Campaigns With Appeal

Fund-raising drives win donors and volunteers with new tactics

The robust economy has brought record gifts to many capital campaigns — and that success has prompted a growing number of charities to run increasingly ambitious fund-raising drives.

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But the ferocious competition that has resulted has caused problems for many groups, especially small ones. Many of them face difficulties winning large gifts and recruiting volunteers to solicit gifts and otherwise get involved in big campaigns.

Some non-profit groups experience such a dearth of volunteers that they must use their own staff members to solicit the largest gifts to their campaigns. Some even pay professional fund raisers to do so.

William Krueger, president of Capital Quest, a Tucson, Ariz., fund-raising consulting firm, says many of the groups he works with have “given up asking for volunteer chairmen.” He adds: “It’s not worth getting turned down.”

Problems in recruiting campaign leaders, difficulty in getting enough gifts to kick off a campaign, and other challenges are leading many charities to experiment with technology and other new approaches to making campaigns more attractive to donors and volunteers. Their efforts include:

Test campaigns. To offset the difficulty of recruiting volunteers who help open doors and solicit large gifts during fund-raising drives, some charities are finding it advantageous to run a “pilot” or “model” campaign before embarking on a full-scale drive.

Such pilot drives show fund raisers how long it takes to raise initial gifts to the campaign, as well as other useful information that can significantly improve fund-raising results.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore chose 12 parishes of varying sizes from among its 162 parishes to hold pilot campaigns last year. The results prompted the archdiocese to proceed with a full campaign; to date, it has raised pledges and gifts worth $126-million, far exceeding an $80-million goal.

Pilot drives were a key ingredient in the campaign’s success, says Tom Sonni, executive director of development. “After the pilots, we saw weaknesses,” he says. “The level of response in terms of recruiting volunteers was really low, so we ended up putting a lot more emphasis on that.”

The archdiocese, he notes, started a project called “Spread the Word,” in which fund raisers used inserts in mailings to donors and other methods to stress that volunteers were needed to make introductions and to talk about their own experiences with the church, not just to ask people for money.

In addition to revealing how many people will serve as volunteers, test campaigns uncover other critical information, says Robert Kissane, a fund-raising consultant at Community Counseling Service Company, in New York, who worked on the pilot drives for the archdiocese. “You learn how long the campaign takes, what percentage of your constituents give, and what gift levels are palatable to donors. You also see the logistical problems, like if your system for processing pledges is inadequate.”

Computerized presentations for donors. Some charities are discarding lavishly designed campaign proposals, brochures, and videos in favor of electronic presentations that fund raisers share in meetings with potential donors, using a laptop computer.

The presentations, most of which feature moving illustrations and sound, can be significantly cheaper to produce than printed materials or videotapes, which have become common in capital campaigns.

In Atlanta, Oglethorpe University spent about $7,000 on a laptop-computer presentation for its $35-million campaign, which is scheduled to end next year. Officials say that if they had decided to use printed campaign materials, they would have spent at least $20,000.

Lowering campaign costs isn’t the only benefit of such presentations. They can be tailored to individual donors by adding photographs, the donor’s name, and other features. In addition, they are easily updated as the capital campaign progresses.

Charts showing how much money has been raised to date, or a list of available sites in a building that could be named for a donor, can be made current with a keystroke or two. And the presentations can be formatted to allow viewers to choose from among different options, such as getting more information about a particular campaign goal or a list of gifts to a specific project.

“Unlike a brochure, it is interactive and it leads you into different discussions and helps get someone engaged,” says Robert J. Buccino, Oglethorpe’s vice-president for advancement, who, accompanied by campaign volunteers, has used the laptop presentation in dozens of campaign solicitations. “I’ve been in fund raising for 18 years, and it’s the best icebreaker I have seen,” he adds.

Laptop presentations also help motivate trustees and other volunteer fund raisers in a campaign. “With a brochure or video, volunteers a lot of times just drop it in the mail to a prospect, because they don’t want to ask for money in person,” says Del Martin, vice-president of Alexander Haas Martin & Partners, an Atlanta fund-raising consulting firm that helped create the Oglethorpe presentation. She adds: “This forces them to go in person.”

Telephoning campaign donors. The United States Equestrian Team, which started a drive to raise $25-million three years ago, is hiring a telemarketing company to call some 800 donors and ask each of them to give $10,000 or more. The Gladstone, N.J., organization says it was forced to use that approach, which is not often used for gifts so large, because the group lacked sufficient volunteers and staff members to make in-person visits to donors.

Potential donors will receive a letter telling them to expect a call from someone who will set up a specific time to telephone again to discuss a large contribution to the campaign.

“This isn’t the optimum way of running the campaign, but it’s better than not asking at all,” says Kim Rippard, assistant director of development for the equestrian group.

The same strategy of asking for big gifts by telephone, she notes, worked well during a previous drive by the charity to raise money to help send equestrians to the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996. The group hired a telemarketing company to call its most-generous donors and ask each of them to give $1,000 or more. That raised $350,000, and donors made gifts of up to $75,000 in response to the calls.

Campaign sites on the Internet. Charities are coming up with new ways to use World-Wide Web sites to publicize their capital campaigns, recognize volunteers, and communicate with donors. Carnegie Mellon University’s Web site, for example, is linked to a camera so that Internet visitors can see the construction site of the university’s new Purnell Center for the Arts. Updated every five minutes during the workweek, the image provides donors with visible proof of how contributions to the university’s current $36.5-million capital drive are being spent (http://www.cmu.edu/purnell/index.html).

Goucher College’s campaign Web page contains links to the e-mail addresses of 22 of the institution’s fund raisers (http://www.goucher.edu/campaign). One reason the links were posted was to make it easy for volunteers, who were working on the college’s effort to raise $40-million, to use electronic mail to send in reports on their visits to potential donors.

