YOUR CRITERIA FOR SUCCESS
The Six Things You MUST Have in Place
to Succeed In a Major Gifts Campaign

Whether you are planning to launch a capital campaign or another major gifts effort, there are certain essential conditions that you and your organization must meet for you to be successful. At Jeffrey Byrne & Associates, Inc., we call these your Criteria for Success. In the last issue of “News You Can Use,” we introduced the first criterion. In future issues, we plan to highlight more about how you can use these six simple rules to measure your readiness to launch a major giving campaign. For a complete list of the six Criteria for Success, visit our website at : www.jeffreybyrneandassociates.com.

Criterion Number 3 -
Involvement by the Constituency Leaders

You know the old adage. The best volunteers are always the busiest. It’s no secret why. Why wouldn’t any (read: every) group want to count among its volunteer force the top volunteers in the community who ….

Are you kidding?
We’ve all heard of – and some of us have been fortunate to be a part of – the winner campaigns that have all the right ingredients: Virtually all community leaders are engaged in some way; Recruitment goes easily with few, if any, volunteer prospects declining to serve on the campaign; Early gifts coming in at meaningful levels. Campaigns and campaign organizations like these lay the foundation for success through every phase of the campaign. Early “wins” motivate everyone in the campaign organization to make “stretch” gifts and to leverage their contacts to make gifts to the campaign, as well.

But, you say, “I don’t have all those leaders involved with my group.” That situation is far more common than you think and is a far cry from a death sentence for your campaign. Every organization is armed with two key resources you can use to build an effective campaign organization:

Recruiting Top Community Leaders
Recruiting the best volunteers from the outside can be done, but it requires patience, careful planning and must be discreet. Volunteers at this level are being approached by dozens of groups and must feel a connectedness to the organization and your cause, must see they will be supported by a professional campaign office that has developed the right foundation to support a campaign, and must feel that they need and desire for them to be involved is authentic. These volunteers must be cultivated, and that takes time. It is time worth investing NOW, even prior to beginning the campaign planning process.

Plumbing Your Own Resources.
How well have you cultivated your own leadership? Do you know their families, their friends and neighbors, their work and business connections? More importantly, how willing are they to bring those contacts to the table in support of your organization? Before you start a campaign is the time to start laying the foundation to motivate these internal volunteers to leverage their own resources for the project. This new influx of support is one way that campaigns help build capacity for your organization long after the campaign is concluded.

So, how do you do that? One effective tool is to pledge to hold individual “get to know you (better)” meetings with all your volunteers. In his popular book, Swim with the Sharks, Harvey Mackay developed a list of 66 items he felt all his salespeople should know about a prospect before asking for a sale. They ranged from home addresses and phone numbers, to favorite foods, stores and vacations places, to the names, birthdates and schools of all a prospect’s children. Learning this information is part of a more intimate relationship and doesn’t come from giving a volunteer a quick wave and a smile at a board meeting.

Develop or find a good volunteer profile and ask your volunteers to fill it out. Use volunteer prospect sheets to find out who are the top prospects a volunteer is willing to introduce to your organization and contact on your behalf. At under $20, Harvey Mackay’s book is probably a worthwhile investment just to get the Mackay 66.

And remember, this series is titled the “Criteria for Success”. You don’t wait for your campaign to get started to start getting these things in place. Do it now. Time you invest before starting a campaign will pay off during the campaign.

Training.
So you’ve taken the time to get to know the volunteer and find out who are the best resources he or she can bring to the campaign. For many, lack of coming forward with these opportunities in the past is not a lack of resources, but a lack of recognition that the volunteer has them, that they are worthwhile and beneficial, and the confidence to approach them. That’s where proper coaching can help. A well-oriented volunteer, who feels equipped with a good command of what you are doing and why is much more likely to want to “talk up” your group and your project among his/her peers than one who lacks confidence in his/her ability to articulate their involvement with your group. What are you doing NOW to find out what volunteers need and want in the way of information about your group? Are you keeping them informed, involved and excited about your prospective project? What more can you do to help them feel comfortable and confident in making solicitations in preparation for a campaign?

Soliciting Peer-to-Peer
Now, a word about solicitations. One of the most effective ways to ask for a gift is for a team of two volunteers to approach a prospect and ask for a commitment to match their own. “Joe and Jane, we have made a gift of X to the project and hope that you will consider a gift of the same amount to join us.” This means that early recruitment of those with capacity and willingness to participate is critical. It also underscores the importance of gaining meaningful, “stretch” gifts during the Inner Family campaign phase. You cannot expect a $100,000 prospect to respond to a request for that amount from a volunteer who has made a commitment of $5,000.

So start today to evaluate your internal resources, understand your volunteers’ capacity and what they can bring to your project and determine who you need from the outside to help in the campaign process. Lay your roadmap of how you will cultivate and recruit those individuals and you will help lay part of the foundation for success in your campaign project.

To learn more about campaign planning for success, call Jeffrey Byrne & Associates, inc., at 1-800-222-9233 or visit our website at jeffreybyrneandassociates.com