Capital campaigns are major, long-term fundraisers that raise far more revenue than your typical annual fundraiser. These campaigns have two primary fundraising phases: the quiet phase, during which you will approach major donors for support, and the public phase, where you announce your campaign and gather donations from the general public. 

A successful public phase requires consistent, innovative, and comprehensive communications. To help your nonprofit understand and prepare for this capital campaign phase, we’ll review essential strategies to maintain positive, engaging donor communications.

Communicating During the Public Phase of a Capital Campaign

During the quiet phase of your capital campaign, you’ll raise the bulk of your funding from major donors. During the public phase, you’ll broaden your scope. Rather than having highly individualized, one-on-one conversations with prospects, you’ll turn to your wider target audience of donors, partners, and community members. 

However, you shouldn’t approach this phase like you would a typical fundraising campaign. Your public phase communication and engagement strategies still need to be clearly aligned with your broader capital campaign. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1. Understand the broader purposes of the public phase.

A successful capital campaign grows your organization’s capacity, improving your ability to pursue your mission. While you have already raised most of your funding during the quiet phase, the public phase allows you to increase your nonprofit’s visibility and help you gain and maintain community support. 

Think of it this way: The public phase of a capital campaign focuses on smaller donations that put your campaign over the finish line, but the overarching goal is to raise awareness, visibility, and energy for your nonprofit by celebrating the fact that the campaign is nearly funded.

In your public phase communications, you’ll ask for donations, but remember to focus heavily on engagement and impact. Consider all the ways that donations will make a difference—on the success of your campaign, your nonprofit’s long-term financial sustainability, and your community—and use these to guide your outreach and appeals.

2. Anchor all of your messages in your case for support.

Capital Campaign Pro explains that a case for support is “a clear and compelling set of ideas that literally make the case for why donors should give to your capital campaign.” 

Your case statement outlines the campaign’s broader rationale, argument, and context, which can be adapted for a range of different materials. You will develop your case for support early on in your campaign planning, way before launching the public phase. 

Treat your case for support as guardrails for all of your campaign communications. While the key concepts will remain the same, the way ideas are expressed will change as your campaign progresses. 

For instance, your development staff will use it during the quiet phase to guide personalized conversations with major giving prospects. Once you reach the public phase, your case for support will serve as a resource for distilling your appeals down to their essentials and shaping your marketing materials. 

Essentially, your case for support keeps your entire campaign on-message from start to finish, helping you present a unified argument and image to potential donors at all levels.

3. Offer multiple ways to engage.

To drive engagement and excitement, offer more ways to get involved than simply donating. Here are a few tried and true ideas:

• Peer-to-peer fundraising tactics
• Social media marketing and contests
• In-person, hybrid, or virtual events
• Volunteering opportunities

Determine how you’ll facilitate each engagement activity. Social media and email are reliable channels, but consider text messaging as well. For many organizations, texting is an effective way to fundraise through text-to-give, recruit new volunteers, and earn pledges via peer-to-peer texting tools. 

The main takeaway is to provide variety in what you offer to public phase supporters and how you offer it.

4. Prepare a library of marketing materials and tools in advance.

Compared with the quiet phase, the public phase is relatively short but high in energy and momentum. Once it’s in full swing, you’ll have little time to prepare marketing materials. Ensure you have a library of campaign collateral ready to go. 

Tools you may need include:

• A search engine-optimized campaign website that’s ideally up and running well before your public phase launch
• Professional-grade design software
• Email tools and social media schedulers
• A database or CRM for creating contact lists and tracking performance
• Mass texting tools for promoting events and supporting virtual fundraisers
• An online store to sell branded merchandise
• Virtual event and live-streaming software

Looking for expert guidance? A capital campaign consultant can help you gather the resources you need and create marketing materials like:

• Blog posts optimized to improve search results and attract more supporters online
• Email and social media templates
• Phone and text scripts for your team and peer-to-peer volunteers
• A library of campaign branding and design collateral
• Digital and printed materials to promote engagement events
• Brochures that focus on different angles of your case for support
• A variety of multimedia content, like one-pagers, videos, interviews, and more

Marketing materials such as capital campaign brochures and postcards are essential during your campaign’s public phase to communicate your goals to a broad audience. While you won’t use these materials during the quiet phase, prepare them in advance so you can hit the ground running when the public phase begins. 

