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A unique theme and name is the first step in getting donor attention. You need to distinguish your campaign from your annual appeal as well as other competing campaigns, and inspire donors to support your organization.

The theme is the overarching messaging idea drives all of your capital campaign outreach materials, from brochures to presentations. And it informs the name of your capital campaign.

That’s a lot to ask of a few brief words, but it can be done.

Key Aspects of a Well-Crafted Theme

Most capital campaigns have multiple benefits for an organization — new programs, the ability to serve more people in existing programs, better location, or other advantages of having a new building. Your theme must convey the overarching idea that conveys the overall impact your campaign will have. You want to pique interest so people dig deeper to find out more.

In developing a theme, you want to take into consideration:

• The mission and vision of your organization.
• The aspects of the campaign that are most likely to inspire donors to take action.
• The ways to differentiate this “ask” from others that donors receive.
• The appropriate tone for this particular campaign.

Looking Beyond the Obvious

In identifying your campaign theme, it can help to step back and take a look at your organization with a new perspective. What originally inspired your board and donors to get involved with your organization? What’s changed with this campaign? What’s key idea connects your organization and your campaign?

An outside agency like Red Rooster Group can bring the advantage of viewing your organization with fresh eyes and seeing the distinctive characteristics that are so much a part of the fabric of your organization that you don’t notice them.

Finding the Core of the Corps

A good example is the U.S. Navy Seabees — the construction corps that builds the infrastructure for the Navy and Marines. A major capital campaign was launched to build exhibits in the Seabee Museum, in conjunction with the 75th anniversary of the corps’ founding.

The obvious themes were patriotism, honoring those who served, and preserving history. But those themes are evident in most military fundraising campaigns. We needed to distinguish this campaign from others. So, we focused on what the Seabees did (and still do) for the Navy and Marines — solve tough problems in creative ways.

After researching their accomplishments, we noted that Seabees were remarkably ingenious — and the idea of ingenuity became the driving theme of the campaign. Once we had identified this theme, we explored ways to convey that theme in a name:

Creative Construction: The Seabee story continues.

Creative thinkers support Seabees.

Building magic: Can Do! Done!

75 Years of Building Under Pressure

Building Wonders for 75 Years

In the end, we tied that problem-solving distinction to the anniversary with the campaign name of 75 Years of Ingenuity at Work. The campaign website invites donors to discover the Seabee’s ingenuity, and the importance of telling these stories to others through the museum.

Focusing on Results

When the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue was raising money for a new building, we looked at what made this congregation special. An amalgam of people from all walks of life coming together as friends to share life’s joyous moments of birth, marriage, and holidays suggested that this congregation was all about community.

Building on the theme of community, we emphasized how the expanded space would allow more opportunities for members to engage with each other, and that would lead to deeper relationships. From this concept, we developed the campaign name: Growing Together: Getting Closer with More Space.

Playing on Words

Georgetown Heritage wanted to raise money to restore the deteriorating locks of the historic C&O Canal, ignite interest in the canal’s history through educational programs, and develop the recreational and economic opportunities of this central waterway. This latent canal represented a lot of potential — the key theme for this campaign.

To create an invitation to support the canal’s revitalization, the campaign name, Unlock the Potential: Creating the Georgetown Canal Experience plays on the work “lock” (the canal has 74 locks, in fact, over 184 miles), and is reinforced by the gatefold design of the brochure mimicking the locks themselves.

Getting a Running Start

For all of these campaigns, the theme reflects the purpose of the campaign succinctly and distinctively. A meaningful benefit is communicated. And the tone and personality of the organization is appropriate.  

All capital campaigns — even ones that seem very similar — will have differences that can be highlighted to your advantage. Find those distinctions, and exploit them to their full potential so that your donors can understand your message and be motivated to support your campaign.

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After you’ve done the footwork of a feasibility study, and you know that you have a base of donors who are likely to support your campaign, you may be thinking of asking your donors what they think of your Case for Support.

If you do, it’s important to do it the right way so that you don’t isolate donors or diminish the impact of your Case for Support by trying to appeal to everyone. Your purpose in soliciting input is get feedback that you can use to guide your Case for Support, not to please all donors by taking all their suggestions.

We propose two main ways of eliciting donors’ feedback: testing framing concepts, or getting feedback on your Case for Support.

