What To Do In The Year Before Your Capital Campaign

In this webinar, Mark Quigley will explain the critical items needed to get started early to position your capital campaign for success!

Full Transcript:

Steven:All right, Mark, is it okay if I go ahead and get us started officially here?

Mark:Terrific. Thanks, Steven.

Steven:All right. Cool. Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for logging in for a special Thursday morning edition of our Bloomerang webinar series. We’ve got today’s session, “The Year Before Your Capital Campaign.” My name is Steven Shattuck and I am the Chief Engagement Officer over here at Bloomerang and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion as always.

Just a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. I just want to let you all know that we are recording this presentation and we’ll be sending out the recording as well as the slides later on today. In case you didn’t already get the slides, we’ll get those to you for sure as well as the recording. If you have to leave early or perhaps you want to review the content later on, have no fear, I’ll get all those things in your hands today, I promise.

As you’re listening today, please feel free to use that chat box right there on your webinar screen. We’re going to try to save some time at the end for Q&A. So, don’t be shy. We love to see your questions and comments. We like to keep this as interactive as possible. You can also send us tweets. I’ll be checking out Twitter throughout the hour here. So, send us a message there. You can use the hashtag #Bloomerang.

And one last bit of housekeeping—if you have any trouble with the audio, we find that these webinars are usually only as good as your own internet connection. If you have any trouble with the audio through your computer speakers, we recommend you try dialing in by phone. We find the quality is usually a little bit better by phone. If you can do that and you don’t mind doing that, just check the email from ReadyTalk and there is a phone number there for you to use.

And in case this is your first webinar with us, I just want to say a special welcome to you folks. We do these webinars just about every Thursday. We bring on a great guest like Mark for an insightful and educational presentation. It’s one of our favorite things to do here at Bloomerang, but what we are most known for is our donor management software. If you’re interested in that or maybe want to learn more, you can check out our website. You can even get a quick video demo and see the software in action. Don’t even have to talk to a salesperson if you don’t want to. So, check that out if you are interested, love for you to learn more.

But for now, I am very excited to introduce a very special guest this morning, this handsome gentleman joining us all the way from Sydney, Australia. It is midnight his local time, so I hope you all really appreciate what he’s about to do for you over the next hour or so. He is Mark Quigley. Hey, Mark. How’s it going?

Mark:Very well, thanks. Very well. Thanks, Steven.

Steven:I’m really looking forward to this one. This is a session that Mark did at AFP in Boston just a few months ago where I met him in person, super great guy, super smart. I just want to brag on him real quick before I turn things over.

If you don’t know Mark, you’ve got to know him. Like I said, he’s down in Australia where he is a multi-award-winning fundraising consultant. He specializes mostly in capital campaigns and major gifts, both of which he’ll be talking about a little bit this morning. He is a fellow over at the Fundraising Institute of Australia and he’s got over 20 years of experience in fundraising. He holds an FIA Certificate of Fundraising. He has attended the University of Indiana School of Philanthropy here in our backyard at Bloomerang.

He was a Yale University and Asia program participant. He’s got his BA from Carleton University in Canada, where he originally hails from. So, internationally renowned, for sure. But what I’m really excited about and what I think he is most excited about as well is he has created a really cool mobile app called My Major GiftGetter, which is available on the Apple iTunes Store, got to check it out. He’ll probably tell you more about it. But Mark, I’m going to hand things over to you to tell us all about how to prepare for a capital campaign. So, take it away, my friend.

Mark:Thanks, Steven. Thanks, everyone for joining us.

Just on that My Major GiftGetter, it was interesting because Bloomerang themselves did a survey a few years ago where they talked about charities wanting more major gifts but there was a problem. They identified a few of the problems.

For example, 58% of the respondents to this survey—and Steven can correct me if I’m wrong—said they didn’t have a strategy for getting more major gifts. Another 49% said they lack time on their part. Another 75% said they lacked investment. I’m assuming going to a conference or attending seminars was significant and expensive in terms of professional development and training.

So, there’s this problem where charities want more major gifts, but they just don’t have the strategy, the time, the investment or the expertise sometimes to know really how to go about it. So, that really was part of the inspiration for My Major GiftGetter and I went and talked to a few peers around the world, including Harvey McKinnon and Bill Tolliver and a number of people that gave me some advice and guidance. I literally thought for more major gifts, there’s an app for that.

I would just encourage everybody to take a look at the app store. It’s a calendar of what to do when every week that you can start today. You can read loads of tips on gift getting, learn about the tools you need to succeed, you can engage more donors more often, so there’s some donor cultivation strategies to get you to the ask a little bit quicker.

And of course, as Steven said, it’s mobile. If you find you’re out on the road and a major donor ditches you at a meeting, which often does happen, you can sit in the car for another 45 minutes before your next meeting and maybe look at some tips and learn how to engage donors more often.

That’s the end of the commercial because that’s not what you’ve come here for, but if you want to check it out on the app store, I’d be grateful. Thanks very much.

So, now let’s get into the one year before the capital campaign. As Steven said, I did this at AFP. It was, I hope, well-received and just was the genesis for doing this webinar here. Just moving on to the objectives, just to be very clear, we’re looking at identifying and discussing the elements necessary for positioning your campaign for success. The longer the lead time you have to prepare for a capital campaign, the more likely, in my experience, you’ll be to succeed.

I also want to provide some practical advice, things you can take away with your workplace right now that you can literally, once you finished today, that you can actually action today. So, I don’t want to concentrate exclusively on theory and grand strategies. I actually want to get into the nuts and bolts, the tactics that will help you be successful and hopefully we’ll have a little bit of fun along the way.

Before we get into that, everyone does have a capital campaign experience story usually. Some are very positive, some less so, a bit of pulling teeth. A number of you I’m sure listening have been through a capital campaign where it perhaps worked out not too bad or didn’t quite work out according to plan. So, hopefully a little bit of this webinar will prevent you from being one of those three stooges or certainly being the guy in the middle.

So, in terms of how to break this up, I just thought it would be best to look at it in a calendar perspective. So, looking at what to do 12 months out, what to do 9 months out, 6 months out, 3 months out. As we progress over the next hour, I’ll break things up into these date factors that you’ll see in the presentation slides, hopefully to make it a little bit easier.

Of course, that’s not to say that something that is suggested in month 12 or month 9 has to occur at that time, obviously your circumstances are unique. You might play with the timing a wee bit, but this is just to give you a sense of a guideline of a framework to work with.

