your plans.

4. Don’t set unrealistic goals or projections.

Here’s another critical issue you may encounter:

You’ve established your campaign’s objectives, understand how long it will take and the phases it will require, and have secured buy-in from your organization’s leadership. You’ve also set your most ambitious fundraising goal yet. Great! That’s what capital campaigns are for.

But when the rubber hits the road, the money just isn’t there. Donors whose support you counted on ultimately choose not to give, or they give at lower levels than anticipated. You extend your campaign’s timeline, but it soon becomes clear that you won’t be able to secure the bulk of your funding during the quiet phase and that your goal isn’t achievable. 

What should you do instead?

Setting overly ambitious, untested fundraising goals can set your campaign up for failure. Although a capital campaign will be the most ambitious fundraising project that you undertake, your goals must still be truly achievable or else risk damage to the organization’s reputation and donor relationships.

This is why conducting a feasibility study is such a critical early step in the planning process. By gathering input and opinions at the start, you can get a clear sense of the effectiveness of your case for support and an indication of who would be willing to support you, and at what levels. 

Taken together, this information gives you an idea of the feasibility of your preliminary plan and allows you to adjust course before moving into the active phases of your campaign. This might mean lowering your goal and slightly shrinking your objectives to ensure they can actually be achieved. In some cases, you may discover that a major campaign of any scale isn’t feasible right now. Or you may see that your donors are extremely eager and that you can realistically increase your goal.

In any case, you must learn these things before investing your valuable time and money into a campaign plan. Planning and testing beforehand increases the likelihood that your campaign will actually be able to have its intended impact.

It’s also important to remember that you can be flexible. The capital campaign model allows you to flexibly scale your goal as fundraising dollars come in and you get a real sense of the campaign’s performance so far. You can adjust your goal up or down depending on the real circumstances you encounter before you publicly kick off the campaign. 

So, although you must thoroughly test and refine your plans early to give your nonprofit a reliable roadmap, avoid feeling that you’re 100% locked into it. You can make adjustments as needed up until the public phase to ensure your campaign’s success.

About the Authors

Andrea Kihlstedt & Amy Eisenstein

Andrea Kihlstedt is CEO & Co-Founder of Capital Campaign Pro. Andrea is the author of Capital Campaigns: Strategies that Work, now in its 4th edition, as well as How to Raise $1 Million (or More) in 10 Bite Sized Steps, in addition to other books. Andrea has been leading successful capital campaigns for more than 30 years. To learn how Capital Campaign Pro can support you through a capital campaign, visit capitalcampaignpro.com.

Amy Eisenstein, ACFRE is CEO and Co-Founder of Capital Campaign Pro. Her published books include: Major Gift Fundraising for Small Shops, Raising More with Less, and 50 A$ks in 50 Weeks.  She became a Certified Fundraising Executive (CFRE) in 2004 and received the ACFRE in 2013. For more information and free resources visit CapitalCampaignPro.com.