Strategic, Smart, and Bold - A Petrus Development Show Episode on Capital Campaign Preparations

Here we go again!  Andrew and Rhen join together for another nuts and bolts show on capital campaigns.  Several months ago, the pair hosted an episode with details about the campaign itself.  In today's episode, however, they discuss what needs to happen BEFORE you can even get to the campaign itself.  

Show Notes:

A successful capital campaign requires lots of pre-planning as a warmup to the actual campaign.  The more you prepare prior to the campaign launch, however, the greater your chances of campaign success!  Listen in as Andrew and Rhen discuss, in detail, all of the things that should happen before you embark on a capital campaign.  

In this episode, Andrew and Rhen answer the following questions:

• How do you know when your organization is ready to execute a successful capital campaign?  What are some indicators that your nonprofit may not be ready to take on a campaign?
  
  
• How do you develop vision for a campaign?
  
  
• What kind of data/database to you need to have in place to be ready for a campaign?
  
  
• How can you get a good estimate of what the cost will be for the campaign project?  How much time do you need to allow before a building campaign in order to get drawings, land, etc.?
  
  
• What happens to your annual fund during a capital campaign?  Can you fund both?

As Rhen mentions at the end of the episode, Petrus is offering a free capital campaign prep checklist for listeners.  Use this document to make sure you're covering all of your bases BEFORE you begin your next capital campaign.  If you'd like to receive this resource, please click here for more information.    

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

02:56.76
aggierobison
Well, howdy everybody. Welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. I am Rhen Hoehn from Petrus Development and joining me today is Andrew Robison, owner and president of Petrus. How's it going, Andrew?

03:07.18
AROB
Rhen, it's going fine. It's going good. We're in the fall. Summer is behind us. Doesn't mean that it's any cooler here, but yeah, things are good.

03:18.22
aggierobison
Excellent. How have the dog days of August been treating you here?

03:24.02
AROB
We had a very bizarre weather summer. I guess there were, you know, I live in Texas and there have been multiple years that it's been, you know, a hundred-degree highs for weeks on end. And this year, July, I distinctly remember a day that it was,

03:46.64
AROB
in the morning, like 75 in the morning, one morning, and then, you know, the high was maybe high 80s, maybe 90. And we just thought, what in the world is going on? It has, August has compensated for that. Let's just say August has been warm with multiple triple-digit days, definitely triple-digit heat index. And it's been, it's been warm. Yeah.

04:13.82
aggierobison
Excellent. My kids have been doing Taekwondo this summer.

04:16.55
AROB
Ah, very good.

04:16.62
aggierobison
They started last school year. And so that got us watching Taekwondo in the Olympics, which I had never watched before.

04:21.06
AROB
There you go.

04:23.06
aggierobison
I had pulled up ChatGPT and said, tell me everything. How does this scoring work? Why is this happening? And it taught us how it all works. Did you watch any of the other Olympic events earlier this month?

04:33.98
AROB
So I would watch, I watched highlights of things. So you know, certainly, you know, events that happened that were exciting to watch or funny to watch. I would catch the highlights, but we have at our house, we don't have live TV and we have a Peacock app, which is you know presumably the best way to watch it.

04:50.50
aggierobison
Oh, yeah.

04:52.70
AROB
I found it's very difficult to actually just sit down and turn on the Olympics and watch when you have that app. You can certainly, um, you know, catch highlights, but just watching it.

05:04.73
AROB
So all that to say that there were a couple of days that we did sit down and watch really random events like handball.

05:11.48
aggierobison
Ooh.

05:13.25
AROB
Which is not handball that I grew up going, you know, where you're in a racquetball court hitting, but it's very different.

05:16.16
aggierobison
Hmm.

05:18.60
AROB
We watched some soccer. And then of course, you know, I watched the breakdancing. It feels like, you know, every other post on my Twitter feed for like a week was this Australian breakdancer, you know, so watched that and, you know, the pole vaulter that knocked the pole down and, you know, the world record pole vault and then, you know, just all the kind of exciting stuff like that.