So, I want to just look now . . . Sorry, just trying to move forward. Sorry, Steven, we seem to be having a bit of trouble moving forward. There we go. My apologies.

So, I want to look at a couple areas and we’ll drill down into each, but running concurrently eventually will be these items. So, the research and evidence, the narrative, the sell and the strategy. Again, you’re not going to start off on month 12, day 1 implementing grand plans in each of these areas, but eventually, and it may occur quickly for you, it may occur less so, but eventually, these things will be running concurrently in the preparation and lead up to what is your feasibility study, the precursor towards a capital campaign, a feasibility study to see if it is actually feasible to raise a large sum of capital.

But also, one of the key messages I want you to take away, in my experience, the ability to plan for a capital campaign successfully is related directly to whether you are ahead of budget, at budget or behind budget in your annual fund. We all have annual targets and annual KPIs that we need to meet. If you are ahead of budget, it makes it easier to take on new initiatives, take on stretch opportunities, plan for capital campaigns, to launch new initiatives, to cultivate more donors because you’re ahead of budget.

If you’re at budget, obviously you can take on a little bit, but of course being at budget, that sometimes can be difficult. If you’re behind budget, then obviously, you are doing everything you can to make the annual fund a success to reach your targets and your KPIs, making it a bit difficult to take on new initiatives like planning capital campaigns. You’ll hear me refer to that—ahead of budget, at budget, behind budget—as we move along.

So, if we get started on those areas, those five topic areas I mentioned, I don’t want to spend too much time on them because I want to progress through, but if you’ve got to look at external research, there’s certain things you need to look at. The first box there off to your far left is understanding the issues and the facts. You really have to understand the whole issue you may be dealing with.

If it’s homelessness, for example, or childhood literacy or poverty, you really have to understand the drivers of those issues. In homelessness, you’ve got all sorts of issues with mental health, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, those kinds of things. You really have to understand the facts and the figures as they stand as an issue as a whole because eventually you are going to suggest how you deal with that better.

Of course, the other thing you need to look at is that third box, reviewing the possible philanthropic trust and foundations for alignment, getting an early sense of where philanthropic opportunities lay. They may be with your existing donor base, but they also may be external to it.

Just as a practical tip, hopefully everybody does this, but you image check your top donors. Hopefully, all you MGOs out there and fundraising managers are checking your top donors and the image banks. There are so many images now available for any level of donor. We’re all on social media. Most of us have profiles and pictures that we put up every week. The high net worth individuals, in my experience, are very much the same. Whether they’ve done a fun run or whether they’ve had a weekend with their family, you will find some people are very active in that sense.

So, image checking your top donors will tell you a little bit about them obviously as well. This gentleman here at the top right corner is Frank Lowie. He’s the Westfield founder, so shopping malls in San Francisco and New York City, all those kinds of places. But this will tell you, obviously, what is important to him.

So, you can see that his face is important to him. You can see family is important to him. He’s flanked by two of his sons. And in the bottom right corner, he’s standing beside another gentleman, a very tall gentleman named James Packer, who happens to be one of the richest people in Australia. So, obviously he’s got connections. So, it just tells you a little bit about the donors themselves.

Again, we’re looking at internal research. As I mentioned previously, this is understanding how your organization deals with a particular issue. What is your unique proposition? How do you deal with homelessness or disabilities or medical research different than the group down the road? How is that different?

The other thing I would suggest to you too very early on in the piece is to email your staff, to look at surveying your staff. It’s incredible that six degrees of separation. It really is true. It’s amazing how many people do know people. Sometimes in smaller urban settings, so if you’ve got towns of one or two million people, it’s a small circle of people that you might be dealing with at that high end, that major gift end and they are interrelated often times.

It never ceases to amaze me how many times in 20 years that I’ve been doing this that you see people who actually know very, very powerful people, who have what I call proximity to wealth. That proximity to wealth can be highly valuable over the next 12 months as you work through the planning phase of your capital campaign.

And the last I would say is to check that you have acquitted previous funding agreements and with philanthropic trusts and foundations. If you’ve received a large grant, have you actually acquitted that money to that donor?

Interestingly enough, last week, I was doing a proposal for a very large, well-known family foundation in Australia for a homelessness shelter who had received money from this very well-funded philanthropic organization. It turns out that that my client hadn’t actually acquitted the previous sum that they had received, which was to the tune of $400,000. So, you can imagine that it is kind of difficult to go and ask somebody for an additional large gift if you haven’t actually told them what you’ve done with the previous one.

So, a tactic or top tip for anybody that’s new in fundraising to their positions and is planning capital campaign and getting familiar with the database and the high net worth individuals and the philanthropic trust and foundations, have a look at the successful grant applications you’ve put in over the last few years and go back and see, “Have I acquitted or has our organization acquitted those funds that we received? Have we actually reported back to the donor?” The last thing you obviously want to do is start a new conversation bringing on the front foot as a new fundraising manager only to find out that you haven’t acquitted that previous gift.

Many of you will be familiar with the gift table. Often times, you will plug in a figure and you will get spit out on the internet a gift table. In 20 years, I have never seen a capital campaign work out like a gift table. I can assure you that it’s highly unlikely that your capital campaign will work out the way any gift table produced by a consultant or produced by one of the tools online spits out. Having said that, they are very good indicators of certain things.

So, one of the tasks that we’re not going to do, for the sake of brevity, we’re going to move on, but I’ll leave you with is to look at obviously what your target is and to look at, in my instance, four of your donors, existing major donors who can maybe account for 10% of your overall target. If you’re after for the sake of argument $2 million, could you right now name four people who arguably could give you $200,000 maybe spread over a couple of financial years? You should be able to rhyme that off within 30, 40 seconds, maybe a minute, maybe two. You can do that for each gift level.

So, a little bit of homework that I’m going to leave you with, a little bit of morning homework is to use a gift calculator on the net, plug in your number, whatever that number is, even if you have it as back of an envelope at the moment right now, don’t worry about it, just plug it in. Then you’re going to print off your gift table. Then what I’d like you to do is I’d like you to run a query when you get back to your desk or after you get off this webinar if you’re at your desk, I’d like you to run a query for every single gift level that you have. It might be that your top gift level is a gift of $1 million. It might be the next one is $750,000, then $500,000, $250,000, $50,000, $25,000 and so on and so on.

