Creating a Capital Campaign Plan: Complete Guide & Template
Launching a capital campaign is an exciting but complex undertaking for any nonprofit. That’s why you need a thorough, strategic capital campaign plan to guide you through each part of the process.
In this guide, we’ll outline everything you need to know and do during the planning phase of your capital campaign to start your organization off on the right foot. Specifically, we’ll cover:
Extensive planning is essential for safeguarding your resources, maximizing your chances of meeting your goals, and making an excellent impression on your key stakeholders. Use this guide and the included template to ensure you’ve covered all of your bases.
A Review of Capital Campaign Basics
As you begin planning your own nonprofit’s capital campaign, it’s helpful to review some capital campaign basics. In this section, we’ll cover what a capital campaign is, a typical capital campaign timeline, and the key players you’ll need on your team. To create a thorough and useful capital campaign plan, you’ll need to know these basics like the back of your hand so that you can ensure you’re checking all of the boxes.
What is a capital campaign?
Put simply, a capital campaign is a strategic fundraising effort that aims to raise a large amount of money over a set period of time, usually multiple years. Most capital campaigns are geared toward funding some type of growth-related project, such as:
Building a new facility
Purchasing expensive equipment
Scaling up your organization’s programming and staff
Building an endowment fund
Whatever the specific objectives of your campaign, the ultimate purpose is to raise the funds needed to increase your nonprofit’s capacity (your ability to raise money and serve constituents). This influx of capital in order to make capital investments essentially allows you to scale up your operations.
Thus, capital campaigns can (and should!) take a lot of time, attention, and strategy to plan, because they’re such big investments of your nonprofit’s finite resources. You have to do your due diligence with effective planning before committing to such a major undertaking.
Traditional Phases of a Capital Campaign
Divvying up the hundreds of tasks a capital campaign requires into specific phases can help you stay organized and on track to meet your goal. Traditionally, capital campaigns include four distinct phases:
The Planning Phase: Spend a few months determining your campaign goals, assessing your resources, and creating your campaign plan with the help of a fundraising consultant. This phase may involve conducting a feasibility study and/or collecting initial commitments from major donors.
The Quiet Phase: During the quiet phase (usually several months to years), your organization solicits major gifts, securing 50-70% of the total funding your campaign hopes to raise. We also recommend using this time to engage your broader community and build new supporter relationships that will last beyond the duration of your campaign.
The Campaign Kick-Off: “Kick off” or announce your campaign to the public and start soliciting general support for your finalized campaign goal. Usually, nonprofits plan an event to get their supporters excited about their project, like a groundbreaking ceremony or a gala.
The Public Phase: During the public phase, you’ll want to raise donations of all sizes to help you cross the finish line and meet your campaign goal.
In addition to these phases, capital campaigns require a few follow-up tasks after they’re over, like thanking your donors, collecting pledged donations, reporting on the final results of your campaign, and recognizing your team’s hard work.
Note that this traditional structure is only one way to approach capital campaign planning. At Donorly, for instance, we help nonprofits accelerate their capital campaigns by layering the work of multiple phases into one year. By planning, meeting with major donors, and building up the community at the same time, you can reach your fundraising goals faster.
Capital Campaign Key Players
Run-of-the-mill fundraising projects might fare well with just a few members of your team working on them and taking on multiple responsibilities. But a capital campaign will require full engagement from your staff members, volunteers, and board members, and everyone will be taking on distinct roles. Here are the typical key players you’ll need in order to make a capital campaign successful:
Campaign Chair: Your campaign chair will be the leader of your capital campaign and will be responsible for overseeing campaign committees and championing the campaign in your community.
Board Members: Your board members will need to approve all the major decisions related to your capital campaign, but they will also be instrumental in helping you secure major gifts. They are likely to give a large gift themselves.
Committee Members: You’ll typically need a planning and steering committee for a capital campaign. The planning committee will determine the capital campaign goals, strategy, and timeline. (In other words, your planning committee will benefit greatly from this article!) Your steering committee will step in during the main phases of the campaign to ensure that you’re staying on track with every task that needs to be completed.
Volunteers: Your volunteers will play a vital role in helping you secure donations, especially during the public phase as you’re soliciting many small to medium-sized donations, running events, and more. Give yourself ample time to recruit your volunteers and train them in what they’ll be responsible for.