05:46.50
AROB
But yeah, how about you other than Taekwondo?

05:49.38
aggierobison
Uh, yeah, same. It is hard to watch things live when they're on at three in the morning. Right. So we watched a few replays of things. Uh, I always find it hard to watch the summer Olympics because it's just so, it's the nicest time of year to be outside.

05:56.78
AROB
Yeah.

06:01.64
aggierobison
Right.

06:01.90
AROB
Ah, yes.

06:01.92
aggierobison
Like in the winter when it's, you know, cold and windy, I don't mind sitting inside watching TV, but when it's 80 degrees and sunny, I'll be outside in the garden personally, most of the time.

06:11.15
AROB
Well, plus you're more interested in the snow and the cold weather events, right?

06:17.19
aggierobison
100%. My kids and I watch biathlon every weekend in the winter. We're like, you know, we're the only ones in America that do that probably, but that's our thing. Love hockey, skiing, all that stuff. So it's, uh, I'm ready for winter 2034.

06:28.89
aggierobison
I think we'll find our way to Salt Lake City to see some of those events.

06:33.42

aggierobison

Looking forward to that already.

06:34.88

AROB

I don't think I knew that they were coming back to Salt Lake City. Are they able to use the same Olympic facilities they built in whatever that was? 2004?

06:43.29

aggierobison

thousand' two I think, if I remember.

 06:45.49

aggierobison

Yeah, ah I imagine so. We'll find out.

06:48.47

AROB

I just real quick, I was living in Colorado at the time and this was during my ah free and unencumbered years of life when I was not in school. I was living in Colorado, I was taking a gap year now as they say, but the Olympics was putting out, you know they were they needed hourly workers to work uh, in an Olympic village and all this thing. And I thought, oh my gosh, I have to do that. And for some reason, I didn't, I didn't apply. I didn't go out there and I always wonder like, why didn't I just go and, you know, get a part-time job at the Olympics? And like, that would have been so awesome. But I had a great year that year, but that was my, that was probably

07:29.89

AROB

When I'm on my deathbed, one of my regrets will be, why didn't I go get a stupid hourly job at the at the Olympics when they were you know four hours from my house i don or where I was living?

07:41.90

aggierobison

Yeah, that would have been an experience.

aggierobison
So the Olympics are known for costing a lot of money.

10:15.09
AROB
Okay, yes.

10:16.90
aggierobison
Do you know what else costs a lot of money?

10:19.15
AROB
I can make some guesses, but tell me.

10:20.74
aggierobison
A new building, hiring new staff, things that a lot of organizations run a capital campaign to accomplish.

10:27.77
AROB
There you go. Hey, that was a great transition. I love it.

10:34.03
AROB
I think it's great.

10:36.52
aggierobison
So a few months ago, we talked about campaigns and I think it was episode 141. We talked about the entire process of capital campaigns, getting ready, executing, wrapping up, what's all involved, right?

10:47.56
aggierobison
Today we're going to tackle kind of the lead-up to a campaign. Say, you know you need one.

10:52.02
AROB
Okay.

10:53.42
aggierobison
I have been involved with organizations where the roof starts leaking and you're like, "Oh, big problem."

10:58.04
AROB
All right.

10:59.10
aggierobison
We need to raise a bunch of money now or we see, oh, we're going to offer this facility or we want to hire this new staff and add this programming, but it's going to cost us a big chunk of money. So, you know, we need to do a campaign.

11:11.26
aggierobison
How do you know if you're ready to execute one successfully? What steps do you need to take now and how do you know when you're ready or not ready? And what could be some of the downfalls if you aren't ready?

11:21.76
aggierobison
So I thought we'd talk about that today.

11:21.78
AROB
Yeah, I think that sounds like a good conversation. So it could be, you know, the way you described it, right? We have a need, an urgent need. We need to do a campaign. How do we get ready for it? Or it could be kind of the other side.

