Stalking the Elusive Mega Gift:
Is the Capital Campaign History?

Marianne G. Briscoe, Ph.D., ACFRE

Is the capital campaign a dinosaur? Or is it the only way to raise significant sums for buildings, endowment and special programs? Harvard University, which raised more than $2 billion in its recently ended campaign, is asking just that question. At a time when colleges and universities seem to be in perpetual campaigns, the biggest institutions are asking whether mega donors really need a campaign to make their major charitable investments.

Brakeley John Price Jones, our predecessor company, is said to have “invented” the capital campaign at the time of our founding in 1919 when we counseled Harvard’s first endowment campaign. We raised $14 million, the largest sum ever raised by an educational institution up to that time.

So we take a keen interest in the possible extinction of our invention. We do think close examination of the assumptions and strategies that under gird capital campaigning is a healthy thing. And we believe that some aspects of capital campaign “doctrine” are less effective than they once were. In newsletters to come, we look forward to exploring some of the enduring and, conversely, tattered and worn campaign conventions. But here let us think about mega donors.

Most mega gifts are the product of long, multi-part cultivation interactions between the prospect/s on one hand and, on the other, faculty and scientists, development executives, and senior academic management, including the President. By “long” we mean as long a time frame as ten years. We speak here of an academic setting because most mega gifts have been made to higher education, though recently there have been some noteworthy ones directed elsewhere, such as Joan Kroc’s significant bequests to Salvation Army and National Public Radio. And we believe that as other nonprofits become more adept at truly major gift strategies, mega donors will begin to invest in many more parts of the sector.

While campaigns are taking longer than they once did—there was a time when 12-24 months was the norm—few institutions can build a 3-5 year campaign around a mega donor’s typical cultivation timetable. So, as Harvard is exploring, if you want to focus on mega gifts, maybe you aren’t well served by a capital campaign.

But very few organizations have the luxury to focus their fundraising on mega gifts and those who might focus here are, in our view, ill advised to do so. Here’s why:

Mega donors start small

Mega donors rarely start out with mega gifts. We do a lot of our work in Silicon Valley where venture capitalists showed us how they structure their investing: find a company you think will be a winner and make an initial round investment. Watch how the company uses your money and if you like what you see, make a second round investment, and so on.

In a similar fashion, your biggest donors most probably got there by starting out with fairly small gifts and then making ever larger commitments when they liked what you did with their last gift. In capital campaigns we are seeing lead donors make their gifts incrementally as well. These prospects know the critical role their pledges play in campaign success, but they don’t want the entire campaign to rest on their commitments. So they will pledge a fraction of your lead gift “ask” and watch how the rest of the campaign progresses. If it moves forward they may respond positively to re-solicitation at critical points in the campaign.

This can be hard on a campaign director. Campaign doctrine teaches that we must get the lead gifts first and we must ask lead gift prospects for pledges at the top of the campaign gift table. If the lead donor is targeted for $20 million and pledges just $1 million, has everything turned to ashes, is the campaign in dire trouble? Or is this an incremental giver who first wants to see others step up? And how can we know? Most probably we can’t know for sure. But in today’s campaign world, our best strategy is to keep up the cultivation and stewardship of this prospect, to report regularly on campaign progress (as a good campaign would do in any case) and then to ask at a suitable interval, probably one year later, for a second commitment—even if the first one was a multi-year pledge.

Since mega donors start with small gifts, this means that there are future mega donors throughout your donor base. They are of varying ages and have been associated with your organization for varied periods of time. If you focus on prospects for $10 million gifts, you will of course be overlooking future mega donors who are only at the $50,000 level in their relationship with you. A good reason to continue using the capital campaign.

Transformative giving

We encourage clients to think about their big gift prospects as potential active investors in their organizations. They give to make something happen that could not occur otherwise. They expect to be treated as partners in that transformation. They may or may not want board seats, but they certainly want frequent opportunities to learn what is being done with their money, to get to know the people who are using it and, perhaps as well, those who are benefiting from it.

Transformational giving does not mean one more computer on the desks, another scholarship or fellowship, or a name on a room or even a building. Transformation means changing the way your organization addresses its mission. It may take computers or a building to effect a transformation, but that is not what we are offering to the mega donor.

It is a challenge for any organization to stay its course and diligently pursue its multi-year strategic plan while at the same time espousing an adventurous, transformative vision—or maybe even several of them. And it is harder still to do this in a way that has consistency and coherence, that doesn’t turn the organization into a simple pursuer of money for any plan that a prospect may espouse. Our British partner, Brakeley Ltd, calls this complicated, disciplined strategy “raising your game.”

Coherence and urgency

The planning work that supports your campaign should include considerable effort to craft that transformative future vision. Your case for support should show how the campaign gifts will change you into something better able to serve your mission. So a good campaign needs list can provide points of entry for donors who want to be part of a transformation. But campaigns do one more thing. Within the strategic plan and vision, they create a timetable and a deadline for raising the funds and addressing the needs and the future vision. Without the time structure or urgency a campaign gives, it would be very hard indeed to start a mega donor in training on the path of making those small and then ever larger gifts that build engagement with your organization and clear the way for eventual mega gift discussions.

So mega donors probably don’t need capital campaigns to move forward on their mega gifts. At that point in their philanthropic relationship with you they are probably beyond caring who else is giving. They are confident they are not the only major donors, and they can see how to make a difference in your organization in a way that is highly meaningful to them.

But that mega gift moment is ten years and in most cases one or two or more campaigns in the making.

The capital campaign may not be the motivation a mega donor needs, but the campaigns of the past may very well have been the way that together you and the donor reached the mega gift threshold.

At Brakeley Briscoe we’re not ready to give up on the campaign but we know it is changing and adapting year over year and client by client.