Run a query for gifts that have been given to your organization for that exact amount. What you’ll quickly find out is if you are top heavy or bottom heavy or sort of lost in the middle somewhere or maybe you’ve got a good spread of donors at every gift level, so you have to look at those kinds of things to give yourself a sense of what opportunities you have.

In my experience, usually it’s that middle bit, the movement of donors who come into your organization as you’re moving them from mid-tier donors to major donors where there’s a bit of work to be done. So, there’s usually some top donors that every organization has and you know them. Of course, there’s a groundswell of community support, but it’s that bit in the middle that often times needs that cultivation work that major gift officers are involved with.

So, that sort of brings us to that cultivation side of things, that pipeline. Many of you will have heard about the donor pipeline. It’s very true in a capital campaign as well. Capital campaigns obviously rely on a bit of donor pipeline. There’s some characteristics that come with making a good donor pipeline. If I can just—I do apologize, folks. I seem to be experiencing some trans-Pacific problems here at the moment. My apologies.

If you’re hitting your personal KPIs, if you’re ahead of budget or perhaps you’re at budget, that’s fantastic. You’ve got time to work on the pipeline. If you’re behind budget in your annual fundraising, it’s going to be difficult to work on some of these things. But at the end of the day, the capital campaign pipeline is essential in your planning process. You need to have some good mix of donors at every level of your capital campaign table.

It’s important that you have some sort of way of moving them through a donor cycle. So, there’s lots of material out there that you can Google to look at how to move managed donors through cycles and many of you will have those programs available already that you were doing, but it is important to be constantly engaging with your donors during this process, during this starting 12 months and as we move towards 9 months to be engaged with those donors to be looking at how you can actually keep them moving through the donor pipeline.

Quantitative and qualitative evidence, that’s a must. There’s a lot of talk out there at the moment about storytelling. It’s an invaluable part of what we do as major gift people. If we’re going to try to engage donors with giving large gifts, then obviously telling stories, powerful, compelling stories, emotive stories is highly, highly important, highly critical because people will respond to that, but in my experience, sometimes people neglect the other portion of that. That’s the statistical evidence, the somebody that might be moved by the binary or the logical.

So, it’s important that you have quantitative and qualitative evidence because people make decisions based on evidence. So, you’ve got to collect some facts and figures. One of the other things that I’m conscious of with clients is sometimes people don’t have money to invest in program evaluation or research or those kinds of things. It’s difficult, but for example, I’ve worked with a very small not-for-profit in the homelessness and children’s literacy space. They didn’t have money to program evaluate.

So, what we did was we asked program participants who their child was participating in a literacy program. We asked the parents six or eight very simple questions that would give us some data. For example, did your child benefit from the program? Did your child’s literacy rate improve? Did your child engage more with homework and school post our program?

And we got some responses that were fantastic, so we got the stories about how little Johnny or little Sally was moved by the program and did well, but we also got some hard stats, which said something like 94% said their child improved their literacy during the course of our program. Those things are very, very basic and simple bits of market research, but it was better than going to donors with no statistical evidence whatsoever or statistical data to share with them. So, you have to have both the qualitative and the quantitative in my experience.

I guess I want to get onto the narrative now. This is another big thing that occurs over the life of planning for a capital campaign. It’s the narrative. The classic example is if you’re building bricks and mortar, somebody does a back of the envelope assessment of what your building will cost. For whatever reason, it comes up with a figure.

Let’s say that figure is $10 million. All of a sudden, that figure germinates from perhaps board level or CEO level up to the board or down to the management, out into donors. Word gets out that it’s about $10 million. That narrative is something that you then are tied to to a degree. You just have to be very conscious of that narrative. Dealing with the first part, of course, is the compelling visual story that you need to have.

This is obviously Cerebral Palsy Alliance, obviously as the name suggests, dealing with kids with cerebral palsy. You need to have that narrative and you have to have effective and compelling communications. That’s sort of a standard everyone knows. You need to have something that will move people and make people give. That can come through visually, obviously, with your case for support.

A key thing I would make mention of is not during this time, during this 12-month period, to manufacture urgency. There are a lot of capital campaigns that are celebratory in nature, so, “It’s our 25th anniversary or 50th anniversary.” Is there necessarily anything that you need? Is it simply a milestone in the calendar or a milestone in the organization’s history? Is there actually a need? In my experience, there are some very astute high net worth individuals who will see instantly that you’re manufacturing a possibility rather than actually genuinely needing a capital campaign. Just be conscious of that particular part of a narrative.

Of course, the narrative, like I say, needs to be compelling. With Cerebral Palsy Alliance, as you can see by that very devastating picture, their place burnt down. Our narrative was very, very simple. It was a place for children with cerebral palsy, their home, in a sense, burnt down. If your home burnt down, wouldn’t you rebuild?

So, it was a very simple, powerful narrative that we showed visually that we also had backed up with different tools and techniques. We had the clients speaking to camera about the benefits of their programs and the devastation because of their child not being able to go to a service because it had been burnt down. So, obviously a very powerful and unique narrative at that point.

But as I said before, the other part in the two parts of the narrative is the financial. This is where I think, again, like the quantitative and qualitative evidence, people need to pay attention to the financial narrative. What is the financial narrative of your capital campaign? What is your financial need?

There’s a lot of things that fall out of that. So, say, for example, that you’re working with an organization that’s been around for a very long time and perhaps is fortunate enough to have some significant cash reserves. How do you explain what cash reserves you’ve dedicated to your proposed capital campaign or explain that you haven’t dedicated any reserves to it?

So, for me, for example, I’m dealing with an organization called Royal Far West. They help country kids, basically, with health and education. They’ve been going since 1924 and they have quite a healthy bank account. We’re doing a $35 million campaign. They could arguably kick in quite a sum of money off of their own reserves. They have chosen to kick in a target of $5 million from their own reserves. Now, the reason they set that amount was to show some skin in the game because some donors will want that, but also because they acknowledge that they are sitting on a very healthy bank account.

But what they’ve come up with was a strategy to suggest why they have put that dollar figure against their campaign. It really related to the fact that they were going to invest in other things like their programs and services were going to be expanded. Their staffing numbers were going to be expanded. They were going to bring on new clinicians, new healthcare workers, new education workers. They were going to invest in upgrading their IT and their infrastructure. And of course they were going to invest in buildings.

