Episode 202: Case Statements - And not Just for the Formal Large Campaigns
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community.
And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
I can't tell you how appreciative I am for you to be able to join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall.
I want to talk a little bit today in our 20 minutes or so around case statement development. But I don't mean it from the perspective that I think most of us in the philanthropic world understand it. The traditional model of a case statement has always been around or just used in capital campaigns or large campaigns—a multi-page, beautifully laid out document. And they have their purpose in campaigns, which I'll talk about here in a few minutes.
But I'm talking about a more nuanced way and the rationale of why we should be using very short, one- to two-page case statements with much of what we do on a daily basis. Tilly is it applies to major gifts that can include principal gifts, planned gifts, anything in the larger gift conversation, and in particular, the process of developing relationships with individuals who might have gift interests at those levels.
So let's start with kind of the bigger picture here. Why is this really important? Well, the first thing is that I think it really pushes inside an organization the creation or the ability to be aligned. What do I mean by that? I've used this platform, the podcast, as well as my blogs, to talk a lot about this. I certainly wrote about it in my book, Vibrant Vulnerability.
All too often, not only when I was a practitioner, but especially as a consultant, what I find is that philanthropy is not aligned with the clinical enterprise. You could also say that the clinical enterprise is misaligned with philanthropy. What I generally see is that philanthropy is trying to figure out how to raise money. They understand that the higher-level gifts, those transformational gifts—again, not a dollar figure—where people's emotional connection is at a higher level because they're genuinely interested in the organization and the purpose. It's hard to have those conversations when we don't have alignment. We don't know what's needed, and are those things that are needed, maybe from an educator or a clinician—if it's in healthcare—a frontline director who's maybe managing part of a program? Are they actually going to get approved?
Let me give you a couple of examples. I have a new client that I'm working with. We're having conversations around this alignment, and they have a number of regionalized fundraisers. They're beginning to ask questions with the new head of the philanthropic office. Well, if you want to have these discussions, what are we going to ask for? And the new philanthropic leader, who I've known for a number of years, is also asking that question. It's now being pushed back into the administrative team, the executive team of this nonprofit, and I'm helping to start those discussions.
Hey, you can't go ask somebody for $500,000 if you don't know what you're going to use the money for. If you push into a process that can help elevate case statements, that would help the conversation. So that's at the elemental level.
Let's take another client, and they're a little bit further down the road. They were going through these same issues as client number one. What they've gotten into is they have asked me to get involved with their kind of mid-level leaders, the department leaders, so to speak. I'm building out a two- to three-page case statement for each department conversation. What do you want? What's it mean? Things of that nature. I'm going to develop probably eight different two- to three-page case statements.
What's beginning to become very apparent, particularly with the person who oversees these department chairs, is that this process is going to help the organizational leadership team, the executive team, have really robust discussions about what the department chairs want and whether that is actually what the organization should do. So it's forcing alignment conversations.
The first thing is that we misalign all too often when we are trying to figure out what we can go have discussions about. We'll get to the idea of how we should really send a donor's passion first, but we have to tie that back to something the organization's doing. This misalignment issue becomes catastrophic for philanthropy. As I talk about in my book and I teach in any place I can, we have to reorient how we talk about philanthropy from an ROI perspective. Don't ever use the cost to raise a dollar. If we want our higher ROI (return on investment), we have to go ask larger sums of money from a smaller group of people. The number of people making those gifts, who are making most of our money, is decreasing.
And to do that, this higher level of philanthropy requires an understanding of what we're asking for and the outcomes that are coming from it. So the first point is it creates alignment.
The second thing is it allows us to have a series of mini-campaigns. Now, I am not against the comprehensive campaign. We mentioned at the top of this podcast that the traditional thought process behind a case statement is a book. I think about a university because they do it really well. They produce an enormous book for a $2 billion campaign, a $1 billion campaign. If you're doing that, that's great. But most nonprofits never get to that level, and they're too segmented, meaning internally there's too many different departments.
Think about the story I just told you about a client where I'm actually developing two or three case statements—excuse me, six or eight case statements, two or three pages apiece—of all the different things these departments need. It's actually a series of small, mini-campaigns identifying a smaller group of people among the constituents, the donors, and the prospects in each of these areas.
Now, if there are overlapping needs—let's say it's technology, as just a generalization—then we could do something bigger with a larger dollar figure. But each individual department is going to need specific things that are going to help them move the mission forward for that particular organization.
The power of these mini-campaigns is that think about all the different things that gift officers can go talk about, that the head of philanthropy can go talk about because they know exactly what this department needs and this department needs and this department needs. We’re going to circle back to this passion conversation and tie this all together here in a moment.
Mini-campaigns are where most organizations should be, whether it's three or four campaigns—one starting, a couple in the middle, one ending—and they're all $150,000, $200,000, or maybe they're a million or a million and a half each. Most places need more of a mini-campaign approach where they're moving things along as they go.
So think about how that looks in terms of your organization and creating more opportunities for conversation.