Mark Jones, vice-president for advancement, says the electronic reports came in much faster and more regularly than they did when volunteers were asked to submit paper forms. The quickened pace of the reporting seemed to help the campaign, which reached its goal in June, a year ahead of schedule.

Joint capital campaigns. Because the number of capital campaigns has intensified in recent years, individual donors, foundations, and corporations are growing frustrated by the number of requests for gifts they receive. To counter such problems, charities in some cities are holding a single capital campaign to benefit two or more groups.

In Columbus, Ga., for example, nine arts groups completed an $87-million campaign in March. The impetus: a grant from the Bradley-Turner Foundation, a local family fund, where officials say they wanted to avoid “dueling campaigns.” The gift, a $25-million challenge grant, matched contributions made to the joint drive dollar for dollar.

In Kansas City, Mo., the local Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City and the Genesis School, an alternative school for troubled kids, teamed up to raise $8.5-million for a new building in a capital campaign that is scheduled to end in December. The new building, which will house both charities, also contains additional space that other social-service agencies will be encouraged to rent.

A key reason for the campaign’s success, according to officials from both groups, is a previous, complementary relationship: Genesis had rented space from the Boys & Girls Clubs for more than a decade, and the two charities work with many of the same kids.

The logistics of such campaigns and the legal issues involved, however, can be daunting, officials have learned.

Even with their previous relationship, it took Genesis and the Boys & Girls Clubs two years to hammer out the fine points, such as how much money each group was responsible for raising and how they would end their joint-ownership arrangement in case either group ever needed to take that step.

“Joint campaigns give you more resources and minimize competition for funds, but they greatly complicate the administration of the campaign,” says Lisa Gessen, vice-president of resource development at the Boys & Girls Clubs, who served as the campaign director for both charities.

“You have two boards and everything must be approved by both,” Ms. Gessen says. “And when you get to the construction phase, every little change must be approved by two sets of people. If these two organizations had not previously worked together, it would have been very difficult.”

Sometimes even very similar charities cannot make a joint capital campaign work, notes Robert F. Hartsook, a fund raiser who runs a Kansas City, Mo., consulting firm that bears his name. Mr. Hartsook says that he recently advised two homeless shelters to abandon the idea of having a joint campaign.

“One worked with homeless mentally ill clients, and the other helped families and other temporarily homeless people get back on their feet,” he says. “The first group had a fundamentally different approach; most of their clients need more intensive help. Both groups were faith-based, but the religions were different.”

Adds Mr. Hartsook: “There has to be some reason beyond the need for money to collaborate on a campaign. Philosophically you have to have the same focus.”

On-line acknowledgments. At Baruch College, in New York, which is in the beginning stages of a capital campaign, fund raisers have been asking donors to endow data bases and other computerized tools in the college’s library, such as laptop computers that are lent to students. In return, the college incorporates the donor’s name into the new electronic resources, typically by designing an opening screen that bears his or her name.

For example, when one alumnus gave $100,000 earlier this year to endow a new data base that helps students track business and financial news, the college designed an opening screen to tell users that the data base was made possible through a fund set up in the donor’s name. The “electronic bookplate,” as fund raisers call it, also provides some facts about the donor’s financial-management company. Another opening screen was designed for loaner laptops to acknowledge a gift from two members of the class of 1967.

A similar approach is being used at the University of Pennsylvania Library, which is now in the midst of a campaign to raise $27.5-million by May 2000. A New York bank that made a large gift to expand the university’s business library wanted its company’s name on a “screen saver” used on 40 new computer terminals in the business section. When the computers are not in use, the screens are lit up with a message that the new resources are made possible by a gift from the bank. Its executives hope the screen saver will inspire students to seek jobs at the bank, once they graduate.

Campaign gifts from other charities. The Good Shepherd Food-Bank, in Lewiston, Me., took an unusual step before asking for the largest donations in its capital campaign to raise $2-million by July 1999. The food bank first asked more than 300 soup kitchens and other non-profit groups that rely on it for supplies to make a cash contribution to the campaign.

That strategy, food-bank officials say, has helped them subsequently persuade companies and foundations to give more than they normally would to the campaign, which will pay for a new warehouse to expand Good Shepherd’s storage capabilities.

Fund raisers asked each of the charities that rely on the food bank to write a short letter of endorsement, spelling out how the food it receives from Good Shepherd enables it to help needy people. In addition, they asked each group to give between $25 and $5,000 to the food bank’s campaign.

Altogether, the charities have given about $75,000 to the drive. “I have been absolutely amazed at the level of their giving,” says JoAnn Pike, executive director of the food bank. “I thought they’d give in the $150 range, but most have given $500, $2,500, and $5,000.”

Those initial gifts have impressed local executives and foundation leaders, says Ms. Pike. For example, she says, she called on a local bank executive in southern Maine, who was quick to say that his company only gives locally. But after Ms. Pike showed him other charities’ endorsements, along with detailed figures on how many pounds of food were distributed to several other parts of the state, the banker changed his mind.

“This particular banker got very excited when he saw the effect of our work on all the communities,” says Ms. Pike. “He proposed that the campaign be taken on as a statewide project by a group he belongs to, the Maine Association of Community Banks.”

Now, she says, bankers who belong to that association are introducing the charity to other donors, such as a brokerage firm that will give at least $15,000 to the campaign.

“Before this,” says Ms. Pike, “it had been extremely difficult for us to get statewide support. We were based in Lewiston, and it was hard for donors to see that we are statewide. Now, because other charities have endorsed us, they know. And I’m finding donors I never knew of before, thanks to the campaign.”