11:35.84
AROB
Where it's, hey, our development efforts, our fundraising efforts are going so well that now we are in a place where we actually can kind of dream of what's possible.

11:47.19
AROB
So how would a capital campaign work? And that was the situation that we had when Petrus was working with you at St. Albert the Great at Michigan Tech, right? There were needs, but they'd already fixed the roof a couple of years before when it was leaking.

11:56.85
aggierobison
Right.

12:04.94
AROB
But there were needs, but it was really a, you know, we started, you and Father Ben really kind of started fundraising with earnest, with strategy, with intention. All of a sudden you have monthly gifts. All of a sudden your appeals are working and it's kind of like, wait, we've got out of the immediate hole, but immediate situation that we felt like we were in. Now we can dream what would a campaign look like? So, you know, organizations I think can be in both situations. And this is a conversation that,

12:33.47
AROB
still is valuable to either one.

12:35.95
aggierobison
Exactly, and maybe tack on to that second piece there. I mean, it is kind of part of a fundraising strategy over the long term, right? You'll see a lot of universities, dioceses, you know, bigger organizations will do a campaign every 10, 12, 15 years or so, because it does kind of rally the troops, gets everybody motivated toward a project.

12:43.20
AROB
Right.

12:54.00
aggierobison
There's some people that just really like to give to campaigns specifically, so you're going to motivate them.

12:57.53
AROB
Yeah.

12:58.71
aggierobison
And so it is kind of a, you know, a big reason to get everybody together and get excited about some projects and taking a big leap forward for the nonprofit. So lots of uses for a campaign.

13:08.76
AROB
Totally. Yeah. But you got to get ready for it. And you got to know if you're ready and if you're not ready, or if you don't know how to answer that question, these are some of the questions that we get from a lot of organizations that come reaching out to us. And so I'm excited to talk about it here.

13:23.49
aggierobison
Great, so maybe we should start with the pieces that might indicate you're not quite ready for a campaign yet.

13:29.36
AROB
Okay.

13:29.45
aggierobison
That'll help us kind of focus in on what you need to do to get ready. What are some of the indicators that a nonprofit isn't ready to take on a big campaign right now?

13:38.53
AROB
Sure. So, you know, there are a couple of really vital pieces, elements that you need if a campaign, if any major fundraising effort, but especially a capital campaign is going to be successful. One of those is a vision, right? So where's the organization going and how can you tell people that, how can you share that vision with people in a way that excites them and makes them want to give?

14:01.87
AROB
Right? The other, and so, you know, in fundraising terms, that's a case for support, right? You might not have a defined case, but at least a vision. The other piece that's going to be critical is donors. So if an organization doesn't have a database or hasn't done really any outreach or communication or cultivation of their donor database in some amount of time,

14:26.81
AROB
then spending time on the front end doing that work will bode well for a campaign. And then the other one is staffing, right? Who are the, who's the team that's going to actually do the work. And when I say team, that includes, you know, usually leadership. So, you know, pastor, executive director, principal, development director is oftentimes really important for a capital campaign. There are some exceptions, and we can talk about that in a little bit. And then volunteers, right? You know, once you get going in a campaign, you're going to need a lot of support and people.

15:01.72
AROB
And so volunteers, you know, we count as part of the team when it comes to it. So I would say that, you know, those three big things, right, a vision, who's going to give, so your database, and then who's going to fundraise. So, you know,

15:17.11
AROB
who's your team. So, you know, another way to think about it is, what are you raising money for? Who are you raising money from? And who's going to ask for that money? Right. So if any one of those areas is weak, then maybe you're not quite ready. But there are certainly ways to get ready quicker than you might think.

15:40.59
aggierobison
So maybe let's spend just a couple of minutes on each one of those, starting with the vision. You know, what do you need to do to develop a vision?

15:43.66
AROB
Yeah, great.

15:47.50
aggierobison
I feel like vision is one of those things that when you say it, you hear it, it's like a vision. Everybody talks about vision, you know, it's almost overstated, but it really is critical. So how do you develop that vision and figure out what it's going to be for the campaign?

