From the Campaign Plan to Every Donor
Building a sound campaign plan is half the work. Making sure that plan reaches every donor is the other half. Most firms help with one or the other. We do both.
Counsel and Communications, Together
Your campaign speaks with one voice, from the first planning session to the last gift.
The team that sets the vision with your president also writes the case, trains your gift officers in its message and helps you reach donors at every level of the gift pyramid. Every donor hears the priorities your board approves. Nothing is lost in a handoff between firms, because there isn’t one.
Lessons From 125+ Campaigns
The standard campaign model was designed for a different era. The math has changed. The model hasn’t kept up.
Campaigns almost always hit goal. Yet most institutions finish a campaign no stronger than when they started it. The consultants leave. The messaging goes stale. Staff members leave, and the institutional memory leaves with them. The goal got met, but the advancement operation is back to square one.
This happens because the standard model treats campaign planning and campaign communications as separate jobs done by separate firms at separate times.
A consultant writes the plan. An agency makes it pretty. The institution hands out the brochures and hopes. That model was built for an era when donor bases were broad and campaigns were modest. Neither is true anymore. Your campaign will likely be won or lost on a few hundred conversations with your most sophisticated donors. If the people in those conversations can’t make the case with precision and conviction, no amount of planning will save the moment.
How We Plan a Campaign
Most campaign planning starts with how much and how fast. We start with why a donor should care.
We plan the campaign and shape its message in the same rooms, with the same people, from the first meeting. You can bring us in at any step. Here is the full sequence when we serve as your campaign counsel.
Visioning sessions
We sit down with your president, cabinet, deans and medical directors. Starting from your strategic plan, we ask what the world needs your institution to become, and what stands in the way today. You leave with a shared picture of the future, described in terms a donor would want to fund.
Campaign rationale
We interview your leaders and key supporters to answer three questions: Why now? Why here? Why this? Then we lead your senior team to one answer they all stand behind.
Campaign pillars
We help you name three to five things the campaign will make true. Not accounting buckets for donors to fill, but outcomes a donor can picture: what will be different when the campaign is done.
Funding priorities
Unit by unit, we help each school, center and program set priorities that trace back to a pillar. Each one has to pass four tests: ambitious, ownable, achievable and fundable. Then we guide each priority to approval.
Preliminary case for support
We articulate your vision and plan the way a donor will read them: why your institution can succeed and why it must. The preliminary case is built to be tested, not printed.
Feasibility study
We take the preliminary case to your top prospects in confidential interviews and study your donor base. You learn what goal your donors will support, and the case gets sharper with what they tell us.
Campaign plan and leadership gift strategy
We set the goal, the timeline, the phases and the volunteer structure. Then we plan how to win the leadership gifts the quiet phase depends on.
From Plan to Practice
The plan is built and tested. Now it has to work in every conversation.
A plan pays off only when people put it to use. Next comes putting it in motion: preparing everyone who will make the case and helping you reach donors at every level of the gift pyramid.
Campaign Fluency
Your gift officers will sit across from thousands of donors during your campaign. Will they be ready?
Materials don’t close gifts. People do. A 40-page case statement persuades when someone the donor trusts walks them through it.
Campaign Fluency is the difference between a fundraiser who reads from a talking-point card and one who knows the campaign’s logic by heart. The second can walk a skeptical alumnus through the case, then pivot when the alumnus says financial aid is the only thing that matters, without reaching for the brochure.
We build that capability through workshops, coaching and training resources designed around your campaign. The training goes deeper than talking points because it comes from the team that built the campaign rationale. Your people learn the thinking behind the case, so they can adapt it to any conversation without losing the thread.
What We Build
Onsite Fluency Workshops
In-person sessions that build your team’s ability to make the campaign case in any donor conversation, in their own voice.
Online Training and Resources
Online modules that train your full advancement team, campaign volunteers and the institutional leaders who will be asked to make the case.
Fluency Tools and Frameworks
Reference materials that reinforce the training over time and stay with your institution when staff move on.
Personalized Donor Engagement
A thousand donors who care about different things. One case that needs to speak to each of them.
