Steeple Capital Campaigns

How to Set a Realistic Fundraising Goal

Tim Triplett — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:44:45 +0000

Your campaign goal is more than your building costs

Ask a pastor how much he needs to raise in his capital campaign and nine times out of ten he’ll say that his campaign goal equals his construction costs. So if he’s building a $1 million capital asset, he’ll say he needs to raise $1 million in funds. The problem with this kind of logic is that it overlooks other real and vital costs.

There are as many as five specific budget categories that need to be incorporated into any capital goal. It is essential that all five be understood individually and planned for appropriately.

Organizational Planning. There needs to be an organizational plan in place that presents a comprehensive vision and strategy with well thought out goals and objectives. Additionally, there ought to be a tactical plan in place that outlines specific activities that will achieve the goals and objectives brought out in the organizational plan. It costs a lot of time, effort and money to prepare an in-depth organizational plan.
Project Planning. While it’s true that form follows function. It’s even more true that a man’s building is his brand. It makes all the sense in the world, therefore, to budget for physical assessment and design management. There needs to be adequate advance funds for space evaluation and planning, equipment needs exploration, architectural design, interior decoration, landscaping and other related things.
Facilities Planning. A master plan coordinates with the organizational plan and matches program needs with square footage and physical space requirements. It is an integrated plan that addresses today’s needs in relation to the projected needs of the organization.
Project and Construction Costs. The price negotiated with a builder is one factor in calculating the actual costs of construction. Don’t forget to figure in the expenses accrued because of construction, such as long-term storage, loss of attendance (revenue), loss of interest income, new interest payments on construction loans, and relocation costs.
Campaign Costs. The direct costs of fundraising include staffing, consulting fees, promotional materials, telecommunications, back office support, dead beat pledges and more. Most campaign costs average between five and fifteen percent of the fundraising goal. Smaller campaigns cost more proportionately than larger campaigns do.

Steeple provides fund raising and organizational development services to faith-based and community-based organizations of the nonprofit sector. Our efforts are dedicated to putting nonprofit managers and trustees in touch with the tools and resources they need to develop their organizations and to conduct successful capital campaigns. Our work with clients is for the long-term—to build internal capacity, to create brand equity, and to attract and retain funding. Since 2007, we’ve helped nonprofit organizations like yours raise more than $14 million.

The Flaws of a Grassroots Campaign Model

Tim Triplett — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:28:19 +0000

Is a grassroots approach an effective strategy?

Every now and then, you’ll hear of an organization that wants to raise money, large sums of money, the good ole grassroots way. The thought process goes something like this: If I can just find one million people to give $1.00, I’d reach my capital campaign goal. The problem with a grass roots approach is that finding a lot of people who will make a small contribution to reach a large financial goal is a very slow and ineffective way to raise large sums of money.

Direct mail is the wrong way to raise funds; but it is an effective way to acquire names of potential supporters. Whether it’s a capital campaign raising $1 million or $50 million, it takes less than one hundred people (including grants) to account for more than eighty percent of all the money received. Do you have eighty to one hundred prospects with the giving capacity to add up to eighty percent of your campaign goal? Well . . . let’s see.

How many folks do you know who could make a gift that is twenty percent of your desired campaign goal?
How many prospects do you have who might make a gift that is ten percent of your financial goal?
How many people do you have who could make a gift that is five percent?
How many potential donors do you have who could make a gift that is one percent of your campaign goal?
How many prospects do you have who you think could make a gift but you have no idea how to place them in the giving ranks?

Rule of Thumb: If you have between fifty and one hundred prospective donors and the total for credible donations is at least twice as much as your campaign goal, you have enough donor depth to start planning your campaign. One hundred donors is a whole lot easier to find than one million any day!

Five Positioning Strategies for a Startup Church

Tim Triplett — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:52:03 +0000

Can you redefine the mega church brand?

When you’re a startup church in a city seemingly full of mega churches, just as important as what you do is what you don’t do. Here are five ways you can position yourself against a mega church by redefining them.