5. Segment your audience for more efficient messaging.

Since your public phase involves broadcasting your campaign to a broad audience, you need to target your messages to the right donors. This helps you save time and money, while also maximizing results by getting the right appeals in front of the right people.

Public phase donor segmentation involves grouping donors based on their interests, enabling more effective targeting. Determine the characteristics you’re looking for in a supporter, build lists of donors who match those metrics, and then craft persuasive campaign messages based on past donor engagement metrics. 

Example engagement markers or characteristics you might use to segment donors include:

• Recency of donations
• Frequency of donations
• Size of donations
• Donor age or location
• How many people engage through social media
• History of volunteering for your nonprofit

Segmenting your audience by these characteristics can directly lead to more effective fundraising. For instance, rather than sending a blanket appeal for $20 donations to everyone, you can send tailored donation requests based on past contributions. If a donor regularly gives you gifts of $50, don’t leave money on the table by asking for less.

Capital campaigns help organizations take their operations and their missions to the next level. Communication is key to the success of these campaigns at all stages. However, the public phase is when your mass communication tactics and fundraising appeals need to get into gear. With these tips, you’ll be prepared to lay out a public phase communication plan that will help you reach and exceed your goals.

Frequently Asked Questions About Capital Campaign Public Phases

What are capital campaigns?  

Capital campaigns are large-scale fundraising initiatives conducted by nonprofits to secure funding for major capital investments. Capital campaign-funded projects often involve constructing new facilities or purchasing buildings or equipment. The overarching idea is that organizations periodically require significant funding infusions to expand their capacity and footprint over time. 

What are the phases of a capital campaign?

Capital campaigns are traditionally broken down into distinct phases:

1. Pre-Campaign Planning: Determining your nonprofit’s readiness to run a campaign, your campaign’s core objectives, and a working fundraising goal
2. Feasibility Study: Interviewing key stakeholders and prospects to gauge their interest in your campaign before diving into fundraising
3. Campaign Planning: Creating a complete campaign plan, including budgets, timetables, policies, and communication playbooks
4. Quiet Phase: Identifying prospective major donors, building your relationships with them, and soliciting gifts 
5. Kick-Off: Taking your campaign public by announcing your goals to the broader community, celebrating your progress, and explaining what’s still needed
6. Public Phase: Promoting your campaign far and wide, engaging your community, and securing the final donations needed to reach or exceed your goal
7. Post-Campaign Activities: Wrapping up your campaign by thanking everyone for their support, preparing final reports, and collecting pledges

How does the public phase differ from the quiet phase in a capital campaign?

During the quiet phase of a capital campaign, a nonprofit approaches major donors to secure large gifts. At this stage, the nonprofit has not yet publicly shared its intentions to launch a capital campaign to the wider community. 

In contrast, the public phase begins with announcing the campaign and involves seeking many modest gifts from moderate and small-dollar donors. The public phase is expected to generate approximately 20-25% of the nonprofit’s funding goal, with the remainder raised during the quiet phase.

Amy Eisenstein, ACFRE, and Andrea Kihlstedt are co-founders of the Capital Campaign Toolkit, a virtual support system for nonprofit leaders to run successful campaigns. The Toolkit provides all the tools, templates, and guidance you need — without breaking the bank.

Author: Amy Eisenstein

Amy Eisenstein, ACFRE, is CEO & Co-Founder of the Capital Campaign Toolkit.  She is a veteran fundraising consultant. With over 20 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, she’s published a number of books, including Major Gift Fundraising for Small Shops. Amy is also an in-demand keynote speaker and an engaging board retreat trainer and facilitator.

Mukundan Sivaraj

Mukundan (that's me!) is a writer at CallHub, an outreach platform that connects nonprofits with their supporters through voice and text messages. Mukundan’s focus on nonprofit technology and communication helps him show nonprofits, big and small, how technology can help elevate their cause.