Special Bd. of Aldermen — 10/26/15 Page 3
| am going to move away from the feasibility study now and talk about campaign strategy and timeline unless
anybody has any questions before | proceed?
Ok so a campaign typically has very specific phases and | should tell you, | probably should have done an
introduction in the beginning of my background. I’ve been in development in New Hampshire for 30 years both
as a Staff person and then for the past 15 as a consultant. Between my staff and consultation roles | have
worked on at least 15 capital campaigns around northern New England. They range in size from $500,000 to
$5 million. This is not Dartmouth or UCLA’s $300 billion campaign, these are community-based, non-profits
that are working with Full Circle Consulting so that we can help them manage their relatively smaller capital
campaigns. Through that, | have come to recognize that there are very distinct phases and also there is a lot
literature in practice out there that backs up our experience.
The first phase | would describe as campaign readiness and this can take anywhere from a few months to 5
years, depending on the organization. This is about pulling together your “why”, which is the case statement,
why is this project worthy of charitable support? Why should donors be interested and invested in this? What
about it is going to be exciting to them? So that is our case for support as we describe it. | think all of you
have seen this, haven’t you? Ok. So this is one part of it, we have additional materials that answer questions
and we will continue to tweak those as they go forward, but this is more of our standard and what we hope is
an inspirational piece.
This is also when we pull together our capital campaign committee of volunteers in the community who are
willing to ask for contributions from their peers and colleagues and neighbors and help with events around this
fund raising. This is also when we identify perspective donors. So what is different about this from a non-profit
that has a history say, you know, like an organization that has been around for 30 years is that those
organizations have a donor base. They have a list of people that they know have given to them before and
they can probably go and start. Here it is even a little more difficult in that we need to identify people who are
interested in the Performing Arts Center and then really engage them as to their interest to give.
Then there is what is called the Lead Gift Phase and | am going to attach some numbers to this, to these
definitions ina moment. So this is really wnen we are asking a small number of people who will give probably,
if all goes according to plan, and you know best laid plans, but what will probably happen is that a small
number of people will give the majority of the money needed for the capital campaign and this is quite typical.
When | started my career in fund raising, the rule of thumb was that 80% of your money is going to come from
20% of your donors. I’ve talked about that in front of a lot of groups and I’ve had a number of business people
say “that is the kind of thing that happens with some businesses as well that 80% of your income could come
from 20% of your clients or customers’.
That has changed in the 30 years | have been in the field, it is now closer to 95% of the money from 5% of the
donors, so philanthropy is seeing what the United States is seeing as a whole which is the increased disparity
in wealth distribution. So some of these lead gifts are going to be very, very important and these gifts can
come from businesses, they can come from individuals, these lead gifts are probably not likely to come from a
private foundation, at least one in New Hampshire.
We hope that we would achieve 70% of the campaign goal in this first phase and then we would move on what
is called the Major Donor Phase which is the next tier of gifts coming in. Those first gifts are more one-on-one
meetings and really long conversations to encourage people to give. After that the outreach can be through
house parties, events, phone conversations with folks. In the major gift phase we get to 90% of the campaign
goal and then it is the Public Phase. This is when you think of oftentimes this is the only phase that a person
not involved with the campaign sees. So this is when there are big events around a capital campaign, there
might be a mailing, there might be dinners around the community. This is where many, many people bring in
the final 10% of the campaign goal.