Distribution. You can’t afford a city-wide direct mail campaign. There is no way you can blanket the city in billboard signs. Television and radio are pretty much out of the question. So what are you going to do? You’re going to start out by reaching out directly to just a few families, win them to Christ and equip them for ministry. And you’re going to keep doing this until you have a solid core on which to build.
Access to Capital. You don’t have access to capital. So be frugal. You’re going to be missionary-cheap in everything (I can say this because I’m a missionary’s kid), so much so that it’ll make access to money a mute point.
Brand Equity. The best way to redefine the mega church is to position yourself against it. There’s a big difference between positioning against a market leader and competing head-to-head with the market leader. You’re going to be “deeper in discipleship than the mega church”; “wider in spiritual experience than the mega church”; and “stronger in relationships than the mega church”. The more the mega church brand gets publicized, the more your positioning statement increases in value.
Relationships. Your strategy is not to go after the mega church’s people. Instead, you’re going to go after a beachhead in your city. Then by serving people, slowly but surely you’re going to increase market share. You’re going to relentlessly focus on one person at a time. And you’re going to go after the kind of people that don’t fit the mega church mold.
Staff. I can hear you chuckling. You’re saying, “What staff? It’s just my wife and me here.” Well . . . you guys are great ministerial staff, so stay intentionally small, probably never more than three people, including your wife and you until you reach an average attendance of 200. And the third person is going to do clerical and administrative work to free up your wife. Your job is to equip a volunteer army for ministry. Paid staff just give your people an excuse to withdraw from the battlefield.

Seven Overlooked Advantages of a Startup Church

Tim Triplett — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:00:04 +0000

Does a small church have a chance to succeed?

If you’re a startup church in a city seemingly full of mega churches, do you have a chance to succeed? In a word, no. Not if you try to compete head to head. Not if you try to act like a big church. If you try to steal the giant’s lunch, he’ll probably eat your lunch. But it’s not time to throw in the towel either. There are at least seven things that you can do now that can give you tremendous advantages as you launch your new church.

You’ve Got Nothing to Lose. First of all, if you did (which you don’t), you’ve already walked away from a salary, your retirement, that little office in the middle of the hall. You’ve committed yourself to planting this church. You already quit your job . . . remember? This is it. Secondly, everything is straight up from here, you’ve got kids to feed and you’re hungry. This is huge! The mega church has been doing this for a lot of years. It has systems and quotas and established traditions to maintain. It is like a rock concert with a throng of people coming each week — so many people, in fact, that it doesn’t even try to connect with individual people, anymore. Everything it does is fine tuned for the masses. The problem is that the mega church has to have huge crowds to survive and the church has changed since it first started. There’s opportunity in new niches that haven’t been fully exploited. And the mega church is still doing it the same old way to an ever-changing sea of people. But the masses are getting smarter. They are looking at what a mega church delivers and the price tag seems way too high for what they’re getting. They’re tired of being anonymous and they want to find a place where people know their name. There’s a place for a hungry guy like you who has nothing to lose. This is an advantage.
You’re Completely Happy with the Small Fish. The mega church has to eat a lot to be happy. You can do with crumbs. There’s a lot of room in the city for a little fish like you. You can operate anonymously, fly completely under the radar, and it won’t hurt your ego a bit. This is your advantage.
You’re the Senior Pastor. It’s true that when the pastor of that mega church wants to meet with the mayor, odds are that he’ll make time for him, after all he is the lead pastor. But in a big church, you can bet all your enchiladas that the lead pastor is far removed from the day-to-day action. He has people who are getting the job done for him. Except for lead donors and high-profile members, the lead pastor rarely gets in on any of the action. But with you, it’s a different story. You are the senior pastor of your startup church and you have a lot of interaction with your people. You can use this power and flexibility to wrap yourself around each and every person, and make yourself indispensable. The people who you lead, get to work with the senior pastor. This is an advantage.
You’re Very Fast. An office full of people with slow-moving bureaucracies, being meeting-ed to death, and who have a slacker mentality, can’t get the job done faster than you. They can’t hire nine women to work really hard on a team and produce a baby in a month. Just because a mega church has an organization doesn’t mean it is faster than you. You can do it yourself and you are very fast. Today, you don’t have one committee meeting to waste your time and energy on. And because you’re just one person, the only way you can survive is to stay focused and work like your life depended on it. Come to think of it, your life does depend on it. You’re fast and this is an advantage.
You’re the Underdog. We’ve all been to a lot of Super Bowl parties where the two teams playing didn’t mean a lot to anyone in the room. Most of the time, your friends chose to root for the underdogs. Well . . . you’re the underdog here. There are a lot of people around you who are rooting for you and who are more likely to spread the word about you and activate some really great referral networks for you. Being the underdog is an advantage.
You Don’t Have Any Overhead. You rent an elementary school cafetorium for your services. You work from a converted shop in the back of your house. Your PBX system is a cell phone. You don’t have an executive pastor or an accounting team. The only insurance you have is on your leased computer equipment and that’s only because you have to. You don’t have a company car and there isn’t a crop of volunteers waiting to work for you. You can do what the mega church can do, for a whole lot less money. The ministry you create is in your heart and between your ears. It doesn’t take a big corporate machine to deliver the goods. Right now, you are the ministry and your monthly survival numbers are very low. You don’t have any overhead and this is an advantage.
You’ve Got Time. This doesn’t mean that you have time to waste. You still have to apply knowledge to work to increase capacity; and you’d be a slacker if you didn’t apply logic to what you do, to increase your productivity. But this doesn’t mean that you have to rush things, or hold things back just to meet quotas. When it counts, you’ll work your tail off to get things out the door ten times faster than the big guy. But when you can make a difference by taking your time and doing it right, you will — and it will show. You control your time and you can use it to your advantage.

