Brazen Solutions · Capital Campaigns

Everybody asks how to get ready for a capital campaign. Almost nobody asks what order to do it in.

You have twelve to eighteen months before you'd launch. Here's what to prepare for a capital campaign first, what comes second, and why doing it backwards means paying for the same work twice.

August 2026 · 3 min read

What almost nobody tells you is that the list is a sequence. Do them in the wrong order and you don't just lose time — you buy the same finding twice, and the second time it's expensive and public.

I've written a readiness checklist you can answer at your own kitchen table.

Adjust the months to your reality. Don't adjust the sequence.

Month one: find out what's actually broken

Before you hire anyone, before you set a number, spend two weeks getting honest in writing.

Eight places to look: mindset, vision, board and leadership, case, finance, infrastructure, donor base, reputation.

Months one to three: the data, before you take a single donor meeting

Can you pull everyone who gave $1,000 or more in the last five years, with their giving history, in an afternoon? If not, that's your first ninety days, because every single step downstream reads from that list.

Months two to four: say what changes for a person, out loud

One sentence: because of this campaign, in five years, a person who walks through our door will experience _______.

One sentence, said out loud, that three different people on your leadership team would finish the same way.

Months three to five: the board conversation, before you spend forty grand

Ask, out loud, in a meeting, with the names written on paper: who at this table will sit across from a person they know and ask for money?

Count the names. Then ask whether your chair understands the difference between approving a goal and carrying one — ninety seconds versus three years.

If the answer to the name question is two people, and one of them is the ED, you've found your binding constraint, and it isn't your donors. I've written that argument out in full in what a feasibility study actually costs.

Underneath all of it, starting now: the relationships

Relationships at the top of a gift table take twelve to eighteen months to build. The convention is three to four qualified prospects for every gift you're counting on, and a lead gift commonly runs ten to twenty percent of the whole goal on its own.

If you do exactly one thing after reading this: pick your top three names and get one meeting with each of them in the next six weeks. No ask. No materials.

Months four to six: the money arithmetic

True cost, and true means all of it. The project, the cost of running the campaign itself, the staffing you'll add, and the operating increase the new thing creates the day it opens.

Escalation — construction costs have been climbing somewhere in the five to eight percent a year range, so a goal priced eighteen months ago may not build what you promised. And cash flow: pledges get paid over three to five years, and contractors want paying this quarter.

Months six to nine: now write the case

Write the thirty-second spoken version first, test it on somebody outside the sector, and only then let anyone open a design file.

Months nine to twelve: now hire the study

Same $30,000 to $60,000 you were going to spend anyway. Roughly triple the value, because the recommendations land in an organization that can act on them, and the interviews test a vision that's already been sharpened on real donors.

The phases from there are their own piece.

The eight weeks of the Capital Campaign Incubator are this exact order, worked in a room with other EDs doing the same thing — $2,997.

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.

Or see what's inside the guide →

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

Take the free readiness assessment

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