16:01.17
AROB
So, funny story. I was at a CCMA conference years ago and I was talking with this young pastor. He was at a campus ministry and he was newly ordained and newly the pastor. And so, you know, he comes, "Andrew, what do I need to do for fundraising?" And so I, you know, talk about this, talk about that. And I said, you know, a vision is going to be really important and that has to come from you. You know, you're the chaplain, you're the pastor and he goes, "Okay, great. Yeah." You know, very diligently.

16:27.12
AROB
I'm paying attention. "Okay, great. Yeah. How do I come up with a vision?" And I was like, "Oh man." Yeah. I totally walked into that one. So, you know, a vision at its core is just really,

16:39.49
AROB
where is the organization going? What kind of impact can the organization have in the future? And what's necessary to be able to achieve that level of impact? Right? So that could be, you know, what are the needs of the organization to have a greater impact? It could be facilities, it could be staffing, it could be money, it could be, well, money is kind of tied up in all of these. It could be a variety of different things, but it's really about, you know, we tell people all the time, like a building doesn't, people don't give to build a new building.

17:14.98
AROB
People give to impact what happens in that new building, right? So if you can tie your needs and that vision to greater impact, then that is a vision.

17:20.53
aggierobison
Right.

17:27.81
aggierobison
Yeah, when I first started fundraising, I think an exercise that was helpful for me that I found intimidating at the time. I was working with Peter Demarco and he'd come up to me, "Hey, I'm a donor. I'm going to give you a million dollars right now. But only if you can tell me, what are you going to do with that million dollars? What are the two or three things you're going to do? And how's that going to impact the organization?" Like you had to have that clear vision of these are the next things you want to do. And this is why it's important to do those things. And I found that very helpful, even though I did find it intimidating at the time.

17:56.20
aggierobison
Peter can be an imposing guy, right?

17:59.74
AROB
Yeah, definitely.

17:59.84
aggierobison
But it was fun. It was a good exercise that helped me a lot when I was actually sitting down with donors to be able to explain those things succinctly to them.

18:08.70
AROB
I think that's a great exercise. And I've done that with people not in an intimidating and foreboding way that Peter might have with you. But certainly, you know, asking that question to even the most dedicated and forward-thinking leaders, directors, it can oftentimes kind of put you in a situation where you're just not used to answering a question like that, right?

18:33.14
AROB
You know, the question is usually, how are we going to keep the lights on for many nonprofits?

18:33.29
aggierobison
Right.

18:36.70
AROB
How are we going to keep people? How are we going to meet payroll? How are we going to make it another month, another year? That is really kind of the mindset of most nonprofits. So to be in a position where you have to think, "Oh wait, all that's covered and we can do more," yeah, I've never even really thought about that. But that's where, to your point, answering and being asked that question, answering that question and being ready to answer it for others can be a really helpful exercise.

19:04.08
aggierobison
And just to add one more piece to that little section here, doing a visioning session with your organization and its stakeholders, I think can really inform that, right?

19:14.81
aggierobison
If you go back to episode 100 of the Petrus Development Show, you talked with Bishop Konderla, right.

19:19.21
AROB
Yeah.

19:19.32
aggierobison
And talked about the visioning session that St. Mary's of Texas A&M did in the early 2000s that culminated with the building of a new church, which here we are 20-something years later.

19:27.37
AROB
Yeah.

19:30.44
aggierobison
And that's all that's happened, but it took two decades to get there. But it all went back to a visioning session where they brought in somebody to lead a visioning day, and brought in alumni and donors and current students and just all kinds of people who were interested to develop that vision. And that's what drove them for the next couple of decades of their work.