Five Big Things Smaller Churches Don’t Have

Tim Triplett — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:48:42 +0000

What makes the megachurch the default market leader in town?

Amarillo is a city with a population of more than 180,000. On any given Sunday, 64,800 people are in church, somewhere. Eighty percent of those people are sitting in the ten largest churches. With more than 300 churches in town, this means that the remaining 12,960 folks are spread out among 290 churches. Megachurches have five key leverage points that smaller churches do not have, and they capitalize on them every day.

A Network of Distribution. A megachurch succeeds because it can afford to hire lots of development people. They sponsor big events and purchase premium ad space in the local television and newspaper markets. They have a network of the most successful and most gifted opinion leaders in their communities attending their fellowship. And they have no problem getting their services in front of the market.
Access to Capital. These guys can get their hands on a lot of money anytime they want it. They don’t have to come up with personal guarantees, pay high-interest payments, and they don’t have to do downside risk estimates. If the church market can be bought with cash, megachurches can do it.
Brand Equity. A megachurch has invested millions of dollars building a brand name. It has a lot of brand equity. Church people tend to trust anything a megachurch does. Every week, a megachurch gets to extract the benefits that come from having a huge market share. And people are like sheep, they tend to follow the brand leader.
Market Relationships. The pastor of a megachurch has a tremendous advantage over a small church in that he can pick up the phone and meet almost any community leader in the city. In established markets like Amarillo, this is a huge advantage.
Great Staff. A megachurch has a lot of exceptional people on the payroll. These folks were drawn to work for this ministry because it has a great reputation, offers stability, and pays well. A megachurch, if it is smart, has leveraged these people to the hilt. No doubt about it, successful megachurches have attracted some incredibly talented people to their leadership teams.

So where does this leave the small church? The advantage that a megachurch has over a small church is overwhelming, especially if the small church trys to act like a big church. The market won’t buy it. It has to do something different, if the small church hopes to survive. But the “Be Different” strategy has to wait for another post.

According to Wikipedia, a megachurch is a church having around 2,000 or more attendees for a typical weekly service. The Hartford Institute’s database lists more than 1,300 such Protestant churches in the United States. According to these data, about 50 churches on the list have attendance ranging from 10,000 to 47,000.

Managing a Feasibility Study

Tim Triplett — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:01:24 +0000

How do you find out whether people are ready to give?

You hope your organization is strong enough to tackle a capital campaign, but how can you be sure? Are your donors able to help you with uncommon gifts? Will your cause be compelling enough to inspire your backers to give? Do you have a large enough donor pool and are they ready to give? If you are not so sure about the answers to these important questions, it may be time to test your market.

A feasibility study is a confidential way to assess whether your organization is ready to take on a capital campaign. It is an empirical way of discovering the real health and deficiency inherent in your donor base in relation to your organization. With this evidence, you should know whether to proceed with your preparation for a campaign or make other plans.

Not every organization needs to conduct a feasibility study before embarking on a capital campaign. If you are confident that your preparation is sound and your donors are ready, you may be able to avoid the cost and effort of a formal market analysis. It should be noted, however, that the organization that foregoes a feasibility study is the exception now days and not the rule. Most organizations are not in a position to gauge campaign readiness without getting outside counsel.

What is a Feasibility Study?

A Steeple feasibility study assesses your organization’s capacity to conduct a capital campaign in three important ways:

Infrastructure. Are there enough trained volunteers? Is the staff ready, i.e., are there people in key positions with enough capacity, experience and authority? Are office systems in place to handle a campaign?
Case Study. Is the case for a capital campaign strong enough and appealing enough to cause people to want to give?
Donor Pool. Are there enough prospective donors ready and able to give enough contributions to meet the campaign goal? What are the conditions or circumstances that are likely to influence the size of their gifts?

