In this article:
Why integration from the start produces stronger campaigns—and what institutions miss when it doesn’t happen
I’ve spent 15 years inside institutional advancement—leading communications strategy at Tulane University through a billion-dollar campaign. I’ve sat in prospect review meetings, met with donors one-on-one, and written proposals that moved major donors to yes. And I’ve seen the same gap open up on campaigns of every size: strategy and communications operating on separate tracks, each doing excellent work, neither producing the result the institution needed.
I saw the payoff of early integration firsthand with a recent healthcare client. Foster Avenue and Marts&Lundy were engaged together from the very beginning—our team leading campaign communications while Marts&Lundy led counsel. When the institution came back to us urgently needing a $50 million gift proposal, we didn’t need weeks to get up to speed. We had the research, the narrative, and the donor intelligence already in hand. We turned the proposal around in days.
The fix isn’t complicated. Campaign counsel and campaign communications are both essential—and they work best when they’re integrated from the beginning, not handed off sequentially.
What’s the difference between campaign counsel and campaign communications?
Campaign counsel covers the analytical and strategic foundation: feasibility studies, gift table development, donor strategy, prospect management, and organizational readiness. These are the consultants who help an institution answer whether a campaign is viable, how much it can raise, and in what sequence.
Campaign communications is the work that gives a campaign its voice: naming, case for support, donor proposals, digital experiences, and the materials that fundraisers carry into meetings. It requires writers who understand philanthropic motivation, designers who know how to structure a gift proposal, and strategists who can translate institutional priorities into language that resonates with the person writing the check.
The consultant who builds a rigorous gift table is not necessarily the person who can write the two paragraphs that move a donor to fund the lead gift. And the writer who crafts those paragraphs needs the strategic grounding that only comes from deep campaign planning. Without it, you get proposals that lead with the wrong priority, or a case for support that doesn’t reflect what donors actually said in feasibility interviews.
Why does a team approach produce stronger campaigns?
The strongest campaigns run on a team approach—one where counsel and communications are working together from the start, not handing work back and forth across a gap. When both disciplines are in the room, the work is better. Donor analysis informs the case for support. The campaign’s core argument gets pressure-tested before anyone opens a design program. The materials that reach donors reflect the actual strategic thinking, not a translated version of it.
Integration doesn’t require a complicated structure. It requires a shared foundation—the same conversations, the same understanding of what each prospect needs to hear, and a workflow where strategy and creative execution develop together rather than sequentially.
When should communications enter a campaign?
From the very beginning. Communications should be at the table before the feasibility study—writing the prospectus, listening to stakeholder interviews, and helping shape the campaign’s core argument as it forms. By the time a gift table is built and a campaign chair is recruited, dozens of decisions have already been made that affect how the campaign will be communicated. The communications team should be part of making those decisions, not inheriting them.
During feasibility and planning: Listen to stakeholder interviews, identify the language leaders use to describe the institution’s value, begin framing the campaign rationale.
During the leadership gifts phase: Develop naming, brand platform, messaging architecture, and leadership-level proposals.
During the public phase: Scale those materials across channels—website, print, video, digital donor experiences.
What should institutions look for in a communications partner?
Three things matter more than a strong portfolio.
Fundraising fluency. Your communications partner needs to understand how campaigns actually work: gift tables, prospect pipelines, the difference between leadership and public phase messaging. A general-market creative agency will produce beautiful materials that miss the strategic mark—a proposal that leads with the institution’s priorities instead of the donor’s, or a case statement built around internal talking points rather than what the feasibility study actually surfaced.
A message-first approach. Materials should flow from strategy. Before anyone opens a design program, the strategic rationale should be clear: why this campaign, why now, why this institution is the right vehicle for a donor’s investment.
Capacity building. The best communications partners invest in your team, not just your materials. After working through a message platform and fluency training, a development officer should be able to walk into a donor meeting without a script—articulating the campaign’s case in their own words, responding to a donor’s specific interests without losing the thread, and knowing which priorities to lead with for that particular conversation. That capability doesn’t come from a beautiful prospectus. It comes from internalizing a strategic argument well enough to make it your own.
The institutions that run the strongest campaigns aren’t choosing between great counsel and great communications. They’re working with partners who’ve already integrated both—the way Foster Avenue and Marts&Lundy have for more than a decade.