So, the proposition they put forward to donors was if we were to take a very large sum of capital that we have in reserve and dedicate it to this program, we might be pushing back other investments that we plan to make in other areas of the business. That might be something that you as an organization might have to consider if you’re sitting on a large endowment or sitting on large cash reserves or you’re sitting on a large property portfolio, why don’t you dispense of some assets and kick them into your capital campaign?

So, your financial narrative brings up a lot of questions around the finances of your organization and where it’s going and where it derives its money from. So, just be conscious and paying attention to those particular narratives as well.

And of course, start early on a case for support. I won’t go into what a case for support is. I’ll accept that as known amongst the listeners, but you obviously want to have a case for support that touches on the various areas that your program or your capital campaign is going to address. I would shop that around internally as quickly as possible, even if it’s just a couple of bullet point pages. If it’s just the outline of various bits and pieces that you’re planning to do in a capital campaign, it doesn’t have to be set in stone.

I would invite feedback, invite comments and only incorporate the comments and the feedback that you think actually enhances the document. Don’t get stuck into vision statements and vision and direction of the organization. That’s not the purpose of the exercise. It’s really to pin down, to try to crystallize what was perhaps the back of an envelope to something a little bit more concrete.

I just want to get in now, bear in mind, we’re still moving through that 12-month to 9-month engagement. Looking at early major donor engagement. Some of the things you need to do with some of your more well-known donors, the donors you perhaps know more intimately is you need to look at identifying the problem. You need to start making them aware of what’s coming down the road and start warming them up to the idea that there is a need and the capital campaign can meet that need. So, it’s identifying that problem that obviously the capital campaign can solve.

Again, looking at that second to last box is to refine but not dramatically change your message or your financial needs. One of the things that often occurs in capital campaign planning is that back of an envelope narrative which suggests we need $10 million for this or $15 million for that only to six or eight months down the road suggest that that number has changed dramatically. It might be lessening or going up, but what the donor might hear is simply the number moving from one spot to another with no explanation behind why that has occurred.

So, just be very, again, very conscious of when you’re doing your early major donor engagement, just be very conscious of that financial narrative to make sure that perhaps you catch some words or phrases to say maybe we need a minimum of $5 million or it’s a $25 million project that could be built in stages or done or funded in stages. So, giving yourself those qualifications does allow you a bit of flexibility when you really start to crystallize that financial narrative a little bit further down the track.

Having an early . . . I guess what I call an early major donor warning system, this is another good thing to look at early on in the piece. There’s a simple fact that some people will not be interested in your capital campaign and they could be some of your most valued donors, but you need to get out in front of that early.

A classic example I had was somebody who had been identified by a client giving the lead gift in the $20 million capital campaign and I was doing the feasibility study and I suggested we go and talk to that particular individual and the CEO of the charitable organization said, “No, leave that person with me. I’ve got that. That’s not a problem. This person is good for our lead gift in our $20 million campaign,” which we were talking was a $2 million gift over several years.

Of course, the time came to go and approach that person and that person told the CEO, “I don’t really like bricks and mortar. I would prefer to give to programs.” You can imagine how devastating that was when we could have found that our months and months earlier and been obviously planning and cultivating other donors or prospects who could make up that $2 million assumed gift.

So, just having an early warning system, I would encourage you, you need to look at. And we’ll talk a little bit about donor objections a little bit further down the track addressing those early warning systems in your major gift work.

I just want to stop and sort of change the tack for a quick second. This is an incredible device. I’m not promoting that you buy an Apple device, but I’m just saying the tablet device and its impact on major gift work has just been stunning in the last few years. So, all of us have smartphones. We’re all listening in and we’ve got the ability to take photos, to share images, to take videos and share those videos, but it’s amazing to me how many major gift officers and fundraising managers, CEOs, don’t make good use of that device.

It’s very simple right now. So, let’s just say for the sake of argument that your CEO couldn’t make it to a meeting with one of your significant donors. Why not take your handheld device or your tablet device up to the CEO and have them record a 30-second piece to camera to say, “Look, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I’m very sorry I couldn’t be with you today on this donor tour or at this meeting. I’ve had to do this or I’ve had to do that, but I just wanted to tell you how much I value your contributions and the difference that they make and I really do hope we can catch up upon my return.”

It takes about 10 or 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds maybe to do. There’s no reason you couldn’t do half a dozen of those just obviously changing the name of the prospect that you’re going to see or the donor that you’re going to see.

You could do that with a service manager. So, let’s say you’ve got some of your major donors who have been supporting a particular program or service. Why not get the manager of that service or someone involved in that service to say that same thank you to them? You could be going to see Mr. and Mrs. Smith. You get there and you say, “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, it’s great to see you again. I just want to show you our service manager from the program that you support. She couldn’t be here today, but she’s got a very special message.” Of course you play that message.

Those things are fantastic. They do not require high production value. They do not require scripts. It can be a very honest and raw piece to camera. The only thing I would suggest is make sure you’re not holding the camera or the phone like it’s “The Blair Witch Project” but making sure you’re holding it fairly still, but other than that, that is something that is an incredible device to use. I encourage people to go ahead and try and use that as many times as possible in your major gift work.

So, by now, you should have been pretty much through your 12, 11, 10 and say you’re getting close to your 9 months. You should have identified some of these top gifts on other gift levels through what we’ve talked about with the table of gifts and running those queries on your database itself.

You should have gathered evidence. You should have at least had some quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered by this point. You should have a few pages or even maybe a draft document of a case for support. And looking at engaging government, I think certainly in the experience in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., government does generally speaking form an ask within a capital campaign. It might be less so in the American experience. I’m not sure, to be honest.

But one thing I would encourage you is that if government can be engaged and the possibility of support from them financially is there, then you should engage them early about what your plans are. Of course, engaging your CEO in early planning as well, you need to have that buy in.

At this point, we’re now at nine months. I just want to start moving a little bit quicker because we’re now looking at running things certainly concurrently at this point. Getting the band back together. So, KISS, one of the great interesting bands of all time, for sure, for me, controversial though that may be to say. But KISS looked at getting the band back together.

People have been involved in capital campaigns before with your organization. Go and talk to them. Did it work out well? Did it not work out well? Why didn’t it work out well? Why did it work well? Would they be interested in being part of it all again, or would they perhaps at least hear the vision for the new capital campaign and add their thoughts and feedback? So, again, if you can get the band back together again, I would certainly look at doing that.