A donor who built a career in pediatric medicine needs to hear the hospital campaign differently than a real estate developer who grew up in the neighborhood. The rationale is the same. The version of it that moves each person to act is not.
Most campaigns leave this to the gift officer in the room: adapt the pitch, read the prospect, improvise. That works when you have twenty leadership donors and your best people on every visit. It falls apart when you need to reach five hundred or a thousand prospects with a version of the case that connects to their specific interests. At that scale, you need a system, not just talent.
Through Ovrture, our sister company, we build personalized digital experiences that connect your campaign’s priorities to each prospect’s particular passions and giving history. The donor who cares about scholarships sees a case built around student access. The one who cares about research sees the same campaign through the lens of discovery. Both are true. Both come from the same strategic source. Both feel like they were written for one person. See how DePaul adapted its unit cases for one-to-one donor outreach.
What We Build
Personalized Donor Microsites
Built with Ovrture: a digital case for each prospect that connects campaign priorities to that person’s interests and giving history.
Unit and Priority Cases
Versions of the case for each school, unit or priority, all written from one campaign rationale.
Major Gift Proposals
Proposals written for each leadership prospect, built from the campaign’s case and the prospect’s own interests.
What Changes
Fewer handoffs. Sharper conversations. A team that doesn’t need the brochure to make the case.
Sharper conversations
Gift officers will own the room. Deans will make the case from conviction instead of a briefing document. Every prospect will see a campaign built with them in mind.
Messaging that outlasts turnover
Staff turnover will no longer reset your messaging to zero. The next hire will step into a system that belongs to your institution, not to a departing consultant.
A faster next campaign
When this campaign ends, your team will still know the case and your donor relationships will still be in place. Your next campaign will start there, not at square one.
Fewer handoffs
One team will do the work, from the president’s office to the donor’s inbox. You will spend less time and budget coordinating separate firms.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers about how we plan campaigns and prepare the people who make the case.
What does campaign counsel do?
Campaign counsel plans the campaign with you: what it will fund, how much it can raise and how it will win its leadership gifts.
When Foster Avenue serves as your counsel, that work runs in seven steps: visioning sessions, the campaign rationale, campaign pillars, funding priorities, a preliminary case for support, a feasibility study and a campaign plan with a leadership gift strategy.
Can we hire Foster Avenue for one part of a campaign?
Yes. You can bring us in at any step, from visioning sessions to the campaign plan, or for Campaign Fluency and donor materials alone. We work alongside the team and consultants you already have.
Can a firm your size run our whole campaign?
Yes. Everyone on the Foster Avenue team works full time for the firm, and senior people lead every engagement. The senior strategists who write your case also lead your feasibility interviews, so what your donors tell us goes straight into the case and the plan.
When a project needs more hands, we add affiliate strategists and writers who work with us regularly. Prospect research is led by Charlie Melichar, our principal, with Kathy Howrigan of KHow Consulting, one of our strategic partners. Practicing since 1982, our team brings the experience of more than 125 campaigns. Today we support 10 to 20 campaigns at once, each at its own stage, from planning to launch to the years after.
What is a campaign feasibility study?
A feasibility study tests your campaign before you announce it. We take the preliminary case for support to your top prospects in confidential interviews and study your donor base. You learn what goal your donors will support, and the case gets sharper with what they tell us.
What is a preliminary case for support?
The preliminary case is the first written version of your campaign’s argument: why your institution can succeed and why it must, told the way a donor will read it. We write it to test in feasibility interviews, then sharpen it with what your donors tell us.
What is Campaign Fluency?
Campaign Fluency is your team’s ability to make the campaign’s case in any donor conversation, in their own words, without reading from a script. We build it through onsite workshops, online training and reference tools designed around your campaign.
The training comes from the team that wrote your campaign rationale, so your people learn the thinking behind the case and can adapt it on the spot.
How do you personalize a campaign case for each donor?
We write unit and priority cases and major gift proposals from one campaign rationale, so every version makes the same argument.
Through Ovrture, our sister company, we also build a digital case for each prospect that connects your campaign’s priorities to that person’s interests and giving history.
Work That Earns the Gift
Campaign materials that connect an institution’s plans to what its donors care about.
