By Jennifer Furla, Executive Vice President
Kansas City

At our campaign workshops, we’re often asked: “How do you pick a campaign chairman?” “What do you look for and what makes a good campaign chair?”

The pat answer is: Someone with influence, affluence and interest. Someone with the capacity to make his or her own gift at a leadership level (or bring resources to the table to be counted as a leadership gift) and who has the credibility to spur others to give at significant levels within the campaign.

Your campaign chair should provide leadership, direction and should motivate his or her colleagues to stretch both in their own giving and in their comfort level with asking for other pacesetting gifts.

Campaign chairs are often identified in the Community Readiness Assessment ^SM, or fundraising feasibility study. In an ideal campaign plan, they are recruited first and allowed to “build” their own campaign organization. Sometimes, they “bubble up” from within the Steering Committee as excitement builds and the campaign begins to gain momentum.

However they’re recruited, there are some “intangible” characteristics that we have come to see in campaign chairs that spell sure success for your campaign.

At a recent steering committee meeting for a comprehensive cancer center for a regional hospital, the campaign chair started out the meeting much like he had done several times before: With a personal perspective on why the campaign is important and to help the volunteers understand what they were giving their time for.

The “case” for the cancer center was to bring existing services all under one roof and to add radiation therapy to the mix so that residents of the region would no longer have to make the 90-mile round trip for daily treatment for weeks at a time.

“I want to tell you a story about Nancy,” he began.

“Nancy was diagnosed with multiple cancerous tumors and had to undergo aggressive treatment that included both chemotherapy and radiation. Now, we all have heard how traveling for weeks of radiation can place a burden on the patient and their family. Nancy had to undergo 150 such treatments.”

“ ‘The amount of treatment I went through was unbelievable for just about anyone,’ Nancy said. ‘If we had had the cancer center here in town, I could have remained at my job, taking treatments during my lunch hour and returning to work.’ “

The room was filled to the brim with nearly three dozen caring, committed community leaders who are usually talkative and jovial. No one made a sound for several seconds.

I whispered to the chair that he’d missed his calling and should have gone to seminary, but, in all seriousness, I marveled at the depth of his message and how profound the impact was of his simple story.

What made his simple act more incredible was that this was not the first time he had moved the group to utter silence.

On each occasion that the steering committee had met, he had – without coaching and on his own volition – come to the meeting with a similar tale, a highlight of an important aspect of the campaign told in very personal terms, or a call to action for his colleagues.

This same campaign chair contacts the key staff for the campaign almost daily, asking about campaign progress and offering to help make calls to his colleagues to offer them encouragement and move them along in their calls.

He made an early personal commitment to the campaign, and will ask his employer – a major national concern – to make a significant commitment to the campaign. He served on the campaign planning committee and is juggling his responsibility to this campaign with a myriad of other community commitments. He was identified multiple times in the Community Readiness Assessment ^SM as being a strong candidate to chair the campaign, but with the cautionary note that he was “probably too busy” to accept the job.

Did he have the affluence, influence and interest to serve? Most certainly. But it is that extra unique quality of taking the time to add a personal perspective – a dimension to the campaign that he, alone, brought from his deep personal commitment to seeing the campaign succeed and to research and fully learn the complexities of the case and why it is important to give – that will bring this campaign for a comprehensive cancer center to successfully reach its goal.