Episode 173: Campaign Case Statement Development: The Critical Work Before the Feasibility Study

Before the copy writing, before selecting pictures, before the layout edits, the most important work starts.

Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community and here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

It's a pleasure to have you join me on this edition of Around with Randall. I spent the last week at a conference specifically dedicated to capital campaigns and was taking notes as I was going to different presentation was also felt incredibly mumbled to be asked to speak two times during the conference.

What I took away was a number of different things and they're probably more nuanced than they are epiphanies of grandeur but it's those nuances that make the difference sometimes in success.

Today I want to talk about case statement development and some things that I heard that I think I knew but I don't probably articulate as much as I should when I do the kind of campaign work that I normally am engaged with and that's feasibility studies and campaign council.

In this case more of the feasibility stage and actually in many ways the pre feasible. Case statements are a core of really honing a lot of different perspectives into one if done correctly, centralized theme of what we're trying to accomplish in a campaign.

One thing we should start with is this concept of campaigns in general. The idea of a capital campaign is really kind of artificial from the world's perspective. The reason that we use capital campaigns most of the time is we don't in philanthropy fundraising have a clear picture about where we need to go or as clear as we want and what it's going to take to get there. Sometimes campaigns become an impetus for strategic planning.

I ease with somebody says we need to have a campaign. Well, I'm hoping someone didn't say great let's just pick something out of the air and go ahead and do it. That campaigns bring together finance and marketing and strategic planning and the boards of vision and hopefully ACO's leadership to pull those things together so that we have a centralized clearly articulated and agreed upon direction of where we're going to go. We need to do to make that happen out of that should come the case statement and the old school. It's minimally acceptable level of a case statement was always based on kind of and I did a quick Google search to kind of confirm this and I see some publications where they say a case statement should include your mission, your vision, your value statements and answer the who, what, where, and why of your fundraising efforts. Yes, I suppose that might work but I think it misses the important point and that really is twofold based on twofold.

Number one, with so many fewer donors in the United States that as I've talked about you probably seen and heard we have this decreasing number of households making a gift to any nonprofit and that's causing an issue. So when you have less than half the homes in the United States making a gift you need to hone your message a lot more than just the basics of here's our value statement because there's less people that are interested in making any gift, let alone a gift to you. The second thing is that what I said a moment ago about should clearly answer the who, what, where, and why and it's about your mission statement, vision statement, and value statement is premised on something that I'm talking more and more against. I think in philanthropy we're talking a lot at people and not with people.

Pay statement development so we'll get into the process here in a few moments is not meant to be let us tell you what we need and why you need to support it because that's talking at philanthropists at donors and if we want to elevate the conversations that we're having we need to be talking with our donors getting their interest perspective figure out their passion and that's really hard to do if all we ever do is talk at them. I need X can you give me money? Could there be anything more transactional than that conversation? I'm not sure there actually is. If I'm someone with resources and you talk at me and I like you or I like the organization or I even have a history of giving I'm going to give you five or ten thousand dollars. If you want a million dollars you got to get to where I'm at in terms of passion and the way to do that is to ask people what their passion is.

Now if you ask someone just bluntly what's their passion you're going to get a lot of odd responses. I mean because my passion is my family and you know how I help people. Pay statement development not just the case statement is a way to engage donors perspective donors possibly to figure out passion where do they fit? What are they like? What moves them? What else are they given to? It's not a static isolated siloed process and I think what I see most often is the case statements are developed as a way of increasing the siloed nature that I was referring to.

The second huge part of a case statement is about uniqueness at least to me. Why is it that you are uniquely qualified to solve whatever problem that we're going to discuss? Give you a couple of examples. Have a client working in a campaign council situation after doing the feasibility study. We did the feasibility study and we did the case statement development which we'll talk about again process in a moment. What we found out was fairly quickly that the people in the community and this is more of a rule based community didn't understand the uniqueness of the way in which this organization can solve the particular problem. And in fact, maybe the only ones that can solve this problem.

While it was generically in the case statement, what we found out was by putting in a map and it's a geographically more rural area so distance in this particular case with the kinds of services provided is really important. What we realized is by putting in a map and talking about how far people would have to go to receive the service and that time is life and death. All of a sudden we began to have a different conversation.

So if are there other organizations that do some of this work turned out when we were able to appropriately compare and contrast? No. No matter what the other organizations say, there was ways of documenting that they don't. Uniqueness is important. If you are in a smaller community, you have the ability to be more unique. But if you're in a larger community, that doesn't mean you can't find uniqueness. I have another client that I'm working with for doing a feasibility study. They've been in business almost 200 years of doing this specific service. Well, what have they learned from this? Do they have the kind of longevity relationships in the community that give them better opportunity? Yeah. We got to say that. Heck yeah.