Testing Framing Concepts

The first method can be useful early in the campaign to get clarity on how to package your overall campaign. Many campaigns have multiple aspects that will appeal to donors. Campaign messages can be framed in different ways. Testing framing concepts allows you to find the message that will best appeal to the widest range of donors.

Think about a social service agency raising money for a new building. It can frame its story as expanding access for the population it serves or emphasize the expansion of a job training program in the new building that will have a “hand up, not a hand out” message or focus on how the new state-of-the-art facility will allow them to attract more qualified staff and improve the level of service to their clients.

Which message will best resonate with donors? Donor reactions to each of these messages help determine the priority or even presence of the message in the Case for Support. Which of these most strongly aligns with donors’ values and will lead to a long, strong relationship between your donor and your organization?

Develop one-pagers on each approach, with compelling headlines and key points. This gives your donors something tangible to comment on. Present the options to donors in one-on-one meetings so you can ask questions about what appeals to them and why.

After you have the feedback, review it to determine if there are any patterns. Remember, if you are only talking to a handful of donors, you need to be cautious about how you interpret and use the findings. The results may not represent the views of all donors and should be taken as anecdotal. However, you will get useful information, particularly if one of approach clearly resonates with donors much more than the others. You may also get ideas for ways to make the message more robust.

Getting Feedback on Your Case for Support

The more typical way to solicit donor feedback is to present donors with a draft of your Case Statement and ask for their feedback. Which parts resonate the most with them? Which parts may be unclear? What do they think of the tone, the length, the flow? Are there specific phrases or language that resonates with them? Why? What do they know about the organization or the capital campaign that they think should be included? And, of course, how like they would be to support your campaign based on this Case for Support.

Incorporating Feedback

Since you are asking for feedback, you’ll get a lot of it. But remember to be judicious — use the feedback to guide adjustments in your Case for Support, not to make it a hodgepodge of messages. You want to be succinct, gripping, and distinctive.

Your Case for Support must represent your organization and your campaign accurately. And, as a fundraising document, it must resonate with most — but not all — donors. Again, you won’t be able to please everyone. Thank them for their insight — they’ll appreciate being asked and that in itself will help prime them for your campaign ask.

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Solicit Input

Let’s start with the basics — asking for input. You do want to get insights from a variety of stakeholders. Doing so not only enriches the final product, but also makes people feel good — their opinion matters, and that good feeling eases acceptance of the final product. But be sure that when people are asked for their opinions, they also understand that not every idea can be incorporated into the final product.

Soliciting input gets even more complicated when you start asking for feedback on specific concepts and colors. When you ask for people’s opinions, you open the door to derailing the project. What will you do when one person prefers black and the other prefers blue? That’s where the approval plan comes in.

Lay Out an Approval Plan

To develop an effective decision-making plan, consider:

• Who will be asked for input? You may want to include some staff, board, and donors, but you also want to make sure that doing so will not result in someone feeling left out.
• Who will make the final decision? Usually, this is the board or a subcommittee of the board.
• Who will make day-to-day decisions? Often, this is the head of the capital campaign committee made up of key staff and board members, or an executive director, development director, or a designated staff person.
• In what ways and how often will information be communicated between the day-to-day decision-maker and those making the final decision?
• How will you resolve differences of opinion?

One key to a successful process is frequent check-ins with decision makers. Present overall concepts, approaches, and directions early and often. If you don’t, you may find that the final product can’t get approved and you have to start over. It’s easier to make revisions early in the process. In short, make sure your ladder is leaning on the right wall before you climb it.

Manage the Process

While you may not want to make full presentations to the board at every decision point, at least report on the progress and the decisions made. This ensures that you don’t get too far along before someone says, “Wait! We can’t do that.”

At the beginning of the project, establish the criteria that will be used to evaluate concepts and materials. A Creative Brief laying these out makes sure that some degree of objectivity is maintained when making a decision. It also ensures that everyone is on the same page about the goals of the project and the process that will be used to achieve them.

Decide in advance who will arbitrate a difference of opinion. Who will make that choice between blue and black? And beware of working too hard for consensus. As Lincoln said, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Explain why choices were made, listen to dissenting opinions, then make a decision. Otherwise, you’ll end with a project that is black and blue and bruised all over.

Most important, remember that it is not the opinion of your board or staff that matters. It is the opinion of donor that matters most. The final decision should always be guided by what will resonate with them.

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