Fundraising Consultant: Most nonprofits find it helpful to have an expert guide them through the capital campaign process. A fundraising consultant can step in and help you with everything from planning to community engagement to stewarding major donors after they give. We’ll take a closer look at a fundraising consultant’s role in the process later in this article.
With a full team that is ready to take on each of the responsibilities listed above, your capital campaign will have a great chance of succeeding. As you recruit people for various roles, make sure they are committed to your goals, making them aware of the time commitments you’re asking for, placing them in positions where they can use their strengths, and encouraging them to be enthusiastic about the exciting journey that lies ahead.
This quick review of capital campaign basics should set you up to take on the capital campaign planning process and be as thorough as possible in defining your goals, timeline, and key players. Use this section as a touchpoint to refer back to as you dive into the template below.
The Benefits of a Thorough Capital Campaign Plan
A capital campaign plan is a written out document that covers all of the essential information, tasks, and big-picture plans that will guide you through the course of your capital campaign. Your plan should be as detailed as possible so that it can serve as a roadmap for your team to reference, helping you to focus on your ultimate goals.
You can create your capital campaign plan any way you like—whether it be with a template or a color-coded binder with dozens of different sections. Assemble your plan in a way that makes sense for you and your team. You should also ensure it’s accessible to every member of your team at all times.
Creating a thorough capital campaign plan will take some time and effort, but it’s essential for success. In addition to setting your campaign up for success and safeguarding all your hard work, diligent planning now will lead to additional benefits down the line, including:
Increased confidence. Knowing exactly where you are and what you need to do next will help you complete tasks efficiently and free up your headspace to focus on items that matter most.
Greater ability to navigate changes. If your campaign gets derailed in some way, you can turn to your capital campaign plan to learn how to get back on course. For example, if a prospect’s gift is smaller than expected, you can use the fundraising planning documents to promptly identify how and where that money can be made up.
Improved team efficiency. Everyone on your team—from board members to volunteers—will appreciate a detailed plan. A plan enables you to share clear and accurate information, provide thorough training for various duties, and quickly delegate critical tasks.
Though it may take a little more time and effort, a capital campaign plan that includes as much detail as possible is essential for demonstrating that your nonprofit has a clear vision for its project and is ready for everyone to jump in and help make it happen.
8 Essential Elements of a Capital Campaign Plan
In this section, we’ll cover the eight elements of capital campaign planning that you’ll encounter in the capital campaign plan template below. We’ll go into each component in detail, highlighting how you can plan out that component of your own capital campaign plan as you fill out the Donorly template.
As you plan, remember to be thorough but flexible. Your capital campaign will evolve as you get deeper into the planning process, and even in the early stages of the campaign as you’re gathering feedback and donations from major donors. Be prepared to adjust your plan to make it the best it can be, but be as detailed as you can right now. Striking this balance will pay off in the end as you develop a clear picture of everything you’ll need to do to make your campaign a success.
1. Campaign Objective and Goals
The capital campaign journey begins when your nonprofit sees a need for a specific capital investment that would further your mission and promote future growth. That need translates into your campaign objective, the capacity-building purpose of the campaign. For example, your organization may identify that you’ve outgrown your current facility and decide to build a new one.
Your campaign goals (the dollar amounts that the project will require) will be built around this objective. As you work out these goals, you’ll budget out the costs of the objective and sometimes add a bit of a buffer to help offset the costs of the campaign itself. Then, you’ll test your topline revenue goal by reviewing your prospect data and major giving program and assessing stakeholders’ support.
This means goal-setting is an elastic process for capital campaigns—you’ll determine an initial goal but then test and refine it as you enter the quiet phase.
Once you’ve created a topline revenue goal, you can set additional goals for strategic focus areas like your community-building and donor acquisition efforts. Use this template to organize each goal:
2. Assessment of Resources and Community Support
During a traditional capital campaign planning phase, your nonprofit would partner with a consultant to conduct a feasibility study that helps you assess your resources and the campaign’s viability.
