Campaign Strategy: Feasibility to Celebration

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.