19:49.79
AROB
Yeah, Petrus has been part of a number of those and I did one last year, I believe, and it was an organization that has a lot of options on the table for new building, new facility, and it's hard when you have a lot of options to really say, all right, which is the one that we're going all in on, because eventually you have to. And having a visioning day where we brought together multiple stakeholders, got input, we did a survey beforehand, we had conversations during, and we had follow-up after, but it was really in that time that

20:21.39
AROB
it became clear that the collective group all believed that this was the best option. And if that option was removed off the table for some reason, then this was the next option. And so it gave the pastor, the director there a lot of clarity and, yeah, all right, we came into this with you know six ways that this could go. Now we feel really clear, we feel really confident that option B is our first. And then if that doesn't work, then D is our next one. And it was really helpful to them.

20:55.94
aggierobison
Great. So let's move on here. I'm going to skip over staff a little bit. And I know if you go back to episode 141, I think we broke that down in pretty great depth. So you can talk about staff, though the volunteers, everything you need involved in a campaign. I'll talk a little for a minute here about data. What do you need to have in place with your database to be ready for a campaign?

21:16.05
AROB
Great. So this is a little bit of a loaded question, right? Because I remember early on somebody said, "How many records do we have to have to be able to launch a campaign?" And I said, "All right, well, how many do you have now?" You know, just to get a scope. And they told me, and I said, "Okay, well, then you need to have X amount." And it was in the intent there to encourage them to continue to grow.

21:37.66
AROB
Well, they kind of stalled at some point and then the pastor kept coming back to that. "Well, we can't start the campaign until we hit this number because that's what you told us, Andrew." So, you know, I just say that as a caution to say, you want to have data, you want to have people that you can reach out to, but don't let that, don't let a number hold you back from launching.

22:03.35
AROB
Because the campaign will help you to grow your database. Okay? So that's kind of the first caveat to this answer. But you know, I would say at a very bare minimum, you need to have a database, right? A centralized database that holds all of your records, not an Excel spreadsheet, not a spreadsheet, not a box of files, not a box of index cards.

22:19.58
aggierobison
Not a spreadsheet. Yes. Thank you.

22:25.69
AROB
You need to have an actual database because there's a lot that happens in the campaign. You have a lot of players and everybody needs to know this is where I'm going to go for information and for data. The other thing is that in that data, you don't just need names, but you need actual information about those names.

22:43.33
AROB
So contact information, mailing address, phone number, email. If you can focus on those three, that's ideal. And then attributes are really helpful. So, you know, if you're, let's say you're a school, right? A K through 12 private school.

22:59.45
AROB
Well, it's really helpful if in your database, you know when somebody was a student, if they're an alumnus now, what year they graduated and connection to other alumni, right? So that's helpful information when it comes to fundraising. But if you don't have that information, then you can figure it out as you go. So contact information, attributes if you have it. And then I would say in a database, you need to be able to, it needs to be capable and somebody on your staff needs to be able to enter pledges, gifts, and not just gifts, but pledges into the database, right? So campaigns most of the time are going to have multi-year pledges, three years to five years is kind of a good standard. And so if your database can't

23:45.17
AROB
allow you to enter a pledge and then track that pledge as payments are made, then that's a problem going into a campaign. So you want to address that. So those are just a couple of points that are really helpful elements to a database that are helpful before you go into a campaign.

24:11.82
aggierobison
Yeah, I think there's anything else I want to spend time on there.

24:16.91
aggierobison
All right. That's great. So let's talk a little bit. I wanted to turn on a few kind of quick hitters here on some logistics pieces that people may or may not think about when they're starting a campaign. They may not be something we've ever dealt with before. Say you want to build a building or even if you want to hire staff or start a new program, how do you get a good estimate of what the cost is going to be? And you know, something you can bring to your constituents to consider donating toward.

24:41.64
AROB
Great, so this is a tough question because there are ways that you can get in trouble unintentionally, right? So one way that you can get in trouble unintentionally is a lot of organizations, you don't want to, if you're going into a campaign, right, it costs money to hire an architect to then have that building design engineered for costs and then to,

25:09.31
AROB
You know, have estimates in terms of what are final costs including building, including permits, including construction, including rental of another facility when we're displaced, including fixtures and furnishings. So it costs money to get that, but I know we've worked with a lot of organizations that go into this kind of phase of the campaign saying, "All right, our diocese or the school you know six blocks away, they built a building. This is what it costs per square foot. And so that's what we're going to base our fundraising goals on."

