If you’ve been involved in a capital campaign, you know the power behind it.

It is urgent, compelling, exciting, and structured. This combination has elevated the capital campaign above other fundraising strategies in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. There’s so much riding on it that volunteers, leadership, staff, and donors all invest time and resources to make it happen. It’s the summit of fundraising.

But what if a building isn’t in your plans? There’s still a way to harness this power.

A capital campaign makes your dreams reality. It can also affect the rest of your fundraising in extremely powerful ways by:

• Inspiring your current donors to make major commitments
• Recruiting new donors
• Activating volunteers to fundraise for the organization
• Motivating middle donors (and sometimes membership level donors) to make a stretch gift

Best of all, your organization can emerge from a capital campaign with a true major gifts program in place where there wasn’t one before. We’ve seen it happen many times.

But even if you don’t need a building, you can still harness the power of the capital campaign to fund BIG dreams….and reap the benefits to your overall major gifts strategy.

Say your organization has a big idea for change. Maybe it’s an entirely new program or rolling out a program to a larger audience. Maybe it’s hiring a team of activists to do something BIG.

Or maybe it’s something concrete, but not as big as a capital campaign: a kitchen renovation, a new fleet of vehicles, or specialized equipment for research.

You can still take the classic pieces of the capital campaign to attract major gifts to resource your big idea. Think here about the value of a strong and compelling case statement, a volunteer steering committee that solicits multi-year gifts, and the intense personal solicitation – all things you need for any major gifts effort.

If a campaign structure can be activated for bricks and mortar, why not for big dreams of real and lasting change?

You don’t want to make something up out of the thin air just to do this campaign. And you certainly don’t want to create a campaign for “business as usual”. You want this special initiative campaign to be something that meets these five criteria:

1. It’s a really BIG dream: A special initiatives campaign will only work if your organization is thinking transformational. We’re not talking about funding for next year or for adding another case worker on to the payroll. We are talking about a large leap that will be a game-changer.
2. It has demonstrable impact: A capital campaign is effective because people can see the outcome in a building. You need to show what these major gift dollars will do for the world (not for your organization) in a very specific way.
3. It has urgency: This campaign has to be around something that is urgent, something that has to happen now. Your job is to show the opportunities that may be missed without major donor commitment.
4. It has the support of your program staff, executive, and board: Like a capital campaign, in order to launch an effective special initiative campaign, you need the support of the entire organization. The program staff, in particular, has to help you drive the urgency and the need for investment.
5. It resonates with your donors: Most capital campaigns have an element of feasibility testing. (If you’d like to know more about feasibility studies, take a look at this classic post Ann wrote). A campaign for a special initiative would also need to have some sort of evaluation of what donors find valuable, especially if you want them to commit to helping you fundraise.

The key? Really good organizational planning.

You and your board and program team need to know what the BIG dreams are for your organization.

If you’ve got big dreams in your back pocket in the form of an ambitious strategic or program plan for the future, be thankful and get going.

But if you don’t, start the conversation this way…See if you can ask your program staff what they would do if money were no object. What strategy would they put in place if someone handed them $5 or 10 million?

That conversation could start the journey to a BIG major gifts campaign.

This post is part of a three part series. For more on this idea of a special initiatives campaign check out this companion post. The next post in the series will tell you how to put this kind of campaign in place.