In terms of what you need to talk about, look, embarking on a capital campaign certainly does increase the amount of activity involved in major gift getting. So, you have to definitely look at some issues that crop up. For example, a capital campaign is often the largest capital raising in the history of an organization. Has your CEO been there for a long time? Have you been there for a long time? Are you very new to the venture? Have you met all the top donors?

So, bringing in a consultant is something that may or may not benefit you in the early stages of a capital campaign. Also, looking at the time needed for more asks—again, going back to that at budget, behind budget, ahead of budget, if you’re going to be doing more asks for a capital campaign or more donor engagement in the lead up to it, how is that going to be resourced? Do you have the time to do that? You need to look at some of those things.

I don’t want to speak too long on government. I think engaging government early is a must. It simply is the biggest player in the not-for-profit space in many places and so I would encourage you just to look at government as a potential funder and to simply engage them early.

It may amount to nothing, but on the other hand, you might be pleasantly surprised and certainly in the Australian experience, it’s one of the first places you go because you might be able to get a very large sum of money towards your particular project. But I don’t want to spend too long on that because I think it’s more about the fundraising side of things and government is often handled by people other than fundraisers.

But I do think having an early warning system for government is needed. I think government funding, you need to look at where government funding is likely to be coming from. You also have to look at that bottom one of your need versus limited government funding and be realistic.

Often times in capital campaigns, in my experience, some people have suggestion with high net worth individuals as well as government or corporate or philanthropic trusts and foundations, an opportunity that’s unrealistic or an ask that is unrealistic. If government is dedicating $10 million in your area towards something, it’s probably unrealistic to think that you’re going to get $8 million out of the $10 million.

But sometimes people, including board members and CEOs, think it’s an easy win. We’ll go and ask government for 50% or 80% or 100%. So, just be realistic and have your funding mix a realistic mix. So, looking at early on in the fundraising narrative and looking at where will my money come from from a capital campaign, just be realistic with what, if any, government involvement could occur.

I’ve talked, obviously, about e-surveys and staff, obviously. Again, just going back to that example before of the six degrees of separation, I had an organization previously that was in social welfare and we emailed all the volunteers. It turned out that one volunteer who had been coming for years and years to this soup kitchen, she was the wife of a billionaire. Nobody knew that. Nobody knew it at all. They didn’t really have very big emphasis on systems and processes and capturing all the data and information with the volunteering program.

So, when we came back in and we looked at our volunteers to act as champions, to act as ambassadors and advocates in the community, this particular person’s name struck me in particular because I simply knew the name. When we delved into who that was, it turned out to be the person we hoped it were. We ended up being able to put a very significant ask to somebody who arguably could have funded the whole campaign themselves had they felt so inclined. So, e-survey your staff and e-survey your volunteers. You’ll be surprised at what you’ll find.

Generating some ideas—this is the time to have blue sky thinking, folks. You’ve got your lead up to your capital campaign. This is the time to think about things you otherwise wouldn’t. Could you insert another direct mail appeal, not necessarily a crisis appeal, but an extra special appeal because you are trying to launch this capital campaign?

Could you do something like that during the course of your capital campaign or even in the lead up to it? Or could you host two gala evenings in a year? Could your annual gala event be done an extra time? I don’t know. That’s possible. It’s a big ask in those gala events, but less so in direct mail, perhaps. But those kinds of ideas you’ve got to at least put on a corkboard somewhere and decide whether they’re worth pursuing or not.

I just want to get into a couple of nuts and bolts around donor engagement. Catch and release or catch and bless are some phrases that I’ve heard, but basically, catch and release is all about donor engagement. It’s about actually getting in front of as many people as possible in the lead up to your capital campaign and telling them what you’re planning to do and gauging their interest. What traction do I have with my donors and my prospects that I should pursue or who is clearly not interested in the capital campaign and that particular vision?

So, looking at the catch and release is really, for me, about a major donor engagement plan. It’s about catching a certain select group of existing major donors because that’s generally who gives to a capital campaign and telling them face to face about your need. Getting in front of them, cultivating them and eyeballing them is so critical and important at that top end.

It’s trying to get to them in 30 days or you release them and move on. Again, as a hard and fast rule, it doesn’t necessarily have to be 30 days in your organization. It could be 45 days. It could be 20 days. It doesn’t have to be a certain set number of donors. It could be 10 donors, 20, 30, 40.

You wouldn’t necessarily ignore someone who you couldn’t get ahold of for 30 days because perhaps someone was on holidays or away on business or whatever, but the point being is you need to have a process that churns through people so that you can tell them as much as possible about your capital campaign face to face and tell as many of them as possible and gauge whether or not they’re interested.

You’re going to circle back to those people eventually to act as champions or certainly you’re going to point, perhaps, a fundraising consultant to them as part of a feasibility study. That’s one way of engaging major donors in that catch and release sort of phase.

The next thing I’d look at is clustering. One of the other things, again, you can do immediately when you finish up in the webinar is you can look at how can I cluster some major donors together? The idea is that you want to form a cluster. Those clusters could be around gift levels, membership, profession or geography.

So, to give you an example. I’m working with an international aid organization. In Sydney, there’s a financial district as there is in most large urban centers. What we’ve done is we’ve taken street by street the donors that we have on those streets and we have put corporate boardroom lunches to find champions and advocates on all those streets. So, we might have 25 donors who are on 2nd Street and we invite them to one place on 2nd Street because it’s only around the corner and we try that, same thing for 5th Street, 6th Street, 7th Street. We try all these kinds of things.

Again, these are things that you could do quickly in the lead up to your capital campaign to try and engage as many donors as possible to see what traction there is. Now you could also do that by profession, obviously. You can invite all of the law firms to a networking night within the law community, the law fraternity. You can do it that way.

You can even do this by suburb. So, you can even take a high net worth individual suburb and we all have them, areas where there’s perhaps more affluence than others. You could invite the 30 or 40, depending on the size of the house or the 10 or 20 people, to a donor event in a suburb in which they live or are adjacent to. Again, that’s proven very successful. That same international aid agency that I was working with, we did that for the chairman’s home.

We just simply invited who he . . . he happened to live in a very affluent part of town and we invited our donors that were in and around his home to a private function at his home, not too many people. I think there were about 40 at best. We got a very, very good return. That eventuated in around about $500,000 worth of pledges and gifts to the capital campaign we would eventually launch about six or eight months later. We circled back to that same group. So, again, just forming those clusters is a good idea.