A feasibility study looks at your current pool of major donors, funders, and other stakeholders and analyzes their support. This typically involves one-on-one conversations where you discuss your stakeholders’ thoughts on the campaign, your organization’s future, and the stakeholders’ interest in supporting the project.
In these conversations, you’ll also test out your initial case for support. A case for support (also known as a case statement) is a set of arguments and core messaging that explains:
Why your mission matters
The improvement or investment you want to make (the campaign objective)
The difference the objective will make for your mission
How much support you need to achieve your objective
Why donors should support your capital campaign
Your case for support isn’t set in stone—test it out during these stakeholder conversations and iterate on messaging based on how they respond. Think of it as a living document you’ll use now to gauge your stakeholders’ perceptions of your campaign and to help articulate your goals and vision for the public phase later.
As you discuss your plans with stakeholders, you should also evaluate their potential for giving using prospect research. Prospect research allows you to identify potential major donors for your campaign by assessing prospects’ capacity (wealth), affinity (warmth), and propensity (habit) markers. Compile your research findings in your capital campaign plan to get a jumpstart on donor cultivation and solicitation once your campaign is truly underway.
The Donorly Approach to Feasibility Studies
Many nonprofits see feasibility studies as a necessary, consultant-led process that involves months of anonymous interviews, resulting in a document that says either “Yes! You’re ready for a capital campaign!” or “No, you shouldn’t move forward.” The consultants at Donorly take a different approach.
We believe that feasibility studies should be transparent, communal efforts that enable you to strengthen relationships while you assess potential support for the campaign.
Rather than conducting anonymous interviews, we guide nonprofits through open one-on-one conversations with key stakeholders like past major donors, community leaders, and local philanthropists. We also view feasibility studies as less black-and-white. We’ll guide you in assessing the landscape, with a general understanding that the intent is to move forward with the campaign, and the knowledge that an assessment may lead to devising an extended timeline or narrowed scope to achieve your goals. We’ll use this time to help you build relationships, identify leadership donors, and glean firsthand insight into how you can improve your messaging.
3. Gift Pyramid
A gift pyramid, sometimes referred to as a gift range chart or a gift table, identifies how many major gifts of certain amounts you’ll need in order to reach your campaign goal. You should create your gift pyramid after you know your working campaign goal and have tested its feasibility. This will be important for guiding the rest of your campaign planning and the quiet phase of your campaign, where you’ll solicit the majority of donations needed for your overall revenue goal (typically 50-70%).
Once you know how much you’ll need in major gifts and whom you can solicit those major gifts from, you can create a gift pyramid to figure out how many gifts you’ll need from each tier and how many prospects you have that might be able to provide gifts at those levels. Here’s an example of a fully-outlined gift pyramid:
In this example gift pyramid, the total needed from major gifts is $2,400,000 (80% of the total needed, which is $3,000,000). The gift pyramid has set gift tiers and shows the number of gifts needed and the number of possible prospects for those gifts at each tier. For example, the gift pyramid shows that one gift of $350,000 is needed and that there are three prospects that could be asked to give that gift. Similarly, two gifts of $20,000 are needed, with 30 prospects available to solicit for those gifts.
Of course, your gift pyramid will look a little different based on a myriad of factors, from the project you’re taking on and the size of your budget to the strength of the relationships you have with your current donors, so be ready to determine the tiers and prospect numbers that make the most sense for your situation. In general, however, the largest gift in your pyramid should make up 10-20% of the total amount you’re planning to raise through major gifts.
This gift pyramid will be an invaluable resource for your major gift officers to use during the quiet phase as they initiate conversations with current donors and prospects, and can guide them in seeking those gifts in a strategic order. For example, it might make the most sense to spend the most time seeking the largest gift needed, since that large gift will give your campaign more security upfront.
Once you have your gift pyramid, you can also create a depth range chart. In a depth range chart, you start attaching prospect names to giving levels, allowing you to see where you have enough qualified prospects and where you need to do more development work. If you run out of prospects once you’re knee-deep in the quiet phase, a depth range chart will help you find where gifts can be made up. In addition, a gift pyramid can also be used to illustrate to your board the importance of their engagement and investment in the major gift solicitation process. Being able to visualize how much effort major gifts are going to require can help encourage them to be proactive in assisting your team with solicitations.
