Episode 45: Campaigns - Understanding Case Statements

Welcome to another edition of “Around with Randall;” Your weekly podcast on making your

nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of

Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

It’s great to have you alongside for this edition of “Around with Randall”. Today’s Part 2 of our

monthly look at campaign work. In the first part, we talked a little bit about feasibility studies.

Next time, we’ll talk about kind of the way to look at how you structure your campaign with this

idea of one grand comprehensive campaign or how mini campaigns might be more effective.

We’ll conclude with kind of a new model that we’ve been playing with at Hallett Philanthropy to

better staff campaigns. I think it will be something to have more conversations about, but today,

we’re going to talk about the idea of case statements and case development, which sometimes

seems on paper to be the simplest, but ends up being the most complex and challenging in any

one of these four bigger conversation areas.

Case statements are really used to highlight what you’re trying to accomplish and most of you

probably already know that. Let me start with what I think is important in a case statement and

some thoughts or vantage points on some of those issues. Then we’ll jump into where the

challenges come from and why this gets to be more complicated.

So, a case statement starts with this idea of need. One thing that we have to become more and

more aware of as donors become more sophisticated is that we need specific need. What is it that

exactly we’re trying to accomplish? I’ve always found it easiest to work and to build a case

statement when we start with some kind of story. Is there an example out there? What is a

possible example of a situation that this case is trying to solve? So, in healthcare, it might be

something related to a patient or a family or a medical situation that needed solving. In

education, it may be allowing access to education or continuing to maintain great faculty. In

social services, it may be meaning that on the ground situation, food, shelter, safety, whatever

that might be. If we can tell a story as a part of this it makes it easier for users to understand.

Using examples of stories is like using a metaphor or simile. It creates in context, the need at an

emotional level, or at least at a level that the individual who’s reading the case or looking at the

case or listening to the case can better understand.

Next, we obviously need some facts, specifics again, and outcomes. I think the term outcomes is

not used enough. Outcomes are, if we’re going to do this, what are the things that we’re going to

realize? So, let me give you a couple of examples. Outcomes are things that are related to in

healthcare, we’re going to have more access for 50 more patients in this area, or people will have

to travel 250 miles less because we have this piece of equipment. You can even make it very

emphatic that something like a stroke where time is brain, meaning time has incredible value.

250 miles could be the possibility for someone to have a short-term disability or long-term

disability. In education, maybe access -- there’s a great commercial on television, I think from

Southern New Hampshire University where the President or Chancellor of the university is

giving a graduation speech and he mentions that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is

not. That’s a powerful case just in that little verbiage. Now the details need to be important, but

that’s pretty cool. How many meals will you be serving if you’re a food kitchen, in addition, if

you do whatever it is that needs to be done? How many more people could you house if you had

more facilities for a homeless shelter? It’s sometimes tough for non-fundraising leadership to

understand that outcome, that level of detail is so important because donors are asking questions.

What’s my money going to do? The more you affect, legitimately so, obviously the better your

case.

We need to spend a few minutes talking about who you are. What has your organization done in

the past? How are you solving these issues? What is it that your organization brings to the

community that’s unique? What are some of your successes? The costs involved should be a part

of this. What’s it going to cost to do whatever it is? I think sometimes we don’t properly account

for costs. So, if you’re building a building, are you taking into account the idea of what I call

funded depreciation? One of my mentors many years ago, before I’d ever heard anybody else

ever talk about it said we’re going to build in 10% of the total cost in what he called funded

depreciation, basically it was an endowment. He was going to hold that endowment for five to

seven years because the building would be new and wouldn’t need quite as much. That money

then would be present for all the kinds of things that were necessary. And that any capital

projects that occurred had to have funded depreciation or an endowment for the building –

brilliant! What other costs should be a part of this for ongoing support? Not to be disingenuous

or over the top, but we need to be honest about what these costs are because this campaign effort

is not just a fund tomorrow, but the future and that future has expenses that we should be

accounting for. I think the other thing that needs to be discussed is what kind of funding are we

really looking for when we talk about costs?

I’ve had clients in the past who have needed to build a campaign for some kind of physical

structure and all of a sudden somebody did kind of an accounting, maybe a third of the way

through the campaign and realized that they were taking an immense amount of planned gifts.

