Campaign Success Is Built Before It’s Announced

A quick online search provides countless recommendations for planning communications to support a fundraising campaign. All speak of research, audience, objective-setting and messaging, and none are wrong. They’re just incomplete.

Here’s what I see – audiences you need to reach in your campaign, information you need them to know to drive support, channels you should use to reach them. All important elements.

Here’s what I don’t see – building organizational reputation and trust, mitigating reputational risk, or training all who may be involved in the campaign on how to share messages consistently.

In short, what I’m not seeing is campaign communications planning being filtered through the public relations lens.

The pattern that quietly sets a campaign back

The pattern that often emerges (and what we have heard in dozens of conversations) is one in which an institution completes strategic planning, builds the case for support, secures lead gifts in quiet phase and then turns to communications for launch, expecting the public environment to be ready.

But creating a public environment built on confidence and trust takes years, not months, and the work of building it is its own discipline.

While public relations principles can be applied at any point of a campaign, it’s best if they’re applied from the very beginning. The goal should be creating an environment in which a campaign’s success feels inevitable.

Communications is more than launch-day publicity

Much of what’s written about campaign communications defines it narrowly as the tools and tactics for talking about the campaign once it’s underway—a case statement, a launch announcement, a steady cadence of updates to donors, publicity for public launch. This approach is not wrong but falls short of recognizing communications’ foundational role in early campaign phases to shape the environment for successful fundraising.

A campaign-ready environment takes years to build

Building that environment requires time and intentionality; it’s not as simple as flipping a switch at public launch. It includes ingredients such as:

• An institutional reputation that makes a major gift feel safe
• A public presence that makes ambition feel credible
• A base of awareness broad enough that the community is primed for public launch

These can each take years to establish, but by the time most organizations turn to communications, they’re asking to announce a campaign – when time could have been spent during prior phases making that campaign feel inevitable.

Where public relations adds value

This is where a public relations focus can add value to the campaign. Taking a page from communications science, teams like ours create ideal conditions for solicitation, including the visibility and credibility that influence how a donor receives the ask.

That can take many forms and depends partly on the phase of a campaign. In our experience, it looks like:

• Research in the quiet phase to understand community awareness and perceptions of the institution and its capital project, which could inform a communications strategy and, eventually, the public launch.
• National media outreach to position the nonprofit as a thought leader in new markets where awareness was previously low among prospective donors – including potential lead donors.
• Workshops to help leaders adopt the campaign narrative and use it with confidence, while maintaining composure under the pressure of tough questions.
• Community activations to reach new or different audiences and move them to donate in the public phase.

In some instances, we are working directly with advancement teams to develop campaign collateral. In others, we’re never touching the campaign materials directly at all. What’s consistent is not our proximity to the ask but that the focus of our work is aimed at the environment around it.

Communications work of this kind is often assumed to be unmeasurable; in our experience, when it’s built early and deliberately, its effects are visible in exactly the conditions a campaign depends on.

Questions to ask in early campaign phases

So, the question for an organization entering its first phases isn’t whether the communications function is present. It’s whether that function is shaping the campaign’s direction from the start, rather than waiting downstream to publicize decisions already made.

A few questions worth posing to yourself and your team:

• Is communications helping shape campaign strategy from the planning phase, or brought in at launch to execute it?
• Is someone accountable for the organization’s public reputation and environment well before the campaign goes public?
• Are you building broad awareness and credibility now, while there’s still time for it to compound, or treating it as a launch-phase activity?
• Have you identified the reputational risks that could surface mid-campaign, and is anyone watching for them?
• Does the eventual campaign story rest on a public foundation you’ve been building for years, or one you’ll be assembling under deadline?

Build that foundation in the phases before the announcement, and the launch becomes what it should be: not the start of the work, but the visible result of work already done.

Tags:Research|Strategic Planning