We put the biggest name in town at the head of the capital campaign committee. He chaired eleven meetings and never made an ask.

A campaign cabinet exists to do two things staff cannot do.

Get you into rooms you can't get into on your own. And ask people for money as a peer rather than as an employee of the organization asking.

The four jobs

Most cabinets need these four covered. Very few people do more than one of them well.

The door-opener. Makes an introduction.

This is the highest-value and least-recognized role in the entire structure, and the people who are best at it are frequently not on your board. They're the retired executive, the woman who chaired somebody else's campaign six years ago and knows everybody. Ask for three names and an introduction, thank them properly, and leave them alone.

The host. Offers the room. A living room, a cottage in August.

When someone opens their own home and stands up in front of twelve friends to say I've put my money into this and here's why, the room does emotional work no case for support has ever done on paper.

The asker. Sits down across a table from a human being they know and asks for a specific amount for a specific thing.

Rarest of the four. Count yours honestly — the number is almost always smaller than the board roster.

One rule under this one, and it's a convention across the sector for good reason: cabinet members give before they ask. An ask from someone who hasn't given has a hole in the middle of it, and the donor across the table can hear it.

The chair. Holds the pace.

Which is mostly homework. Chasing five people about the meetings they said they'd book. Noticing that nothing has moved in three weeks and saying so out loud.

That is why the biggest name in town is often the wrong chair. Chairing is follow-up, and the people with the most recognizable names are typically the busiest people you know. Make them the lead donor. Announce them as honorary chair if the title matters to anyone, and give the working chair job to the person who returns emails.

Build the cabinet backwards, off the gift table

Most organizations recruit a cabinet and then go looking for prospects. It's the wrong direction.

Print your gift table. Take the top three rows. For each name in there write down who could make the introduction.

The people whose names show up repeatedly in that second column are your cabinet. At least one is somebody you haven't called in four years.

How to actually ask them

In person. With a written description of the job, on one page, that says: how long the term is, roughly how many asks you're expecting them to be part of, how many meetings a year, whether a personal gift is expected, and when it ends.

Plan for recruitment to take twice as long as you scheduled. And plan for nos from people who genuinely love your organization. Take it as information, thank them, and ask them for two names on the way out the door.

What a working meeting looks like

Ninety minutes, no more. No staff report at the top.

You go around the table and each person says who they saw since last time, what happened, and who they will see before next time. Names and dates go on the list. Somebody writes them down and the chair reads them back at the start of the following meeting.

Uncomfortable? Very. A cabinet that never has an awkward moment is a cabinet where nobody's tracking anything.

The cabinet you need is usually smaller than you think, and most of it is already somewhere in your database.