4. Timeline
A well-thought-out timeline lays out structured milestones that can help you eventually meet your campaign deadline and topline revenue goal. Remember, in this planning phase, you’ll want to think of this as a working timeline. Exact dates may shift around a bit, so remain flexible but don’t shy away from including as much detail as possible, either.
Here is a sample timeline for a traditional capital campaign:
Planning Phase (6-8 months): During this phase, you might conduct an assessment or feasibility study, set goals, begin major donor outreach and prospect research, and secure board buy-in. From there, you’ll engage in initial solicitations, recruit your team, and choose a fundraising consultant to work with.
Quiet Phase (6-24 months): This phase includes continuing with prospect research and major gift solicitation, refining your goals, and building relationships with all of your existing donors through community outreach. The quiet phase ends when you secure 50-70% of your total goal from major donors, organizational leaders, and other funders.
Public Phase (1-2 Years): Your public phase will begin with a kick-off event. From there, solicit mid-range and smaller gifts, focusing on marketing and promotion as you work toward your topline revenue goal.
Follow-Up (Ongoing): After your campaign is over, thank your donors (perhaps through donor recognition displays) and share final reports with your community. Then, celebrate a successful capital campaign!
Remember that this is only one approach, and your timeline will look different based on the scope of your unique campaign. For example, you may need only a year to solicit major gifts, or your campaign kick-off may take the form of a month-long celebration instead of a one-off event.
Regardless, the important thing to remember is that by writing out a timeline, you’re setting yourself up to be accountable for each task, phase by phase, that will need to be accomplished in order to meet your goal.
The Donorly Approach to Capital Campaign Timelines
While traditional capital campaign timelines work for many organizations, the Donorly team works with nonprofits to make the most of the first year of the campaign.
Instead of spending months waiting on the results of a feasibility study before you begin, we’ll help you move forward with the campaign as you interview stakeholders. This way, your organization starts building community from the very beginning, putting you in a better position to meet your fundraising goals both during and after the capital campaign. Here’s what the first year of working with us looks like:
Using this timeline, we help you energize and expand your inner circle of leadership donors while we assess your resources. The first 2-12 months of your campaign involve both collecting commitments from prospective major donors and hosting regular community events to build a movement around your organization.
For nonprofits that know they want to go forward with a capital campaign, this approach sets them up for greater success in both the short and long term.
5. Budget
When you’re just starting to plan your campaign, you’ll need to know your preliminary goal, where and how you will raise the money for that goal across the duration of the campaign (via a gift pyramid), and what your initial budget is to get started, especially for hiring more development staff and a fundraising consultant.
When planning that campaign budget, your objective and its associated goal will be the guiding stars. Everything will flow from that core campaign objective, its cost, and the findings of your initial assessment. Like your case for support, your budget will evolve as the campaign goes on and specific phases come into better focus, so it will be helpful to start by asking yourself, “What funding do we know we can count on?” and “What expenses do we still need to cover?” In other words, take a look at your inputs and outputs.
Inputs: The inputs for your campaign will be pledged unrestricted gifts, funding from foundations and government bodies that can be put toward the campaign, and other funds you’ve saved that can be safely put toward a multi-year campaign.
Outputs: The outputs will be all the expenses associated with your campaign, including staffing, consulting, necessary upfront technology investments, and eventually the marketing and events that will be part of the public phase.
As with all nonprofit work, having a thorough idea of how money will be flowing in and out of your organization during the capital campaign will be extremely helpful when it comes to securing support from your board. Being able to demonstrate that you’ve already accounted for all of your estimated expenses, labor time, and revenue will show your board that your campaign is truly a feasible undertaking that will contribute to the furthering of your cause. A well-thought-out budget will also be a great tool for course correcting once your campaign is in full swing.
6. Team Assignments
As explained in the review of capital campaign basics above, your capital campaign team will typically consist of a campaign chair, board members, planning and steering committee members, volunteers, and a fundraising consultant. To ensure your staff, volunteer, and board members’ time is being used as efficiently as possible, you’ll need to match each person with a capital campaign assignment that they’re prepared to excel with.