Budgeting for a Capital Campaign

Tim Triplett — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:12:16 +0000

How much does a capital campaign cost?

Campaign costs are the costs directly related to bringing in funds, including executive and support staffing—the greatest expense—consultant’s fees, donor relations materials and marketing collateral, communications, office and equipment expenses, pledge attrition (people who pledge buy don’t pay), and prospect cultivation expenses. According to data gathered by the National Society of Fund Raising Executives, most campaign costs average between five and fifteen percent of the funding goal.

The percentage of costs per dollar raised tends to decrease as the goal increases. Staffing costs per gift solicited are fairly constant, so the ability to attract larger gifts and greater numbers of effective volunteer solicitors drops the cost per gift.

Generally speaking, the smaller campaigns (up to $5 million) may cost more than 15 percent of the goal, the larger campaigns ($25 million and up) could cost under 10 percent of the goal.

Campaign Budget Items

Item	Description
*Contingency fees are approximately 4 percent
Salaries	Campaign director, campaign assistant
Consultants	Fundraising, public relations
Special campaign materials	Case statement, inserts, response cards, video, donor recognition, direct mail or special appeal, manuals, displays, banners, posters, stationery
Promotional materials	Graphic design, production, printing, newsletters, bulletins, website, photography
Special events and programs	Cultivation receptions, dinners, major promotional events, site presentations, volunteer training and orientation
General expenses	Travel, mileage, parking, meals, supplies, postage, equipment, telephone, other consultant expenses, contingency*
Other	Interior and exterior donor recognition, architectural renderings

Positioning a Ministry for a Capital Campaign

Tim Triplett — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:23:03 +0000

How to capture the heart and mind of your donor and be seen and heard above the din of an overcrowded marketplace

Brand positioning as it relates to a capital campaign refers to the intended reason for a campaign in donor’s minds. To say it differently, a capital campaign’s brand positioning communicates the goal that will be achieved by the funds raised and explains why it is better than the status quo and/or other ways of reaching the goal. It’s important to develop a positioning statement for a capital campaign because it ensures a shared vision for the campaign throughout the organization and it serves as a guide to tactical communications planning.

Positioning Fundamentals

While there may be differences in style and language for developing a capital campaign’s brand position, there are certain parts of the fundamentals of positioning that are essential:

Targeted end user. The end user is a broad label for any people that would benefit from the services offered within the context of achieving the capital campaign goal. Who are they? Why are they important? What are their interests? These target characteristics are typically chosen on the basis of shared interests and groupings.
Frame of reference. This is another way of stating the targeted end user’s felt need that will be served by completing the capital campaign goal. The frame of reference may guide the choice of donors, identify situations in which the capital campaign goal may be used, and define other ministries or organizations that claim to serve the same objective.
Point of difference. A concise statement of fact or belief regarding why the outcome of the capital campaign is better positioned to alternative ministries or organizations in the frame of reference is referred to as the point of difference.
Reasons to believe. This is sometimes called supporting evidence in defense of the point of difference and frame of reference. In a capital campaign the reasons to believe are more likely to have a profound effect on the success and survival of the fundraising effort.

These four positioning fundamentals should be used in a formal positioning statement for the capital campaign. To illustrate, consider the following positioning statement for Spring Creek Assembly of God’s new children’s facilities (capital campaign goal):

Spring Creek Assembly of God Positioning Statement
To the parent who sees the spiritual health of his/her child as vitally important and cannot afford anything less than excellence (targeted end user), Spring Creek Assembly of God (frame of reference) offers more than other churches (point of difference) because in addition to biblical training we offer a new and improved multi-million-dollar facility to maximize impact and flexible service schedules to make it easier to fit a young family’s busy timetable and certified teachers to enhance a child’s quality of biblical education and are backed by state-of-the-art security protocols to ensure the safety of every child (reasons to believe).

Branding a Capital Campaign—On Purpose

Tim Triplett — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:05:20 +0000

Branding a capital campaign on purpose keeps strategic focus and out-of-the-box creativity in balance and goal-oriented to achieve your fundraising goals deliberately

At Steeple, we help ministries build strong brands as a result of our signature capital stewardship campaigns by implementing market leadership strategies and deploying out-of-the-box creative excellence. We help nonprofit Christian ministries wade through all the communications clutter and focus on one thing—one clear, concise, consistent promise—and then we communicate that one thing, that one promise—purposefully.

