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Capital Campaigns: Everything You Need to Know

by Linda Lysakowski, ACFRE

The Campaign Cabinet & Other Campaign Volunteers
Part Ten

Once the campaign plan is in place, the organization can start recruiting volunteers to help implement the plan. While the role of staff and board will be important during the campaign, the role of volunteers is critical to success and should not be undervalued.

Involving key community leaders as volunteers in the campaign will assure that the entire community will get involved. Recruiting the right campaign chair is the first step in getting community leaders involved.

A chair who is well known and respected in the community will be able to use his or her influence to recruit other community leaders to serve on the campaign cabinet. (The cabinet is also sometimes called the campaign advisory committee, or the campaign board.) The chair should be someone who has the passion for the organization so that he or she can speak with enthusiasm about the project and the organization.

Leadership qualities are also important, as the campaign chair needs to motivate and inspire all the other cabinet members as well as the volunteers who will be involved in the campaign. In many cases, there will be co-chairs of a campaign or a chair and vice chair. The organization should carefully evaluate the reasons to include more than one person as chair, as this will require a little more coordination, and clear roles need to be defined for each person in a leadership role.

It is critical to recruit the chair before enlisting others to sit on the campaign cabinet, because people will be reluctant to get involved if they don’t know who will direct their efforts. The right campaign chair(s) can be very influential in recruiting the rest of the cabinet. Once the campaign chair is in place, the other cabinet positions can be filled.

Working with the organizational structure described in an earlier article, chairs must be recruited for each division within the campaign. It is strongly recommended that each committee has two co-chairs. Sharing the workload makes it easier to get people to agree to chair a committee, and helps assure attendance at campaign cabinet meetings by at least one of the chairs. Division chairs must be carefully selected to suit the needs of the committees they will be heading.

For example, the chairs of the leadership gifts division should be people who will make a leadership level gift themselves and have the contacts and influence to talk with others with leadership gift capability. Likewise, chairs of the special event committee need to be people with strong organizational skills, who know how to run a successful event.

Each prospect for a division chair should be discussed with the campaign chair(s) to determine if this person has the right qualities and if the Chair(s) feel this candidate is a good choice to head that specific division.

It will be critical to have developed the position descriptions and timelines for each division before recruiting chairs of those divisions. The chairs of each division will then recruit enough volunteers to handle the task they have accepted.

Divisions who will undertake face-to-face solicitation should always follow the rule of one volunteer for every five prospects that are to be seen. In some cases, especially at the leadership gifts level, solicitors may even call on fewer than five people, because the size of the gifts being solicited will require numerous visits before the person is prepared to make a commitment.

Depending on the number of potential donors in a division, it may be necessary to have a structure of team leaders within the division who will recruit additional volunteers. For example, if the small business division has 500 prospects to solicit, they will need 100 volunteers, so rather than have the chairs try to recruit 100 volunteers for their division, they can recruit 20 team leaders who will in turn each recruit five volunteers, thereby assuring that all prospects can be visited personally.

Often in a campaign there will be hundreds of volunteers involved. Although this sometimes sounds like a daunting task to staff and identify volunteer leadership, it can be accomplished easily by following a simple step-by-step process:

• Establish the campaign divisions, based on the potential donors of the organization and the scale of gifts.
• Determine the number of prospects in each division.
• Determine the number of volunteers needed to accomplish these solicitations (number of prospects divided by 5).
• Recruit the chair and vice chair of each division.
• Determine if team leaders are needed and assist chairs to recruit them.
• Have team leaders recruit volunteers.

Once all volunteers are recruited for each division, they will need to be trained in techniques of making the “ask.” Even volunteers who have a lot of campaign experience will need to attend strategy sessions and help develop the appropriate strategies to solicit prospects.

The campaign cabinet needs to meet regularly: monthly, bimonthly or quarterly depending on the size and scope of the campaign. Divisions should meet individually between meetings. It will be very important to have regularly scheduled meetings in order for the divisions to report on progress, discuss developments within the organization and the project, and inspire and motivate volunteers. Regular communications between meetings will be important as well. Staff and campaign leadership should be in communication by phone and/or email in order to assess progress and assure that committees are following the strategies for keeping the campaign on track. It is important for volunteers to celebrate successes in the campaign, both small and large. And, of course, at the end of the campaign, there should be a volunteer celebration event.

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