Do they have the professionals because of their legacy and their processes that they work through and known outcomes that are differential from other places? Yeah. I've got to mention those. If you're trying to solve A and you're using campaign format to do so, there's five other places that are doing the same thing. You can't distinguish yourself, particularly in the case team and it begs the question, what's really the campaign about? And most importantly, why would people believe in you? So we got to stop talking at people and talk with them. We'll get into that feedback loop here in a moment. And number two is the uniqueness of why you are well positioned to solve the problem. And most of the time, if the problem is pretty well known, you don't have to articulate what's going to happen if you don't solve it.

So what are the processes that we want to work through? So my goal when I do the development of a case statement with a client is I'm looking for intentional incompleteness, which sometimes surprises people.

If we really want to talk with people instead of not at them, I want to take them a framework. This is before feasibility study interviews. We are in the planning stages of getting people to give feedback about what we're thinking about. And I mentioned this is where you can begin to figure out what people's passions are.

So in the conversations about a case statement and then in maybe some rough drafts, you want to keep this unfulfilled in terms of totality, completeness. Because the questions I would love to ask as a relationship builder and fundraiser is we have this idea that we need to be doing X. We put some things down on paper. Could you tell us what you think about this as a rough draft? I'm not even here to ask you for money. Just tell us.

And you might think, wasn't that what the feasibility study interviews are for? No. Feasibility study interviews are built to get a more completed case statement done and ask would they give or would they think this would be of interest? That's a wholly different question than with the stage set, brief feasibility study and just beginning to get entry into interest.

And by the way, if we do this correctly and we kind of walk through this loose document of ideas and what it might mean and it's in on word and there's not a lot of pictures yet. And what we end up with is getting conversations about what people think, what they believe, what they want.

What I always say, if you ask somebody for money, you're going to get advice. But if you ask them for advice, eventually you'll probably get money. And this is where this advice piece is probably most important.

So in this kind of loose document, it's certainly about what is the uniqueness of our organization, the uniqueness of the problem that come together about impact and outcomes. And let me spend just a moment on this one. You're not defining how many people are going to be affected, the value, monetary value to the community in doing this beyond just the emotion.

And I'll take either food insecurity or housing insecurity as an example. Well, we don't want anyone sleeping on the streets. I agree with that. We're looking to build 50 mini homes or small homes, whatever the terminology is. We're doing this, we're doing this, we're hearing more and more about it in Omaha, where we can have transitional living, meaning people who are out of home and then we're going to work to get them into some kind of housing. So this is this intermediate place. How many families or people are going to be affected by this? Well, that's a different conversation than just in terms of outcome of what we just want to be sleeping on the streets. Well, I don't want to be sleeping on the streets. But you're here to ask me for money. What are you going to do with it? What's the outcome? So we talk about outcome. It's about numbers. And you've got to find a way to articulate that. And then the effect on the community as a whole. It certainly identifies kind of a bigger problem and need this connection between the two as we've mentioned.

And it's really for this first level of external review that we want to have this conversation. One of the things that I think is missing, which most people don't think about is that we need to train our major gift officers to follow what the intent of the documents. It's not meant to ask people for money and it's not meant for the gift officers that they're in talk about the project from their perspective. Because then we're talking at people. We have to train our gift officers if we're going to do this process, which is what I heard most often at the conference and something I've thought about for years. It was more clearly articulated by some of the case studies that they talked about with larger, huge campaigns, but it's true of any level.

So you have to go out with this kind of general concept and say, how much you think? You have gift officers that are trained not to say too much more and be able to get the feedback. And from that feedback, begin to delineate with community leaders, high level individuals in your organization. Certainly with your large donors, board members and others, what kind of passion do they have in this particular project or specifically inside the project? What is that passion? This feedback loop, as mentioned should be board members, should be past donors of significant, maybe even best prospects, transformational investors. And I use that term purposely. It may come through philanthropic means, but they're investing in you to make the community a better place.

This is also a great opportunity to connect this idea of prospect research tools and capabilities to figure out who else should we be trying to build new relationships with. Are there people in the community you've wanted to go to but haven't found the right ability with the right pace or the right conversation? And so this is an opportunity to go to them as a leader and say, we're not here to even ask you. We don't want to ask you. What we want to do is get your feedback because you're important to what the overall city, town, county, whatever is trying to accomplish. And we play a vital role in that and we want your opinion on what we're trying to accomplish. This incomplete case statement is meant to be from kind of a draft form asking for their input. What do they find of value? How is it engaging? And again, it gets back to that matching the gift officers who are going to be doing some of this legwork, training them just to what's saying what's doing, what we don't need.

