Brazen Solutions · Capital Campaigns

Most case for support examples you'll find online are beautifully written. That's a different thing from fundable.

What actually separates a case for support that raises money from one that just reads well — the change-in-a-life test, the brother-in-law test, and the numbers a donor quietly checks before saying yes.

August 2026 · 3 min read

When an ED searches for case for support examples, what comes back is a stack of finished artifacts.

You can't see whether they worked. Nobody publishes the case that raised $200,000 against a $4 million goal. The samples in circulation are selected for how they look.

Test one: does anything change for a person?

Finish this sentence with your case open in front of you.

Because of this campaign, in five years, a person who walks through our door will experience _______.

If your answer contains square footage, you have a construction project. Donors don't fund those. If your answer is a person having a materially different day than the one they're having now, you have something fundable.

Test two: can your brother-in-law repeat it back?

I put this in the readiness checklist and I'll put it here too.

Read your case out loud to somebody who does not work in your sector. Then wait thirty seconds and ask them what it was about.

What comes back is what your board member is going to say at a dinner party in eight months, which means it's the actual case.

Test three: the numbers a donor checks

Six things a serious donor looks for:

What's actually in the number. Project cost, campaign cost, contingency. A goal presented as one round figure with no breakdown reads as a wish.

What it costs to run once it exists, and who pays for that. A case that raises the capital and stays silent on the operating tells an experienced donor you haven't thought past the ribbon.

Whether the number is current. Construction escalation has been running somewhere in the five to eight percent a year range. If your goal was priced two years ago and the case still quotes it, a donor in the construction business will spot it in about four seconds.

Who's already in. The convention is that a lead gift lands somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the goal, and that the majority of the money is committed before you go public.

What happens if you fall short. A case that admits at $3.2 million we build the clinic and defer the second floor is more trustworthy than one that implies the whole thing arrives or nothing does.

How the payment works. Pledges over three to five years. $250,000 is terrifying and $50,000 a year for five years is a conversation. If your case never mentions pledge terms, some of your best prospects are quietly deciding they can't.

Test four: does the ask show up before page nine?

Most cases spend their first third on history and mission.

Your donor knows who you are.

The history section matters, and it belongs after the reader knows what you're asking them to help build and why the timing is now. And "why now" needs to be a real answer with a cost attached — a lease ending, a waitlist growing at a rate you can name.

Write it in the order it gets used

Thirty-second spoken version first. The one a board member says in a car.

Then a page. Then the three-page working version that answers the six numbers above. Only then does anybody open a design file.

The Case for Support Builder is $497 and walks this exact structure, with three worked examples and a video walkthrough, if you want a starting frame. And the case belongs at a specific point in your calendar — after the vision work, before the feasibility study, which is a sequence I've laid out in how to get ready for a campaign.

Free guide

Hiring campaign counsel? Run the gut check first.

25 interview questions with scoring, the red flags that mean walk away, and a scorecard your whole board can fill in before anyone signs. Free — and it's in your hands the moment you sign up.

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Wondering whether your organization could carry a capital campaign? The free readiness assessment scores you across the eight areas that decide it.

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