That should be part of this process in developing case. While that’s great for the fundraiser to

say, oh, we’ve raised this money for planned giving and can be part of the campaign. If the

money can’t be accessed, then what is the value of the campaign? In the same regard, having

things like the funded depreciation or Chairs can absolutely be partially funded by planned gifts

or deferred gifts, meaning we don’t get the money today. We don’t get it until there’s an event at

some time in the future, usually a death of some sort. We need to use different financial vehicles

and that requires some thought. If you need planned giving to be a part of it, then your

organization needs to be honest about what it needs the money for and if you need the cash

today, then taking a bunch of bequests is going to be a problem. Should you be having things like

lead trusts, where you get the money on the front side and you’re paying for some type of interest

until there’s a death, so you have access to that capital. Should you be taking out a loan as a part

of this process as an organization and some of those estate gifts will fund that? Do you have that

cost structure layered in? So, a lot of different conversations that have to occur in this really

under-discussed and important conversation.

The last thing is what you use the case statement for. So, we’ve talked about the need and the

story and the facts and the outcomes, really specifics, what we’re trying to accomplish costs and

how we feel affiliate that. Certainly, case statements are used for feasibility studies, which we

talked about in the last edition. They’re kind of a catalyst for someone to have a conversation

about does this make sense to you? Do you like it? Do you see yourself funding it? At what

level might that be possible? Certainly, when you’re in an active fundraising process, it’s used as

collateral material, no big surprise there. A honed down version, a mini version is an elevator

speech. If someone says, what are you trying to do? You, in 15 seconds can come up with

something that lays out here’s what we’re trying to accomplish.

All of this at this point, maybe well, this is pretty pro-forma -- why is this interesting? Legitimate

question! I don’t think case statement development is all that controversial, again on paper. The

problem becomes when you actually try to execute it. The challenge usually is the fundraising

office versus the rest of the organization. It’s not because you don’t like each other. It’s not

because you can’t get along. It’s not because you think the other side is not on the same mission

driven page. It’s just that you see it differently.

So, let me walk you through a couple of examples and then that’s going to lead us right into the

tactical as some things that you can do to be a little bit more effective. I was working on a

recently on a campaign for a new facility and we’d laid out the case statement and laid out the

timeline. We weren’t interviewing yet. We were waiting for finalization approval of that case

statement. I think 90% of it is pretty good and all of a sudden, the organization says, hold on a

minute, we’re going to move the entire project. Well, that was kind of harmful to the timeline and

the foundation, who had kind of began to build towards this idea of when a campaign could start

and had started looking at projections. Really what it came down to is that the organization didn’t

have a full understanding that this particular foundation was really gearing up using the

opportunity for a very large campaign to budget for itself, going forward, both revenue and

expense, planning how gift officers’ portfolios would look, reaching out into the community

beginning those conversations with community leaders and all of a sudden, this whole thing

comes to a stop. It was all on the case development, because I kept saying, we got to get this

approved before we can go out publicly and it wasn’t until somebody finally said we can’t

approve it and here’s why. There are two things I learned. So, this is kind of one of your first

tactical things… is that the chief development officer wasn’t at the right table. We thought she

was, but there was another table of conversations occurring that we weren’t quite as aware of and

all of a sudden it was at that other table where some of these issues were being developed to

realize we’d be better off moving the whole project somewhere else. Well, that had a cataclysmic

change to what the next six months would look like for that foundation. So, you think the process

is simple, but it’s more complicated -- getting to those outcomes.

We talked about some of the specifics that are necessary, and you think, well, this will just be

easy. Well, it’s hard to articulate this. I’l give you a great example from several years ago when I

was working as a point person as a chief development officer in an academic medical center. We

had these initial conversations across the country about the concept of population health, and

there was a great big push. We need money for population health, and I would sit through

meetings, and I’d say all of this is great. I understand what you’re trying to do. We’re trying to

reduce costs. We’re trying to be the leader as a large academic clinical center in the community

regarding those who need access to healthcare. I think that’s terrific. If we get them early, it costs

less which is good for everybody. Good for reimbursement, less cost on either the commercial

payer or government Medicaid/Medicare pay side. But can you maybe tell me what the money’s

going to be used for? It was the most frustrating example of case development that I’ve ever dealt

with because I couldn’t get anybody to tell me how they were going to spend the money

physically. What were the outcomes? Well, we just need it so we can invest in the community.