So those are some thoughts as you develop a case statement that's even the free feasibility study. In the tap, maybe a couple of other tactical pieces in the case statement, you want to test titles. They've heard an interesting presentation on they have three titles for their campaign potentially and they thought it was going to be a it turned out to be C. And when they asked the question, why this one over that one? So think about a piece of paper with maybe a kind of a very rough draft case statement. They put all three titles on there or it gave three examples and said, you know, what is it? About A, they thought what came across as depressing. I had never thought about it, but when you kind of think about it, which we're going to get to in a moment about how you write, it's important. And it almost out of the three, almost 70% wanted to seek and they could clearly articulate because this was inspiring aspirational and growth, not negative. So test the title. Test the pictures, match your need in the campaign with the kind of pictures you want. Hurt a presentation about a campaign for mental health for children. And they had all these pictures of all these smiling kids. And as they went through this process, they got feedback saying,

This doesn't match up. You're talking about people kids. It's hard even to think about let alone deal with. Think about committing suicide and you got a picture of a happy kid here. They never thought about it. They thought that would be uplifting. It turned out to be a disconnect. You have to find pictures that match what you're trying to do. A lot of times that's, and by the way, pictures are positive because they're, you know, tell pictures of thousands of words, old damage. They got a match to trying to accomplish.

So when you talk about these things, talk about the overall title of a potential campaign, talk about the pictures, talk about the graphics. Do they make sense? Length is key here. You're in an academic institution and doing a $4 billion campaign. You can do a 32 page case statement because there's lots of sections of university. Most of the case statements should be aiming should be two to two pages front, one page front back. So two pages or even 11 by 17 folded so four pages. That's usually a better way of looking at it. That's a graphics, lots of pictures, infographics, easy to read, easy to understand.

This was the other thing that was said that I thought was incredibly interesting. I've talked about it, but I hadn't heard it said in this way. You want to write the case statement in the voice of the donor, not the voice of the marketing department. Now I've always talked about it a little bit differently, but I thought the way they said it, one of the speakers was pretty powerful. Most often we get outside writers to help us with this. A lot of times it may be if you're a large enough organization or you hire a company, it's a marketing company. Their job is to market the organization about how it connects the community to bring people in to tell a story. I'm not against those things. We need those things. But a case statement is about a specific problem and is opening up some vulnerability. We have a problem. We think we can solve it. We need resources to do so. Here's how we're going to measure it. Marketing doesn't write like that. And so there was this story of this case statement development in the marketing department in this large organization, pushing into the conversations and they had to take it outside and say, you're writing for this. That's not what we want. We want to be vulnerable and show we don't know all the answers so we can get some feedback. So, right from the voice of a donor, not from the voice of the marketing department.

Remember that final, air quotes, final, a statement isn't done until you go public. Even in during the feasibility study interviews, there can be adjustments. This podcast, this conversation, all of these things we're talking about are done even before you hire a consultant. You can do this without a consultant. Now, you want one? Okay. But your gift officers, your internal fundraisers, relationship builders can go do most of this if you can just get open word document and come to some agreement in terms of how this fits in the strategic planning.

So, you're partnering with finance and planning. You're partnering with the executive team, the board, to take out a loose document that says, look, let's kind of private. We want your insights. It's your raft and start building from there. I love writing. For book last year, a couple of dissertations. I mean, I'm a writer by nature of two blogs a week. But at the end of the day, most of the best stuff comes from inside the organization. Consultants come on and, you know, clean up some rough edges every once in a while. But we don't know the organization. And I'm all for having consultants involved with the writing process, but it's at the end. We're talking about today is case statement development from the beginning. That's done internally. It's loose. It's informal. It has details. It's not meant to be a pretty picture. You can go out and test a lot of things and figure out where your donors are at.

Use it as a qualification process. In addition to case statement development, if you do this in the right way, that's developing more transformational relationships and getting your organization to where your donors are. And isn't that the goal of what we're trying to do? And that's really what case statement development is. And more importantly, what campaigns are really all about. So do some things before you get that consultant at feasibility study. What you'll find is you have a much stronger conversation with the people who might be interested in supporting what you're trying to accomplish. Don't forget, check out the blogs twice a week, healthlantepry.com. If you'd like to communicate with me, it's podcasted at howletflantepry.com.

The world's an interesting place. A lot of moving pieces, probably just as true in the 1970s as is in the 2020s. What I would tell you is that the world that we live in needs philanthropy needs nonprofits to help those who are on the margins who are struggling, who have issues and challenges, both individuals for the most part, but also organizations that serve the greater community. That's why what you do is so important. Why we need you? Why we need you to be great. Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, and then there are those who wondered what happened. My all-time favorite saying, "We're all people in philanthropy if we're doing our jobs correctly, you want to make things happen. Take care of those, to help those, to give a hand up to those people and those organizations who are wondering what happened." I can't think of a better way to spend a career. I hope you feel that way. I hope you remember the value you bring in the relationships you build, the conversations you have, whether you're a volunteer and executive or a gift officer. If you're an infrastructure or in finance, you are part of a larger team that is having constant communications internally and externally about the value of what you do. That is a great way to go to work every day. I hope you feel the same and know how important it is. I'll look forward to seeing you next time right back here on the next edition of Around With Randall.

Don't forget, make it a great day.