A successful fundraising campaign can create lasting momentum, but sustaining it requires planning ahead. Building post-campaign strategy into your campaign roadmap can help maintain donor engagement, strengthen your pipeline, and position your organization for continued fundraising growth.
With campaigns usually lasting anywhere from three to seven years, it’s hard to think about what happens after the campaign is complete while your team is knee-deep in the campaign work. But when is the right time to think about your post-campaign world and what happens next?
As a best practice, the initial framework of post-campaign fundraising should actually be embedded in the campaign plan roadmap itself. Significant fundraising doesn’t stop when the campaign ends; therefore, it is important to devote time to envisioning the fundraising program you want to create coming out of campaign.
Visioning for Your Post-Campaign Work
Beginning with the campaign roadmap, create an outline for your post-campaign plan that preliminarily looks at these questions:
- If you are planning to staff up at some level to accommodate the increased pace and workload of a campaign, how might you redeploy these staffing resources post-campaign to drive sustained, exponential annual fundraising growth?
- What is your current annual run rate pre-campaign, and what is your annual run rate goal coming out of campaign?
- How will you identify and articulate funding priorities coming out of the excitement of a campaign and its “wow” vision? How will you work with senior leadership well in advance of the campaign end to develop the next set of funding priorities that continue to inspire donors? Is there a mini or sprint campaign that can fill the post-campaign void?
- How will warm and engage future major donors during the campaign so that they can fill the void created post campaign when your biggest donors are locked into multi-year pledges? How will you identify and strategize around the emerging donors who will step up post campaign?
- What is your stewardship plan for your campaign donors, and when will you begin to talk to them about their next gifts following the fulfillment of their campaign pledge?
- How will you unwind campaign volunteer groups such as your steering committee? What will you do to keep those volunteers connected?
- What operational programs, systems, and procedures have you put in place for the campaign, and which ones will stop and which will continue as is or in an evolutionary fashion?
The Day After Your Campaign Starts Now
There is no way for you to have complete answers to or strategies around any of these questions early in your campaign, nor should you. How the campaign itself evolves will impact how you address each question. Instead, these questions should be dynamic throughout your campaign. Set time aside with your team and campaign counsel to revisit the questions every six months or so, fleshing out the answers as the current campaign unfolds and sheds light on “what’s next.” Make sure you involve your entire team, or at the very least, all the key operations players and frontline fundraisers. You will want, and in fact need, buy-in from the team to achieve your desired post-campaign results.
Ultimately, your campaign and what comes next are not two distinct bodies of work. They are the ongoing milestones in your organization’s fundraising journey, and your campaign roadmap is the throughline that breeds continual improvement and success. BWF can help you build a post-campaign strategy that strengthens your pipeline, sustains donor engagement, and positions your organization for continued growth.