Of course, I mentioned before about trying to just establish how your major donors are feeling. Are they feeling particularly vulnerable in business or economic climate? Are they feeling buoyant? Is their industry travelling well or are they not travelling well? Usually the newspapers can tell you those kinds of things about your major donors, so you should be looking at the newspapers, obviously, to see whether your donors are feeling confident or not.

A case for stretch gifts—just to be very clear, in a capital campaign, we’re looking at what we call stretch gifts. So, Mr. and Mrs. Smith who donate $10,000 a year to your annual fund, if you went to see Mr. and Mrs. Smith, you would say, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith, thank you so much for your annual gift. It’s greatly appreciated, here’s what it contributes. This capital campaign, would you be in a position to consider an additional gift of $10,000 a year for the next three years?

What might happen is Mr. and Mrs. Smith might say, “Look, we are in a position to do that. We could look at an annual gift as well as a stretch gift for this particular unique capital campaign,” or, “No, we’re not in a position to do that. You can have $10,000 a year for the next three years. You can put it towards your capital appeal or you can put it towards your annual fund. It’s a matter for you, but unfortunately we don’t have two lots to give.”

You need to test that proposition with as many donors as possible before you get to your feasibility study, before you get to your capital campaign. The idea is a stretch gift and hopefully the people at the top end are able to entertain notions of stretch gifts. They’re able to entertain a notion of a gift to your annual fund while also this unique, special fund.

The telephone—so many times major gift officers say to me and chief executives and board members, “I just can’t get to this major donor. I just can’t get to them. They’ve postponed five times.” One of the things you need to look at doing is you need to look at the telephone and look at conference calls. Again, with Cerebral Palsy Alliance, the group that I was referring to before where their place burnt down, we couldn’t get to all the donors they had. They’ve been going for 65 years. It was just too difficult to get to all of them, even with the advocates that we had.

We invited people to join in and listen to about what the new center would do. We got the mother of a child with cerebral palsy to speak, we got a board member to speak, we got a service manager to speak. We did this every month for a few months. It was a fantastic thing to do during what was a capital campaign. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t do that in advance of a capital campaign to tell them what’s coming down the road. I would encourage you to look at those kinds of things.

So, now we’re moving a little bit quicker. You’ll notice I’m moving through slides a little bit quicker because the process is getting quicker. We’re now losing time. We’re now at six months out, roughly. You’ve got to look at what we need to be doing next. One of the things that’s huge is to road test your CEO.

So, for fundraising managers, major gift officers, board members, things like that, putting your most critical or important major donors in front of your CEO when you perhaps are unsure of how that CEO will be in asking for money or they are reluctant to do something like that isn’t necessarily a prudent step.

A far more prudent step to road test your CEO is to simply give them an opportunity at any gift price to ask for a gift to your organization, to see how they perform doing that. It is just something that even you yourself might have to do if you’re new to the major gift space.

Again, road testing your CEO is something to do. I would suggest it’s not the wisest move to put a CEO that you have not been with on a major gift ask in front of one of your most critical donors in the first instance. I would suggest to you not to do that. I would suggest the easy wins that I just mentioned before.

Also looking at getting early, easy wins, so, again, as a little exercise, talk to a few of your organization’s closest donors and pre-solicit, perhaps, an annual gift and take your board member, take your CEO along, where you’ve cultivated that donor, where you know that donor is highly likely to give you the gift that you’re asking for, then bring in your CEO or a board member to close that deal, to give them a win and a sense of accomplishment and pride at any gift level. That will be something that they will enjoy and we’ll say, “See, that is something that we can do over and over again.” So, trying to get them eased into the process and not to make it as that three stooges slide was, too difficult right out of the gate.

And of course, letting them have it their own way—so, the other thing to look at, obviously, is a menu, a suite of ways that people could help. So, there’s a lot of different ways in capital campaigns that people can help, everything from hosting a function through providing introductions through to pro bono support. There’s a number of ways people can help and you’ve got to give them an opportunity to contribute in a way that they’re comfortable with doing.

So, there’s a couple things to look at for selling your campaign early on. I think one of the things that you need to look at is requesting meetings well in advance and taking money off the table. In this preparatory phase, you’re not really looking at a gift, necessarily, to the capital campaign because you don’t necessarily have all of the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed. I think taking money off the table, if it will secure you a meeting, is something you should consider doing.

The next thing I’d look at is the last one, number seven, to know your script and to be able to sell your case for support and deliver it in 20, 30 or 45 minutes. One of the tactics I would say to you in this process, if you talk to donors over the course of the next 12 months, is to really look at how much time they have with you.

One of the first things that I do when I meet with a prospective donor or existing donor is to say, “Thank you very much for your time. How much time have you got? I know we booked 45 minutes. Do you still have 45 minutes?” That donor might say, “I’ve got to be out of here in about 30 minutes to my next meeting.” Of course you know that after about 20 minutes, they’re going to start watching the clock because they’ve got a next meeting.

So, time check at the start of the meeting is a very fortuitous thing to do and then you can decide how much time you’ve got and how much you need to impart about the capital campaign to them, how many messages you think you can get across in the time that they’ve allotted to you.

Launching your charm offensive—it’s all about cultivation and stewardship. It’s all about showing people you care. This is something you should be doing in your annual major gift work anyway, but you need to really intensify it if you’re going to ask for stretch gifts, if you’re going to ask for gifts over and above the annual fund, then obviously really cultivating people, calling just to say thank you, sending little gifts, sending them notes in the post about program success or a service success that you’ve had and trying to personalize that content.

Handwritten notes, I still think are fantastic. A handwritten note from a board member, a handwritten note from a service manager, a handwritten note from a CEO, they are invaluable at any gift level and if you can keep pumping those out, I would encourage you to do so.

This is kind of a funny thing, some of you may have done this already from Asking Matters. So if you Google “Asking Matters” and have a look, it’s just a bit of fun, it’s what kind of asker are you. It’s a bit like reading your stars. There can be as much in it or as little in it as you wish, but it will give you a sense. It asks you a series of questions, what kind of asker will you be.

It’s just a bit of good fun, but if you’re not sure what kind of asker am I, am I the kindred spirit, the rainmaker, the go-getter, what kind of person am I in terms of asking? What kind of person is my board member or are my board members or my CEO? It’s just a bit of good fun to look at doing.