One Brand, One Promise

Branding on purpose is finding a way for your organization to stand out from among a bombardment
of innumerable marketing messages.

Taking a nonprofit Christian ministry, distilling its complexity, discovering its essence, and describing it in a very simple way are tougher things to accomplish than one realizes. Not just anyone can do them. But it’s a job we really enjoy and for which we are uniquely qualified. Steeple uses its resources to help ministries communicate across every line and level of their primary and supporting audiences. Our communications are clear and principle centered: one brand, one promise.

Strategy First, Followed by Creative Execution

The challenge is to keep communications focused and strategic, while ensuring that a ministry’s communication pieces live up to the strategy that set them in motion.

At Steeple, we know that when it comes to the a ministry’s image, it is essential that branding and market leadership strategies work together. And they can beautifully with a commitment to let form follow function. Our creative design solutions are as strategically driven as our market leadership strategies. It’s strategy first, then creative execution.

A Ministry’s Brand Identity

A brand’s visual identity must be more than a trendy look and feel, because it has to last for a long time to be effective.

A brand’s visual identity must be solid. It takes between three and five years to establish a brand identity. The visual identity in certain ways needs to be timeless. A brand needs to be an expression of a ministry’s positioning. It has to be meaningful and appropriate for the entire organization. And it must be able to survive for the long haul. Steeple can help ensure that wherever your ministry’s image appears—from stationery and collateral to web sites and signs—it’s leveraged to support the comprehensive brand strategy and, with each impression, is building brand equity and strength for the organization.

Simple, Uniform, Repetitive

Once your ministry has settled on a brand identity and related imagery for a capital campaign, what it must forever after do is leave it alone. Don’t touch it. Repeat it exactly, over and over until you’re bored and beyond bored. The surprise is that’s what makes your brand strong; the public sees it, gets it, knows it, counts on it—if you change it, it never settles in. From the selection of images, colors, and typography to the development of multimedia channels and graphic user interfaces, Steeple knows that just looking good is never good enough. We help you put in place a comprehensive branding identification system so that each communication element expresses the brand and underlines the marketing strategy of your unique ministry.

Learning to Say “No” Is the Secret to Dominating the Educational Market

Tim Triplett — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:07:45 +0000

An educational institution’s marketing success begins with limiting its focus and learning to say “No way José”

It’s tough to say “No.” But to be successful, a university must become very disciplined and adept at saying: absolutely not, most certainly not, of course not, under no circumstances, by no means, not at all, negative, never, not really; informal nope, uh-uh, nah, not on your life, no way, ixnay.

“No” to certain markets
“No” to some types of students
“No” to certain service offerings
“No” to some service levels
“No” to certain growth opportunities
“No” to expansion into some regions

The Six Focusing Strategies

Focus is an essential element in a university’s branding and integrated marketing communications program. An organization should not spread its resources too thinly across multiple areas of a market. They should rule out “opportunities” for growth in order to stay focused. Not every opportunity to add a member needs to be pursued. It’s a myth to believe that an organization can be all things to all people. It’s a falsehood to believe that people truly want one-stop shopping across a broad range of services. There are a number of focusing strategies for an organization to consider:

Focusing the markets served.
Limit the number of markets the university serves. Typically, each additional market requires new expertise and people skills, information systems, management, investment dollars, internal processes, regulatory knowledge, distribution channels, and marketing communication approaches.
Focusing the service offerings.
Limit the number and types of service offerings the university offers and become a specialist with a limited menu.
Focusing the benefits delivered.
Offer students a limited range of benefits across a broad range of services. This becomes a winning focusing strategy when the benefits are mapped to a set of prospective students who place a high value on the derived benefits.
Focusing the geographies served.
Limit the university’s geographic targeting to a region.
Focusing the channels of access.
Limit the types of channels that a student may use to access the university, e.g. on-line verses a traditional residential campus.
Focusing the types of students served.
The university should continually strive to identify under-served sets of prospective students and select segments where it can use existing capabilities to satisfy student needs.

Harnessing the Synergy of Your Focusing Strategies

The real power of the six focusing strategies comes from applying several of them in concert, selecting multiple market niches to pursue, and building the internal capabilities that would enable the university to cost-effectively serve multiple niches.

All six of the focusing strategies require a lot of thought and analysis to answer the big question: “Which strategies should the university pursue, and within each strategy, which niche opportunities should it select and which ones should it ignore.” The main goal should be to identify certain niches that the university can dominate.