What are you going to do with it? And because the term nationally population health had become

so entrenched in kind of the desire of what we should be looking at in healthcare. Nobody could

articulate what it actually was. It took about a decade for there to be the concept of clinics in

underserved populations and how there would be communication and even partnership into

clinics in those areas and that big, huge academic medical centers may not have credibility in

those communities so how do you build the relationships? It became much more defined.

In capital campaigns, being able to get the end user, so in healthcare -- the clinician, in education

-- the educator -- a scholarship or endowed chairs, HR, Provost, if it’s a soup kitchen -- meals, if

it’s a homeless shelter -- beds. How many of these things will the campaign provide that will

make a difference for how many people? I’ve come to appreciate that the smaller the

organization, the easier it is to get this answer. The challenge is they don’t think big enough and

the bigger the organization -- they have great visions, great dreams, great possibilities, but boy,

it’s hard to get that detail. It’s like 51 committees, we’ve all got to go through. We need to get

better at creating a healthier, more robust, more consistent partnership with end users in

philanthropy, particularly when it comes to campaigns, because case development at the end of

the day is all about what are we trying to accomplish? How are we going to do it? And it’s

frustrating to no end when I am all too often partnering with the foundation or development

office, and it seems like we’re the ones trying to tell them how to do their job. That’s not the way

it should work.

The last thing I want to comment on very quickly is the length. The larger the campaign, the

longer, the length of the case statement. If you’re trying to do a $2 billion university-wide

comprehensive campaign, you’re going to end up with some pretty serious collateral material,

some length, but all too often, really what we need is about a page and a half or two. Then we

develop the relationship and bring in the content experts to develop the emotional content. So,

when I talked about need and facts and you know who you are as your organization and what the

costs are and the outcome. I’m really talking about doing it in a very concise way. Most people,

studies show, don’t want to read immense amount of information so we need to condense this as

much as possible. If you’re looking to say, well, how do I do this? 

The next podcast will be this thought around mini campaigns, meaning having multiple smaller campaigns going at different stages versus a comprehensive campaign. That has a direct effect on the length of the case

statement, because if you are doing a lot of mini campaigns, you can have 3, 4, 5 different case

statements, all about a page or page and a half working at different stages of development or

usage. The other reason to keep this in mind is that things move fast, particularly faster today.

So, that’s part of the reason mini campaigns will be discussed in the next podcast, but my advice

is keep it shorter, the shorter the better, tell stories, infographics, pictures, along with some of the

details. The more you put those types of things in, the better off you’re going to be I promise.

This was kind of a look at case statements. Some of the things we’re seeing and feeling in the

industry. Next time we’ll tackle mini and comprehensive campaigns. Then finally, kind of a new

way of looking at a feasibility and campaign council, maybe a cost savings, as well as a better

ROI.

As we always do, please make sure that you take a look, as a reminder, about the blogs 90-

second reads, post them probably every two-three days -- opportunity for you to kind of catch up

on different aspects of our industry, different things going on, maybe something to be thought

provoking.

Also, if you want to reach out to me, please feel free to do so. That’s

podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com or if you totally disagree with me, or if I miss something, my

homage to Clark Howard, “Clark Stinks”. “Randall Reeks”, no pun intended by the rhyme, but

nevertheless reeks@hallettphilanthropy.com. I love to hear what you think.

I conclude every podcast, the same way with an old Gaelic saying, “Some people make things

happen. Some people will watch things happen. And they, then there are those who wondered

what happened.” We fall into a category every moment we’re breathing into one of those three.

I’ve come to truly understand that. The great thing about fundraising, philanthropy, development

-- however you want to look at it. Foundation work is where people who make things happen for

those who are wondering what happened. I can’t imagine going through life thinking that what I

was doing wasn’t helping others. I hope you feel the same way. I hope you realize that you are

doing really incredible things to make that possible. And if you need a moment or two don’t ever

forget, if we go all the way back to the case statements about outcome. Always think about that

outcome, even when you need it as a reminder of why you do what you do, because you are

making a difference. I appreciate your time today 2 of 4 on campaigns. We’ll jump into the third

part next time in the next podcast, right here on “Around with Randall”, make it a great day.