Capital Campaign Consulting

Do You Always Need a Consultant?

Of course not.

However, unless you've personally been through 5 to 10 capital campaigns doing a campaign without guidance is like building your house without ever having built any kind of structure before.

I remember when my kids were little. They wanted a tree house. We have huge pine trees so I decided just to build a fort-like stand alone structure for them in the midst of our trees. I'd seen some in magazines so I just wrote the plans on the back of an envelope. We got the tree house, but it ended up being 16 feet high, wasn't square, had gaps in the floor, it took 3 days and 10 trips to the lumber yard to build, and it was so wobbly I had to rope it to a tree for stability. The kids had a blast with it.

Would my next one be better? You bet. Would the first one have better beteer with good plans and a guide to teach me how to do some basic carpentry; someone to tell me what mistakes to avoid? Absolutely.

When I had my own regional consulting firm I hired a great guy out of a local private higher education institution. He had 35 years of fundraising and campaign experience throughout his career. He wanted to retire, but keep his hand in the fundraising game. I taught him how to do philanthropic market research studies (feasibility studies). After a couple of studies he said:

• "I never used a consultant in my career. In hindsight this was a big mistake. Sure we were successful, but I can see now we could have raised a lot more money with some outside perspective."

Check out the Giving Institute for a list of great consulting fims around the country and the world. Invest in your program. Build a partership with a consultant to challenge your thinking, the ideas of your organization's staff, and to provide outside training to your board.

Image courtesy of weburbanist.com -- not my treehouse

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