Capital campaigns are complicated undertakings, often lasting several years and built to raise more money than your organization has ever raised in a single initiative. When pulled off, their results are transformative—expanding your nonprofit’s capacity to pursue its mission, serve constituents, and grow sustainably for years to come.
As high-stakes projects, it’s no wonder that most nonprofits (from local charities to regional hospitals to major higher education institutions) turn to third-party experts for help during one or several parts of their campaigns.
Let’s take a closer look at exactly why and how a consultant can support your organization’s capital campaign. Here’s what we’ll cover:
- Understanding capital campaign consulting services
- 5 key benefits of hiring a campaign consultant
- Getting started: How to hire a campaign consultant
Remember, capital campaigns require significant investments of time, money, and labor. They involve securing buy-in from many stakeholders. Contracting an expert to help chart your course can be a way to safeguard those investments and maximize your chances of success.
Understanding Capital Campaign Consulting Services
First, let’s review the typical services that fundraising consultants provide for capital campaigns. These can include:
- Campaign direction and strategic planning
- Case for support development
- Ongoing campaign counsel
- Campaign feasibility studies
- Solicitation and leadership training
- Post-campaign audits and analyses
Beyond these broad categories, consultants may play various other roles in a capital campaign as needed. For instance, they may conduct prospect research, optimize your data management processes before the campaign’s launch, help you secure corporate sponsors, or solve ad hoc challenges as they arise. Consultants may also play short- or long-term roles in the campaign depending on your needs and the specific reasons why you’ve contracted them.
For these reasons, it’s essential to understand and articulate your needs before researching potential consulting partners.
Consultants typically provide multiple or custom campaign services, but you’ll need to know where to start to work with them and determine your nonprofit’s ideal support solutions.
5 Key Benefits of Hiring a Campaign Consultant
So, you’ve thought about how a consultant can support your capital campaign. But what exactly are the benefits of bringing in an outside player to help? These professionals offer:
1. Expert guidance and support
Simply put, professional fundraising consultants bring real-world knowledge of best practices from their training and past campaign experiences.
Since most organizations only conduct capital campaigns about once a decade, chances are high that very few (if any) of your staff members have ever been involved in one before. A consultant’s expertise can ensure you’re building your campaign strategy on solid ground, and their ongoing guidance can keep everything on the right track over time.
2. Specialized fundraising expertise
If your nonprofit operates in a particular sector, you should also seek the help of a consultant with more specific expertise in that sector, such as higher education or healthcare fundraising.
For example, Graham-Pelton’s private school fundraising guide discusses the unique fundraising challenges these institutions face; working with a consultant who understands common issues faced by schools like information silos, overreliance on tuition revenue, and scarcity mindsets would ensure you’re on the same page from the start and boost the helpfulness and relevance of the consultant’s recommendations. The same holds true for other nonprofit sectors like hospitals, universities, museums, and more.
Additionally, many consultants offer more than just capital campaign services. When you engage with a consulting firm, you can discuss their other areas of expertise and how they may play a role in your campaign and big-picture plans.
For instance, as you gear up for your campaign, you may find that your overall donor qualification process needs an overhaul or that your development team needs additional training. A partner with broader expertise can help fill multiple gaps at once.
3. Outside perspectives
The external perspective of a fundraising consultant gives you a 360-degree view of your campaign plans.
Remember that capital campaigns are significant undertakings. Whether everyone on your team is fired up for your big-picture goals or you’re struggling to convince skeptical board members, how individuals view the feasibility of your plans can easily be skewed.
An outside perspective gives you confidence in your trajectory or the course corrections that may be needed.
Consultants traditionally conduct capital campaign feasibility studies (also called planning studies) for this very reason. During a study, your consultant will collect stakeholders’ feedback on your preliminary campaign plans and goals. Their feedback and the consultant’s expertise are then distilled into a set of recommendations for the campaign’s direction. The consultant’s objective position helps to ensure that feedback is truthful and as helpful as possible, which might not always be possible if you conduct the study yourself.
4. Increased buy-in
As mentioned above, it’s fairly common to encounter resistance from skeptical board members, leaders, or senior staff. After all, these campaigns are significant investments with inherent risks.
An experienced consultant can give you the support you need to secure full buy-in from organizational leadership. With a consultant’s help, you can conduct a feasibility or planning study, refine your plans to maximize the chances of success, and lay out a clear case for why now’s the right time for this particular campaign.
5. Learning opportunities
Capital campaigns are full of learning opportunities for your staff, giving them firsthand experience learning how to:
- Conduct prospect research
- Manage a prospect pipeline and qualification process
- Build relationships and solicit major gifts
- Follow up and maintain relationships with key donors
- Plan new types of events for the campaign
- Manage complex projects with multiple stakeholders
- Secure and manage corporate partnerships
With an expert guide’s help, you can trust that your team will leave the campaign with experience backed up by industry best practices.
This is one often overlooked long-term benefit of capital campaigns. When team members come away from a campaign with lessons and experience in hand, your organization is well-equipped not only to make its strategic objectives a reality but also to fully capitalize on that growth in the coming years. Ask your potential consultants about how they document and demonstrate their best practices—you’ll want to refer back to them in the future!
Getting Started: How to Hire a Campaign Consultant
In the early stages of your capital campaign, ideally as early as possible, determine why and when you want a consultant’s support.
For most organizations, a consultant’s involvement will begin during the feasibility or planning study.
It’s common for a consultant to conduct these exercises with the nonprofit’s input and collaboration and then for the consultant to stay on to help translate the study’s findings into actionable next steps.
But remember that professional services can fit in anywhere in your campaign timeline as needed, from broad fundraising strategy support to niche services for donor segmentation and data technology, and on different short-term or campaign-long timeframes.
Once you determine your needs (or begin to—you can always extend contracts or hire additional help later), you should take these additional steps:
- Secure internal buy-in. Discuss the need for professional support with campaign leadership and your board to ensure everyone’s on the same page about your goals for a partnership and how it will work. Determine a budget for this expense.
- Form a team. A hiring committee will handle the tasks of researching and comparing candidates. Make sure that the board and campaign leadership are represented in this team.
- Research providers. Online resources, industry databases, peer referrals, and more can help you get started. Prioritize consultants who specialize in your sector and dig into their services, portfolios, and reviews from past clients.
- Create a shortlist and determine next steps. Working with your team, narrow down your list of potential consultants to a handful of top options. Reach out to your candidates to inquire about their process for requesting a proposal, which might involve submitting a formal RFP or otherwise providing background information about your nonprofit and campaign plans.
- Review responses and discuss options. After completing any RFP processes and receiving proposals, meet with your team to review them. Identify your shared top choices, perhaps with a scoring system to remove some inherent subjectivity from the decision.
- Choose your consultant and formalize the partnership. Determine your top pick, reach back out to confirm your choice, and then work with the consultant to formalize the partnership and work out contract details.
Using these steps, you can identify an ideal partner for your capital campaign and emerge ready to get to work together.
Look for partners with proven experience, ideally working with organizations similar to yours. Define your preliminary needs, start a conversation, and request a proposal. In no time, you’ll be working with your next fundraising partner and executing a transformative campaign that takes your mission to the next level.
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Guest Author: Laura McGarry, Managing Principal, Graham-Pelton
Proven leader in education fundraising with experience at Princeton, Lehigh, Moravian Academy, and The Pingry School. Expert in relationship building, communication, and leadership gift fundraising, driving alumni engagement and securing major gifts.