When Should Our Capital Campaign Go Public?

This question comes up a lot. Why is everyone in a rush “to go public?”

People assume that when you go public a lot of donors will respond and make your fundraising life easy. Unfortunately, that’s not usually what happens.

Pareto’s rule — the 80 / 20 rule, is a century old, economic principal that 80% of economic activity will come from 20% of the marketplace. This is true for commercial enterprises (80% of Hewlett Packard’s profits come from ink cartridges) to capital campaigns (80% of the gifts come from 20% of the donors).

Many capital campaigns are finding that major gift donors are providing more than 80% of money — the 90 / 10 rule or 95 / 5 rule is more accurate.

Therefore it isn’t important to inform the 80% of small donors (the public) until you have reached all of your major gift donors (the key 20%). You want to talk to major gift prospects personally, rather than having them read about your campaign in the newspaper and having them send in a couple of thousand dollars rather than the $100,000 you might have gotten through a face to face gift request.

You want to stay in the quiet phase of your capital campaign for as long as possible to make sure you are cultivating the best prospects in your donor file. And, as you approach the 80% mark and prepare to go public you have a final opportunity to refine your overall campaign goal. For many campaigns, you will confirm the goal. For some, the struggle to 80% has been so hard, that modifying the goal or the timeline makes sense. For a lucky few, the 80% has come and gone with many major prospects still in the pipeline — consider raising the goal.

I had one capital campaign that was 108% of goal when we went public. We ended up raising $10 million on a $4.5 million initial objective. As we went public though, we had to restate our needs to declare the $4.5 million represented just the beginning of the organization’s real needs.

So don’t go public too soon. When you do go public, you need all of your major gift officers in place to respond to people who do become interested by the public announcement.

You must be successful. Don’t go public too early or you may lose momentum as the quick gifts of going public take you from 50% or 60% of goal to 70% (but not 100%).

We have found that going public puts prospective donors on guard. They are less apt to come to cultivation events as they now sense that these events are campaign asking events not informational sessions.


Tom Wilson
Author, Winning Gifts

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