For example, say you have a staff member who is extremely reliable and organized. You might invite them to serve on your steering committee because you recognize they would be a great asset in helping your organization stay on track with your campaign. Or, you might secure a major gift from a new donor who also wants to be involved in a volunteer capacity in some way. You could then assign them to lead a group of volunteers in event planning, social media content creation, or donation solicitation.
To ensure you’re assigning responsibilities to the best people for the job, employ these strategies:
Review what you know about each person, such as their skills and track record of engagement with your cause.
Survey your team to find out what assignments each person would prefer to have.
Especially for volunteers, consider the time commitments you’ll be asking each person for and if they’ll be able to fulfill those commitments.
These strategies will be especially helpful if you have a large staff and a full team of volunteers to work with. However, not all nonprofits have this luxury, and you may need to instead thoroughly onboard different individuals into their assignments, especially if they have no prior experience in that area. For example, say you have three volunteers who are willing to solicit donations on behalf of your organization but aren’t well-versed in fundraising. You’d likely want to spend a few training sessions going over the basics of building donor relationships and making solid fundraising asks. If you will need to train your team in their various duties, make sure to allow for ample time to do so. This will ensure that they’re ready to spring into action once the campaign is in full swing!
Time commitment will be a big consideration here and is worth emphasizing. It’s critical that everyone in your organization understands that capital campaign assignments are big, months- or years-long assignments that will change how your organization operates. Everyone, including board members and nonprofit leaders, has to buy into their assignment and be fully committed. Capital campaigns aren’t projects where your team members can simply cherry-pick how and when they want to help. They’re all-hands-on-deck efforts.
Also, note that fundraising consultants can often fill in temporarily for gaps in your development team (taking on tasks like major gift prospecting and fundraising). They can help you keep your capital campaign operations going while you look for the right person to fill the job and even help you with the hiring process.
7. Communications and Outreach
This element of your capital campaign plan will help you streamline both your internal operations and your public outreach. With a solid approach to internal communications and marketing, your team will be able to work well together and rely on each other, and your community will know all about your campaign and how to get involved.
Internal communication:
Communication with your team becomes even more important when you consider the complexity and sheer scale of a capital campaign. You’ll need an organized system for disseminating information, reporting, and more. Here are a few things to work out in your capital campaign plan to lay the foundation for good internal communication:
How you’ll provide the team with updates on campaign progress: When your campaign hits a major milestone or encounters a hurdle, how will you get that information to your team? You might plan to have weekly or bi-weekly team meetings to keep everyone on the same page or to send out a weekly progress report via email.
The tools you’ll use to communicate: You might already have a great tool for team communication and project management. As you’re recruiting the help of more and more volunteers, you’ll want to show them how to use that tool. And if you want to use something new, consider some of the popular tools out there, like Slack, Monday, and Trello. Remember to include your communication tools cost in your budget!
Individual teams’ reporting order: When a team member has a question, concern, or update on a project they’re working on, who do they report to? To keep your communications organized, you’ll need to establish a clear reporting order. For example, individual team members might report to a manager or committee chairperson, who then reports to the campaign chair.
Outreach and Marketing:
Consider how you’ll communicate with donors and the wider community throughout the campaign. Traditionally, only the public phase involves building enthusiasm for your cause through community outreach and fundraising events. However, the Donorly team believes that building a community should be one of your top priorities during a capital campaign—meaning you should infuse community outreach into every phase.
While this will look different based on your unique mission and community, you’ll want to get the word out through multichannel marketing. You might employ all or most of the following at some point during your campaign:
Physical marketing materials like posters, flyers, and postcards
Email newsletters
Social media posts and personal messages
Text messaging
Capital campaign website and event landing pages
TV and radio advertisements
Additionally, it’s worthwhile to reevaluate your website’s donation page with fresh eyes at this point. Ensure your donation page supports your capital campaign and aligns with your other campaign marketing materials.
Effective communication and marketing are essential to the health of your campaign from the start. As you outline your strategy for both internal and external communication in your capital campaign plan, focus on how you can choose channels and strategies that will enable you to create inspiring messaging that calls people to action and will keep people engaged with your campaign until you cross the finish line.
The Donorly Approach to Community Outreach
When you work with Donorly, we’ll help you design a thoughtful community event strategy that runs throughout your full campaign. By hosting regular, mission-aligned events that are open to the public, you’ll engage existing supporters and build a pipeline of new donors who may support your organization for years to come.
