Campaign Strategy: Feasibility to Celebration
The full arc of a modern campaign: feasibility, goal-setting, phases, communications, and the ending that sets up the next one.
Through the Arts & Culture lens
Campaigns most often fund an endowment or a named renovation, with leadership running through the board and an artistic director whose voice shapes the case as much as the executive director's does. The patron ladder effectively becomes the campaign's gift table in miniature, and the public phase's inclusion design matters because turning a subscriber into a named campaign donor is also the sector's best upgrade mechanism.
Continuing education
1.50 points
Securing the Gift · Leadership and Management
Learning objectives
- Choose the campaign type, comprehensive, capital or special, or mini-campaign, set the goal from the plan's needs, the feasibility findings, and a top-down gift table with 3 to 4 prospects per gift needed, and design the quiet, public, and close phases with the leadership slate that carries them.
- Design a feasibility study that tests the case, the goal, the leadership, the institution's standing, and the timing through 25 to 40 confidential interviews, and read its findings weighted by the gift table rather than by enthusiasm.
- Write a 15- to 25-page campaign plan with the goal and gift table, counting policies, phase gates, six to eight workstreams with owners, the calendar, a budget at 5 to 15 percent of goal, the risk register and dashboard, and the post-campaign plan drafted before launch.
- Read the anatomy of a stalled campaign, an early announcement, a goal above the feasibility result, a verbal lead gift, and a neglected annual fund, and apply the eleven-month repair sequence of public reset, leadership repair, table rebuilt from the pipeline, and base protected.
Designed for CFRE continuing education. Not yet accepted; no CFRE points can be claimed.
Lessons
- 26 min
Video lesson
Designing the campaign architecture
I Pause · Securing the Gift
- 22 min
Field guide· PDF
Feasibility study design and interpretation
III Discern · Securing the Gift
- 35 min
Template· DOCX
Campaign plan master template
IV Invite · Leadership and Management
- 18 min
Case study· PDF
Case study: a campaign that stalled, then didn't
VII Multiply · Leadership and Management
This is members-only material.
Members get every lesson, template, and worksheet in all eight tracks, plus the support to put them to work in your shop.
More in this stage
Boards, Teams & Leadership
The CDO Operating System
Leading philanthropy at the institutional level: CEO partnership, cross-functional influence, and the systems that scale past you.
Fundamentals & Ethics
Culture of Philanthropy: Leading Across the Organization
When program staff, finance, and the front desk understand their role in fundraising, the work gets easier. Building that culture is executive work.
Planned Giving
Endowment & Legacy Strategy
Permanence as a product: building, marketing, and governing endowment, plus the blended gifts that fund it.