The third and final reason that case statement development—in kind of a new way of thinking about it, shorter—is that it gives us something to get opinions on. In multiple podcasts, I have talked about the fact that we talk too often to people and not with them. Sometimes it's really awesome, particularly with those who are community leaders who have a strong passion for maybe a community, but they're trying to figure out how to make the community a better place. Maybe it's the fact that they love your organization, but they like to feel vested in the process to have something to say instead of, “Why don't you give us money for X?”
How cool would it be to hand someone a two- or three-page document and say, “I don't want any money. We're trying to accomplish this. Would you be willing to read it and give me your impressions? Is this something that we should do? Are there holes in this? Where are we missing things? What would you add to it to make it more powerful?”
Going back to what I tend to say often when I teach, the old adage is, “If you want someone's advice, ask them for money. If you want their money, ask them for advice.”
Some of the best gifts that I have been so blessed to be not responsible for—because it was the donor who made the gift—but the facilitator for the conduit from A to B, from the donor to the nonprofit, both as a consultant where clients call me and sometimes help them ask more, particularly from my days as a practitioner, stemmed or started from the promise of me asking them what they thought about something. Sometimes even taking them half or three-quarters of the plan and saying, “We got some holes. Can you help me fill them?”
Even if I knew, or the organization that I was working with or for knew what those holes were, making someone buy in is really, really important—particularly for aiming for more transformational, high-level emotional contact, content, and engagement with donors—those transformational gifts.
Well, how do we do that if we don't have something for them to contemplate, to look at, to give feedback from? This is where these smaller case statements come. They can be read very quickly. They can be in a restaurant, say, or a cup of coffee, your favorite Starbucks or whatever coffee place you go to, and say, hey, read this for five minutes. What do you think? And it allows for a conversation. Well, is there this? That all of this is to say that in this process, getting people to buy in comes from getting their opinions about what they think, and these small case statements can be incredibly powerful.
So just before we get to the tactical, the bigger picture, the philosophy is that lots of small case statements, two to three pages, allow you to align the organization, get from those on the front line what they need, and put it into a written document. We're going to talk about here in a second what they look like, what they feel like, and then be able to share them and get opinions, creating alignment. Everybody's agreement. We are going to improve this, but we, yeah, now I know the department chair wants that, but we're not doing that, which creates a sense of approvals of all the things we can go talk about. Finance gets to weigh in. This alignment happens. We've got lots more to talk about. We get our donors to engage with us. It's almost like surveying them. Those are powerful reasons to have something in writing, two or three pages, that just describes what we're trying to do at a high level.
So, the tactical pieces. What should these case statements be and look like? The number one thing to always keep in mind is that if we want to reach higher levels of philanthropy, again, those transformationally, emotionally connected gift opportunities, it has to be about outcome and impact, income and outcome, impact outcome. If I could say it 50 times, I would. What is the methodology we're going to use to measure these outcomes? Specifically, what could these outcomes be? If you're a food bank, if we do this, it's going to provide this many more meals for people. If you're in healthcare, it's going to take care of this piece of equipment. It's going to take care of this number of people that we currently can't serve, or it's going to increase the health outcomes of this population.
And in education, it's going to increase our student population, meaning enrollment, or the student experience, or the faculty's engagement, or retaining faculty members by this, or it's going to increase our offerings, our programs by this. And that means we're going to affect this many more people. When we think about these case statements, it's going to cause us some extra work because we're going to have to sit down with finance and budgeting and maybe the department chair or the head of a certain area or a chair or executive and say, help me want to verify what a million-dollar project of doing X is going to do for us outcomes.
And this is a hurdle for philanthropy because this takes some time. It takes conversations and meetings. I'm always pushing gift officers and leaders to do more external than internal meetings. I still stand by that. But if we can't quantify how many people are going to be affected by this and in what way they're going to be affected by this, then it's hard to really talk about its impact. And because maybe you've got three, four, five, or six of these, whatever, you're going to have to figure out how do we have conversations about individual areas of responsibility inside those case statements, meaning income and impact, income, excuse me, impact and outcome.
So number one, concentrate on the effect of what's going to happen. Number two is you need some level of a business plan. Now I am not advocating in two to three pages, you know, spreadsheets and all that. That's not what I'm saying. But if you can't talk about how much money needs to come in and what that'll mean in terms of how it will be spent on what and what the outcomes are going to be, I mean, that's in essence what a business plan is. You can get into the details. And it's really hard to have meaningful conversations.
So you've got how much this is going to cost? Are there additional costs? I just had this discussion with another client where they're talking about their building. And I said, before you jump forward, are you thinking about what I always call funded depreciation? Meaning, are you going to build in a fund or funding mechanism inside a particular campaign that would create dollars to be held the next time that the carpet has to be replaced or a wall has to be painted or whatever? And they looked at me and they said, no. And I said, because what you're telling me now is the reason you're doing this is it costs too much to maintain. And you'd like to see some improvement.