Talking about your needs at every event, so I want to just get in now to the communication side of things. So, we’ve all got these multiple platforms that we’re now keeping up on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and all of these kinds of things that we’re keeping up. It’s an opportunity, obviously, to convey a message consistently, but on the other hand, it’s also a huge pitfall where you don’t deliver messages consistently or clearly. Just be conscious of looking at those kinds of things and making sure that your uniform, that your message is delivered uniformly and is delivered consistently as well.

I just want to talk a little bit about the donor objections, I suppose, and getting those addressed early in your major gift engagement is important. So, if you’re face to face with one of your major donors or major prospects for your capital campaign and they express a degree of hesitation about what it is that you’re planning, one of the things that you can do, obviously, is push back eloquently around some of those possibilities of their objections, because if you walk out of the room without knowing what their problem is, when you come back to actually having to as them for a gift and it is critical, you don’t have a vital piece of information that you could have had months earlier.

So the other thing to ask is it the project that prevents them from giving a gift? Is it the organization, is it something you’ve done? Like the acquittal, have you not acquitted the last gifts they gave you? Is it the size of the gift? Is there something to do with the size of the gift that is, perhaps, a problem? So that stretch gift, maybe they can’t afford to give two. Or is it the timing? Is it that your capital campaign just doesn’t align with the philanthropic priorities that they have, the commitments that they have as well?

Where your capital campaign has impact obviously is something you need to keep in mind the entire time that you’re dealing with your donors, chasing what impact this will have, what difference will this make and getting people like the service managers, like the clients to talk about the difference that it’s going to make.

So, as you can see, we’re getting to the business end of things. We’ve got three months to go. Time is running out. This is where time becomes not your friend. If you’ve been behind budget or at budget, you might be feeling a bit of a time crunch at this point. If you’ve been ahead of budget, you might have launched quite a lot of initiatives around the capital campaign and that would be fantastic. For some of us, we won’t be in a position to have done as much as we want, so time does not become our friend.

So, really, what you should be doing at this point are these things that we’ve talked about. We mentioned this back in the space of around about 12 months to 10 months. These are the kinds of things that we should have been looking about. Delivering your narrative consistently, including your financial needs, being on government radar, and now starting to get involved with feasibility study planning. I do genuinely whole heartedly think that you should involve yourself in a feasibility study before you involve yourself in a capital campaign. They’re just simply invaluable, prudent tools to be done.

But if time is not your friend, my suggestion is to focus on your top five donors, focus immediately on your top five existing donors financially. Get the CEO involved, board members, whoever needs to be involved. Make sure if they that if they have a family foundation or a trust that you’ve acquitted their previous gift. Make sure that they’re fairly comfortable in their relationship with you. You really do need to focus on them in their entirety.

Give some relationships priority. What I would suggest to you at this point, time is not your friend. You’ve had to concentrate on those top five. Maybe you can widen it a little more to say your top 40 or 50 and look at drafting a feasibility study interview list. The consultant that you get in or people that you involve in your feasibility study will want to talk to a select group of donors. You choose who those donors may be and one of the things you need to assess very quickly is what is the state of our relationship with each of those.

So, then going and looking at those 40 or 50 donors that you do have and saying have we acquitted the last donation? Have we given them timely receipts? Have we invited them to the latest information evening? Have they received correspondence? When was the last time the CEO spoke to them? Things like that so that when it comes time to participate in a feasibility study, you have some sense of the status of your relationship with that individual donor or that particular donor.

Setting bespoke objectives for each, there’s no point in giving a major gift donor or a prospect a task or an objective that is outside of what it is that they are comfortable with doing. So, there’s no point in asking a lawyer, for example, to introduce you to an accountant, necessarily. They don’t necessarily know each other. There’s no point in asking a politician to necessarily introduce you to a celebrity. So, getting people to do bespoke objectives, things that they can help you with, is what you obviously want to do.

Finally, I would suggest to you to road test your capital campaign council. I do suggest you get feasibility study counsel and capital campaign counsel simply because I think external expertise is unquestioning the best way to go. I have in 20 years seen clients try to handle capital campaigns internally. Even the most well-resourced organizations can experience significant problems and need external counsel.

So, more often than not, I’ve seen it work with external counsel rather than an internally driven campaign. There are, of course, exceptions to that in universities, large, mature health and medical research organizations, but generally speaking, external counsel should serve you well. But in order to serve you well, you need to have field tested them.

So, maybe getting them in over the course of this 12 months to do a workshop or some brainstorming sessions or even sitting down and having a cup of tea and saying, “We’ve got 12 months before a capital campaign. What would you do if you were us?” Maybe getting half a dozen of them in to give you that kind of advice or to choose one or two and do a workshop and at least culturally, you’ll get a sense of their approach to their work, whether they culturally fit with you, whether they seem to have a track record that would be applicable to you, those kinds of things are important for you to look at.

So, this is an all-day workshop. We’ve tried to jam as much as possible into an hour. But I would like to leave you with a few takeaways. Hopefully what’s come through is the idea of starting early. It’s really the idea of planning. I go back to that earlier point I made at the top of the hour, which is to say that if you’ve got a long time to plan, there’s more likelihood of being successful because you will have the ability to plan A, plan B, plan C. Then you have to set dates that have things started or completed by.

For me personally, if I say that I’m going to do something by a particular date and I say it out loud to colleagues or clients, then I’m on the hook for that and I think you should place yourself on the hook for that because it has a way of motivating people in my experience. Obviously stating your narrative consistently and clearly and your financial narrative I include in that, and also to expect delays.

People are not available to meet. Somebody goes away on holidays, a project’s costings don’t come through quickly or you don’t have a client survey as quickly as you’d like, all those things. You need to expect some delays and then you need to prioritize your biggest donors. So, right from the get go, you need to think who is going to be involved financially in this campaign.

You need to make sure that you’ve stewarded them, you’ve cultivated them, that you’ve tried to engage them about what you’re planning to do as early as possible, as often as possible in that 12-month lead up time and try to establish how involved they will be with your capital campaign, if at all.

The obvious one that’s easier said than done is staying ahead of your annual budget. It would be fantastic if we were all ahead of budget all of the time, every month, every quarter. Sadly, that’s not the case, but if you can stay ahead of your budget, I guarantee you you will have more time to launch these initiatives in the planning of your capital campaign.

So, that’s about it for me, Steven. We’ve tried to jam as much as possible in there. I’m glad these slides are available to everyone. I think handing over to some questions and answers might be time. What do you think?

