The board asked what the building would cost. Nobody asked what the capital campaign would cost to run.

The architect's number was on the screen. Eight point four million, plus site work.

The board spent forty minutes on it. Somebody asked about the elevator. Somebody asked whether the second floor could wait. Good questions, all of them, and the room was awake for every one.

Then the chair said, "So we're looking at an eight-point-four-million campaign," and everyone nodded, and they moved to the next item.

The ED wrote something on her pad and didn't say it out loud. What she wrote was: eight point four is what we give the contractor. What do we spend to get it?

The dime on the dollar

The sector's rough rule of thumb has long been about a dime on the dollar. Raise a million, spend somewhere near a hundred thousand doing it. On an eight-point-four-million goal, that's a number with six figures in it that nobody in that boardroom had said out loud.

It's a rule of thumb, not a law. I've seen campaigns come in under it and I've seen campaigns blow through it, and the difference usually had nothing to do with the size of the goal. But it's the right starting place, because it forces the honest question early: this money has to come from somewhere, and it will come either from the campaign proceeds, from your operating budget, or from a lead donor who's willing to fund the cost of raising the rest.

Decide which one before you launch. Organizations that don't decide end up quietly funding it out of operations, one unbudgeted invoice at a time, in a year when operations had no room.

What's actually inside the ten percent

Here's the list, roughly in the order the invoices arrive.

Counsel. The consultant, the coach, or the interim campaign director. Usually the largest single line, and the one most people mean when they ask what a campaign costs. I've written separately about what a capital campaign consultant costs in Canada and what drives that number up.

The feasibility study. Commonly $30,000 to $60,000, depending on interview volume and whether prospect research is bundled in. Some organizations buy a shorter market test instead.

Prospect research and screening. Either a bundled wealth screen or ongoing research capacity. If your list is large, this is real money. If your list is small, this is cheap and it's also not your problem — your problem is the list.

Case development, materials, and design. The printed case, the naming brochure, renderings, video, a campaign page on your site. Design is where budgets go sideways, because everyone has an opinion and revisions are billable.

Events. A quiet-phase donor dinner, a groundbreaking, a public launch, a closing celebration. Modest ones still cost. Ambitious ones cost like weddings.

Added staff. Almost every campaign adds capacity — a campaign coordinator, a gift processor, a part-time writer, or a term-position campaign director. This is the line most under-budgeted in the sector, and the one most likely to be needed.

Database and CRM. The upgrade you've been deferring, plus pledge-tracking configuration, plus data cleanup hours. Spreadsheets can hold a lot. They cannot hold a campaign.

Donor recognition. Plaques, a donor wall, naming signage, engraving, stewardship reports for three to five years after the last cheque clears. Recognition is a promise you make during the campaign and pay for after it.

Travel and hospitality. In Western Canada, where a catchment area can be six hours wide, this is not a rounding error.

Contingency. Ten percent of the campaign budget itself. If it goes unspent, wonderful. It rarely goes unspent.

The campaign budget is the only budget in the building that gets approved without anyone asking what's in it. Read yours out loud at a board table before you approve it.

What pushes the dime up, and what pulls it down

Up: a first-ever campaign, a cold donor base, a rural or spread-out catchment, a goal that's many times your annual operating budget, heavy reliance on outside counsel to do rather than to coach, and a case that has to be rebuilt from scratch mid-campaign.

Down: a mature donor base with real major-gift history, a board that already asks, a clean database, staff who have done this before, and a lead gift secured before the public phase.

Notice that most of the items in the second list are things you can build before you launch, at your own staff cost, on your own clock. That's the whole argument for the order of operations. Every readiness gap you carry into a campaign gets converted into a line item at somebody else's hourly rate.

The cost that starts after the ribbon

A building costs money to run. Heat, light, insurance, caretaking, maintenance reserve, and usually a person to staff the new space you just doubled.

I've watched organizations raise every dollar of capital and open a facility they couldn't afford to operate, and it's a specific kind of heartbreak — because the campaign worked. The community showed up. The problem was that nobody put the operating increase in front of the board next to the construction number.

Ask your finance chair for a five-year operating pro forma on the new thing before you set a goal. If the answer adds $180,000 a year to your operating budget, that belongs in the campaign conversation, either as an endowment component or as a plan with a name on it.

Pledges pay slowly. Contractors do not.

Campaign pledges are typically paid over three to five years. Construction draws are monthly.

That gap is where campaigns go sideways for reasons that have nothing to do with whether donors love you. You may need bridge financing, a line of credit, or a phased build — and the time to arrange that is before you need it, when your banker is looking at a strong balance sheet instead of a panicked one.

While you're there: construction escalation has been running roughly five to eight percent a year. A goal priced eighteen months ago may no longer build the thing it was priced for. Reprice before the board resolution, not after.

Where organizations under-budget, every time

Staff capacity. Contingency. Donor recognition. And the closing year — the last twelve months of collections, stewardship, reporting, and thank-yous, when the consultant's contract has ended and everyone assumes it's over.

It isn't over. It's just quieter, and it still costs.

Back to the boardroom

She brought a second slide to the next meeting. One page. The campaign's own budget, ten lines, with the operating increase at the bottom in the same font as everything else.

The conversation took ninety minutes and it was not comfortable. They came out of it with a goal about $900,000 higher than the architect's number and a board that understood why.

If you want to know which of those cost drivers you're currently carrying, the free Campaign Readiness Assessment walks eight pillars in 34 questions, about fifteen minutes, and most of what it surfaces is fixable before you spend a dollar on counsel. If the harder question is whether the organization underneath the campaign is sound, the organizational diagnostic works that layer. And if you'd rather do the fixing with other EDs in the same year, that's the eight weeks of the Capital Campaign Incubator — $2,997, starting January 6, 2027.

Before any of that: open a blank spreadsheet tonight and write the ten lines. Put a real number beside each one, even a bad guess. The bad guesses are the conversation.