If you want to run a capital campaign that inspires your team to share with passion and your donors to give without restraint, you have to understand what makes both of those groups tick. It’s also crucial to understand what your beneficiaries are hoping to see you do with the money from this campaign, as well as what your board of directors’ goals are.
To develop that understanding, you have to — you guessed it — talk to each of those groups. You want your investment to be as worthwhile and impactful as it can be. You also need to move quickly. To avoid making mistakes, lean into discovery.
Discovery is often the underdog of the branding process. But like any true underdog, it’s important not to underestimate it.
What is Discovery and Why Does it Matter?
Whatever specific number you’ve landed on, it’s safe to say that your goal in running a capital campaign is to raise serious money. And the best way to convince potential donors to give? Learn what motivates them.
To design a truly effective capital campaign, you need to understand the people you’re designing it for. That’s precisely what the discovery phase is all about. And when it comes to capital campaign stakeholders, you’ve got to consider more than just donors. You also have to create messaging that resonates with the development officers making the ask. And, naturally, you’ll want to include your beneficiaries in this conversation to avoid a savior complex – how can you help change their world? Your donors, too, will get more excited if they understand the impact their funds will make on your campaign’s beneficiaries.
Discovery is how you’ll build this vital understanding. Discovery drives your capital campaign’s messaging, which drives your visual strategy, which drives your tactics, and so on. One might say Discovery is the concrete to the foundation. Don’t build your campaign’s brand foundation on sand.
In its simplest terms, think of discovery as the process of asking your most valued supporters (your stakeholders) what would make them support your campaign efforts.
Imagine a Venn Diagram where each of the concentric circles represents a different stakeholder or stakeholder group. Where each of the stakeholders overlap on their opinions is the essence of your campaign messaging and brand.
Consult the Right Groups
There is no one-size-fits-all approach when asking the right questions or correctly setting up stakeholder interviews. When building a capital campaign brand, one of the first questions you have to ask yourself is who you are building this campaign brand for. Who are your most important and/or influential stakeholders?
The answer to that question will vary depending on your unique situation. However, it’s likely to include:
- Donors
- Board members
- Leadership team
- Development officers
- Beneficiaries
- Community members
Your discovery process isn’t complete until you’ve spoken with people from each of those influential groups.
Ask the Right Discovery Questions to Guide Brand Building
Actionable intel is a key part of doing discovery as you prepare the brand for your capital campaign. To obtain the information you need, you’ll need to determine the right kinds of questions to ask and the best way to set up your stakeholder interviews.
Often, your fundraising consultant will have conversations with leadership, board members, and donors as they work on their feasibility study. Because of that, it may seem like an overlap to have multiple conversations with those groups.
But these conversations function differently. Your fundraising firm is asking questions to better understand what donors can give (donors’ giving capacity), while your brand partner is going to ask a more general audience what would motivate them to get involved. It’s a tiny nuance that makes a massive difference. Just because some can give, doesn’t mean they’re motivated to. Discovery’s purpose is to suss out their motivations.
The most valuable way to get a nuanced view of your audiences’ motivations will always be one-on-one interviews. These interviews will provide an unobstructed view of each stakeholder’s motivations and priorities, uncolored by the group-think that is possible in focus groups. But because the appropriate groups to interview — and, by extension, the necessary questions to ask — will differ from organization to organization and from campaign to campaign, there is no prescription for what will result in the most useful information.
Let’s say you’re planning a capital campaign to fund a city’s new performing arts center. Because the project is for a city, it must have the support of the city. In this case, your organization will need a lot of qualitative data to ascertain, with reasonable certainty, what percentage of the center’s beneficiaries agree or disagree on a variety of points. This could include everything from values and messaging to color selections. This could also help you avoid an epic misstep. To that end, you may utilize focus groups or surveys to get the critical quantitative information you need.
If, on the other hand, you’re raising funds for a hospital expansion, the stakeholders you’ll need input from will be very different. So will the way you collect feedback. And the number of people you interview will be different, too. Remember: What works in one scenario won’t be appropriate in another.
You’ve Collected Discovery Data. What’s Next?
By the time you’re done talking to your various campaign stakeholders, you’ll have gathered quite a bit of data. You may think you need to start by organizing that data, but it’s more useful to begin analyzing the responses right away
After a half-dozen interviews with each group, you should start recognizing patterns. What themes are you seeing across responses? What are respondents consistently engaged with or concerned about? The patterns and insights you glean can spell the difference between a campaign that soars and one that sinks.
Once you’ve organized your information and identified a few themes, it’s time to start thinking about crafting your campaign’s messaging strategy.
You want your investment to be as worthwhile and as impactful as it can be. You also want to (and often need to) move fast. Don’t make that costly mistake. You have to get input from your major stakeholders and give them a chance to weigh in if you expect them to carry the torch with you. By investing in a solid discovery process, you can lay a solid foundation for your campaign brand — and maximize your impact in the process.
If you want to run a capital campaign that inspires your team to share with passion and your donors to give without restraint, you have to understand what makes both of those groups tick. It’s also crucial to understand what your beneficiaries are hoping to see you do with the money from this campaign, as well as what your board of directors’ goals are.
To develop that understanding, you have to — you guessed it — talk to each of those groups. You want your investment to be as worthwhile and impactful as it can be. You also need to move quickly. To avoid making mistakes, lean into discovery.
Discovery is often the underdog of the branding process. But like any true underdog, it’s important not to underestimate it.