Steven:Yeah. That was awesome, Mark. I am amazed and impressed that you crammed all that into an hour. I’m definitely excited for you to build this into a workshop all day. Sign me up. This was a lot of good stuff in here. We’re getting a lot of good positive feedback as well. It is a little after 11:00, but I’m okay with a couple of questions if you are, Mark. I think it’s now 1:00 a.m. your time, so you tell us if you’re willing to take questions.

Mark:Yeah. I’m a bit pumped. I’ve motor-mouthed for an hour. I’m more than happy to answer some questions.

Steven:Let’s do a couple that way we don’t keep you up all night. Is it safe to say you’d be willing to take questions by email if we don’t get to all of them?

Mark:I am indeed. I’m more than happy to hand out my details.

Steven:Here’s one from Rita. Rita’s wondering about the role of the board specifically. Do you think the board should be expected, maybe even mandated to give towards this goal? What expectations do you set among the board to give to a capital campaign or a pledge to a capital campaign?

Mark:Well, it’s a good point that Rita raises. What is the expectation of the board? What was the board brought on board to do? Often times, position descriptions aren’t given to board members. It’s come on board, this charity and one mate says to another mate or one business colleague says to another business colleague and then they turn around and they’re fundraising. Some are quite resistant to that.

Rita raises a point about mandated giving. I do think you’re on the right track there, Rita, I think what you want to do, maybe using a bit of different language, obviously, is looking at a board target. Would the board consider taking personally on a 10% target or 15% target? The percentage can vary. I think that is something to canvas early because then you can say, “Look, 10% of this is going to get covered off by our board.”

If you were lucky, some of your top donors who may not be board members would also agree to kick in. You could very quickly find yourself at sort of pledges of 20 or 30% of your overall target. So, I do think, Rita, you should engage the board early on the idea of participating in the campaign and setting that target, what do they think. You can only ask.

Steven:Yeah. It never hurts to ask, right?

Mark:Correct.

Steven:Here’s a good one from Diane. Mark, you talked a lot about major gifts and major donors. Diane is saying several of her major donors have said they’re a little tired of hearing from them, maybe they have been over-solicited, perhaps. How do you deal with the issue of donor fatigue? You’re going into this capital campaign and it’s very soon after, perhaps, you’ve acquired a major gift or a gift from those major donors. Should you avoid those people if they have been recently solicited or should you just power through? What do you think there?

Mark:I think that’s equally a good point. I mentioned before about the story of the CEO who said to me, “Leave that particular major donor alone because that person’s good for our lead gift.” So, the question I would pose back is that understanding that you have of the donor the same as your CEO? So, what if your CEO is saying, “No, that person is good for the big gift,” or, “No, we should leave them alone,” but meanwhile, you’re thinking something the opposite.

Internally, there might be a disagreement about how you perceive the relationship with that particular major donor. I know it sounds very cliché, but I think you have an obligation as a fundraiser to tell your major donors what you’re planning as an organization to do and to say to them, “You are one of our most generous supporters. This program would obviously be a long way to succeeding if you were to contribute and I’d like to talk to you about that.”

The fact that you are 12 months out, 9 months out, 6 months out is you can, again, take money off the table by saying, “I don’t want to ask you for a gift but I want to have an in principle conversation about what it would take for you to give a gift.” You can then deal with those donor objections because if that person does say, “Look, we’ve just given you something recently. It’s a very large gift.”

Then it goes back to that donor objection about timing. They don’t have a problem with your organization. They don’t have a problem with the project. What they have a problem with is the timing.

So, what you might say is, “Look, we have got a three-year campaign planned. If we were to get to, say, $8 million of $10 million that we would need and we were to get to $10 million over the next 18 months, would you be able to be the hero? Would you be able to complete the final gift amount in, say, two and a half years’ time?” They might turn around and say, “Look, in two and a half years’ time, our other commitments would have subsided and we could entertain that gift.” So, you’ve definitely got to have that conversation.

Steven:Yeah. I love the advice of just letting the major donor know about the campaign and what you’re planning to do. You don’t necessarily have to ask then and there, but just making them aware seems like it would be really good just to keep then in the loop and maybe even prime the pump for that ask later on. I love that advice.

Mark, we’re about ten minutes over. I want to be respectful of everyone’s time. How can people get ahold of you since we didn’t get to all the questions?

Mark:I’m more than happy to start a conversation with people. So, my email address is a rather lengthy one. It’s [email protected].

Steven:Cool. I’ll send that in the chat and I’ll send your Twitter handle in case someone wants to tweet you as well. I would definitely encourage everyone to reach out to Mark and check him out.

Mark:Yes. Thank you very much. Just looking at the questions, thank you very much everyone for starting the morning off with me.

Steven:Yeah. Get some sleep, Mark. This was a really special thing for you to do for us and staying up late and making all this happen, and so we’ll send you something. Do you have Starbucks in Australia? Maybe we’ll send you a gift card.

Mark:We do. I don’t want a coffee break now, but I certainly would take a gift certificate to Starbucks at some point. I just wanted to say thank you, Steven, and thanks to Bloomerang for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks to everyone who tuned in and hopefully look forward to seeing some of you at AFP in the year ahead.

Steven:Yeah. If you see Mark at an event, let him know you’re on this webinar. Do check out that app in the app store. It’s really cool, definitely affordable and definitely will help you out. I’d love for some of you to download that if you want to check it out.

We’ve got a couple cool webinars coming up here in the next few weeks. We’re going to be talking about website landing pages one week from today. We’ve got Tom Ahern in two weeks talking about writing for emails and for social media appeals. It’s going to be really cool.

The one I’m really excited about three weeks from today is definitely a new one for us. We’re going to try a new format where we’re going to do an hour-long Q&A for those of you who are dealing with some of those disasters, some of the natural disasters like the hurricanes and the wildfires that are happening in the Northwest. We’re going to have a couple of disaster fundraising experts here to take your questions for the entire hour. We’re not going to have a formal presentation.

Definitely check that out if that us of interest to you or if applies to you. It’s definitely going to be a lot of fun and definitely insightful. So, check those out. We’ve got a couple other webinars you can register for as well. Hopefully we’ll see you again next week or sometime this month.

But for now, we’ll call it a day there. Have a good rest of your Thursday and a safe weekend and we will hopefully talk to you again soon.