How about giving the next leaders a chance not to have to worry about the maintenance part? Because you have resources. Are there insurance costs that go with? Don't just think about this little project. What are all the ancillary expenses that go along with it? Talk about those. How much is it going to cost? Who's going to execute it? What is that cost? How are we going to measure the outcome? You don't need a 25-page business plan. In fact, I recommend against it. You should have those basic elements as a part of this because someone is going to ask you, what's this going to cost? You should be able to tell them the total cost.
And here's how we're going to measure it. Here's how we're going to produce outcomes that are meaningful. So a business level, at least inclination inside the document. The third is the look. You should have some type of visualization. You should have the idea of pictures, graphs, and charts. How do you make it easy to read? If you're going to grow your service, if you put a graph in there, it says we've been growing this way, but if we added this, we're going to see a 20% jump in here. So it would look like on a graph. Or we're going to increase our population. Maybe it's a bar chart. And here's how it would grow, which we can measure as we go.
All of this is to say I'm not saying you should send this away for visual design and it cost you $25,000 per two or three pages, you know, a little bit many cases. But what I am saying is it should look nice and have some visualization. I just did a little bit larger $20 million campaign feasibility study. That's something we worked really well to have them figure out how do we graph some of the things they were trying to do in terms of outcome. And what that did is took the verbiage away but added some great visualizations, but kept the impact and the outcomes very visible in front of the people who are reading it, very well received in that process.
So number three is visualization in some way, shape, or form. Number four is finding the right balance between the numbers and the stories. We have to find ways of talking about both because certain people are naturally connected to naturally matriculate to kind of the emotional side, the story that if we're able to do this, here's Betty and we do this. We could take care of more Betty's and see how we've helped Betty. This is her outcome. And it's an emotional personal story.
There are others who say, I'm glad we're helping Betty, but how many more people? It's about ROI. It's about numbers. You have to do both. You have to find an emotional story or two that represent a lot of people. And at the same time, you have to show, hey, we can affect this many people. So there's a data piece and an emotional piece. And if you only do one, all too often, you put it in front of someone and they go, well, there's no emotion here because you've got all data. Or if you do all the emotion, you put it in front of the data person and go, well, how do I know about the outcome? The impact.
You've got to find a way to balance emotion, the logic that goes along with the numbers, and the emotion that goes along with the story. So the four things you need to think about in these case statements, two to three pages. And again, don't over-design them. Get them down. But you need to think about how do we measure outcome? How are we going to describe it?
Get them down. But you need to think about how do we measure outcome? How are we going to describe it? How are we going to use data to our advantage specific outcomes? Number two, what is the business plan? Again, short version. How much do we need? How much are we going to spend? What's it going to mean?
Number three is those ideas of visualization pictures, making it look decent. So it's just not all verbiage. And number four, finding a way to balance emotion and logic. Having both the stories and the data, harrowing each other throughout. Maybe they're sidebars. Whatever you want to do it, so that both sides are told.
Finding ways to get this down on paper by department or by smaller units. Maybe your hospital system by individual hospitals, university by the departments. Maybe you're in social service. You've got different things you do. Giving these many case statements has multiple advantages.
But I harp on this idea of alignment. If you put these in front of these actually, are these what we want to do? Is this the direction we want to go? You create alignment where everyone can agree, yep, these are things we want. It'll give your gift officers more things to talk about. And in the end, there's a real power that comes from engaging your donors and asking their opinions when you have to have something to, you know, think about and put some perspective on.
The case statements don't have to be for multi-billion dollar campaigns. But we also don't want to spend all of our time doing them. And that's why I put a limit on two to three pages. You should be able to do it fairly quickly. A few meetings, maybe more than you want, finding those individual outcomes. But in the end, they're going to create a better environment internally where you have more to ask for, more to talk with, with the people externally who are looking to support you. And that is a winning combination. It's called strategy, vision, and strategic planning. And in a very basic way, this is a great way to do it.
Don't forget to check out the blogs at howlettflanthropy.com, two or three a week, 90-second reads on a variety of things that I see or think about, maybe something to kind of prop your memory. That's at howlettflanthropy.com. And if you'd like to reach out to me, it's a podcast at howlettflanthropy.com.
Don't ever underestimate how important you are. I was recently somewhere; someone asked me, how do you do what you do in terms of philanthropy and ask me over money? I said, I'm not embarrassed by it. I'm proud of it. I'm proud of what I've done in my career. I've never tricked anybody out of any money. I've asked if they wanted to join things I believe did that we're going to make the community a better place. And when they said yes, I was overjoyed. I was privileged to help guide them in that conversation to where they wanted to go.
Don't ever apologize for being in this industry or what we do. We're noble professionals. We're trying to make a difference in our community. Our missions provide kind of the framework of how we do that. And I don't want anyone to ever feel as if what we do is CD or second class or not worthy of our time and attention. What you do every day is critical. It makes your community a better place.
And the most important thing is, as my favorite saying says, some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, and then there are those who wonder what happened. You're someone who's making something happen. You find others in the community who want to do that. The people and the things in our community that are wondering what happens. I can't think of a better way to spend a career. I really can't.
Don't miss me the next time, right back here on another edition of Around with Randall. Make it a great day.