This approach to community engagement helps you build a movement around your cause early on in the campaign (potentially before you’ve even announced it publicly). You can use these events to identify prospective major donors, strengthen relationships with community leaders, and introduce your mission to brand-new audiences—ultimately ensuring that you have a strong, passionate support base that will see you through the capital campaign and beyond.
8. Donor Recognition Strategies
Donor recognition may feel a long way off, especially as you’re just starting to plan your capital campaign. In reality, though, donor recognition will likely come into play for your capital campaign sooner than you might think, especially as you interview major donors during your feasibility study or begin receiving major gifts. It’s never too early to start thinking about how you will say “thank you” when the time comes!
And, when you do begin receiving gifts during the quiet phase, a big part of your recognition efforts will be keeping those donors involved and excited about the campaign. To do so, send them regular updates, invite them to volunteer, and make sure to invite them to kick-off, public phase, and groundbreaking events.
Here are some other suggestions to inspire your general donor recognition planning:
Personalize your thank-you messages. An impersonal thank-you note or letter can feel like getting a birthday card with nothing written on the inside—a little disappointing. With each message you write, make sure you personalize it with details you know about the donor, like their name, donation amount, and donation date.
Send gifts to show your appreciation. Sometimes a small gift can make all the difference in how your donor feels about having donated to your capital campaign. You might send a gift basket or free tickets to a campaign event.
Host donor appreciation events. Everyone enjoys a good party, especially when it’s a party to shout out their contributions to something meaningful. Try hosting a donor appreciation event like a luncheon or gala where you provide food and entertainment.
Honor donors with a recognition wall. For nonprofits who are building or expanding a facility with their capital campaign, a donor recognition wall is an excellent option for showing donor appreciation. A donor recognition wall stands as a physical reminder of those who made your project possible, which can be fun for donors and their loved ones to visit. This option can get pricey, so make sure you budget for it!
Just like marketing strategies, each donor will respond to your donor recognition strategies in different ways. Use your knowledge of what has worked in the past to shape your donor recognition strategies, and don’t forget to budget for any physical materials (gift baskets, thank-you cards, etc.) that you might need to put your strategy into motion. A little thank-you will go a long way in building your relationships with your donors during your capital campaign and setting you up to retain their support for future campaigns.
Comprehensive Capital Campaign Plan Template
The template below combines all of the elements we discussed into one template and includes some examples. Use this template to begin planning your own capital campaign, but remember to remain flexible in filling it out. You may not need some sections, or you may want to add a few of your own to better visualize your campaign.
How a Fundraising Consultant Can Help with Capital Campaign Planning
A fundraising consultant can be your partner through every part of the capital campaign process, including the creation of your capital campaign plan. A consultant can also help you with strategy development, donor research, feasibility studies, fundraising training, and more. The ultimate goal of working with a fundraising consultant is certainly to complete your capital campaign successfully, but having expert guidance throughout the entire process will also set you up with stronger, sustainable strategies to apply as your organization grows in the future.
For information on partnering with a consultant, check out the Donorly hiring guide.
As you go through the hiring process, prioritize finding a fundraising consultant who is willing to workshop their own ideas and strategies to fit your organization’s vision for your capital campaign. Flexibility and the ability to listen and learn about your organization’s specific needs are two qualities that will show that a consultant would be a great partner and teacher for your entire team.
Wrapping Up
Your capital campaign plan is the blueprint that will guide you throughout your entire campaign. Planning now will save you stress and confusion down the line, and also illustrate your organization’s campaign readiness to your staff, board members, volunteers, and donors.
Use the template in this guide to start planning your capital campaign. And if you’re ready to learn more, here are some resources we recommend:
Capital Campaigns: A Success Guide for Small Nonprofits. Want a deeper dive into the mechanics of capital campaigns? This is the perfect crash course for you!
Fundraising Strategy for Beginners: How to Create Your Own. Need to re-evaluate your larger fundraising strategy and identify how your capital campaign fits in? Explore this guide!
Free Step-by-Step Fundraising Plan Template for Nonprofits. Looking to take on another type of campaign? Check out this all-purpose fundraising plan template.