25:42.06
AROB
And that's kind of a quick and dirty way to get to, we want to start, we'll figure all that out as we go. Right? And sometimes that's the way it has to work. But what I've seen oftentimes is that this is a big surprise, but over time,

25:57.22
AROB
the cost of virtually every building resource, every building material gets more expensive over time and so, you know, there was a church that we were working with that just their steel alone in the time that they got an estimate for the building, they started fundraising and then they were even kind of approaching, just in that time, their steel alone went up a million dollars in cost. Right? So it's really hard to plan for that. But if you go into it without any sense of what your costs are going to be after going through you know the process to

26:36.08
AROB
design and then cost out a building, then it puts you, it could put you in a tough situation. And what I mean by that is your fundraising goal may be $12 million. You spend 12 months, 18 months working towards that, you get close to it, and then all of a sudden it's not $12 million, it ain't going to get you anything.

26:58.73
AROB
$18 million is a bare minimum for what you want. And then all of a sudden it seems deflating, even though you've hit a really significant milestone.

27:07.39
aggierobison
And how much time do you think you need to allow maybe ahead of the campaign to get those numbers figured out, to get potential drawings, to figure out what you need to do if there's any, you know, anything you need to do with your land or if you need to acquire land to make it happen?

27:20.92
aggierobison
What's that timeframe look like for that realistically?

27:23.19
AROB
More time than you're ever going to think is necessary. So that's one. You know if you're buying land, contracts, negotiations, they do take a long time.

27:34.08
AROB
Sometimes you know I've rarely seen a land purchase happen in less than six months, and I've seen them take as long as 15 years. Right? That's an extreme situation. But you know you're probably looking at if you're purchasing land somewhere at least six to 12 to possibly even up to 18 months.

27:52.20
AROB
to finalize the purchase of land. If you are designing a building and you know architects can do a pretty good job if you can give them a pretty good sense of what you want. Now this goes back to that question "How do I come up with a vision, Andrew?" Right? Like how do I design a church? These are big questions. And you know, Father Kerry Wakulich in Stillwater, Oklahoma, we stopped in and saw the new St. John's on our summer road trip. And just the level of detail that he and the committee put into every single level of thought that they put into every detail about that building.

28:26.37
AROB
is just phenomenal, right? But that takes time. So coming up with what you want and then working with an architect, that can usually take you know two months, three months, five months, six months, depending on how prepared you are going into it. And then the cost estimates are probably another month to three months after that. So you know if you go into the building process really having a clear sense of what you want, then you know you could probably get design and then costs and then even drawings renderings done within four to six months. And sometimes you do that before the campaign. Sometimes that's during your silent phase, but that's, that's a quick turnaround for that kind of work.

29:11.09
aggierobison
And then one more layer that often gets, depending on your type of organization, you may need to get approval from a higher entity, like a diocese, right?

aggierobison: What's all involved there? What kind of permissions? I know it varies dramatically from one diocese to the next.

AROB: Yep.

aggierobison: What are some of the typical requirements that you see?

AROB: Okay, so most of the time you're going to need to get approval to enter into a feasibility study. And in fact, maybe not even approval, but a mandate - you have to do a feasibility study. And before you can do a feasibility study, you have to get bids from X number of firms, right? So that's usually a requirement, not always, but usually. And then you need approval from your diocese to enter into a capital campaign. So usually the results from the study then have to be submitted to the finance council or a board at the diocese, and then they will approve launching a campaign. Once the fundraising is done, it's usually another approval to begin building. There may be approvals in there for you to go out and hire an architect or hire a building firm, but that varies.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But those are three things almost all dioceses are going to require approvals for - those three phases. And you know, usually what do you need? You're going to need bids from firms. You're going to need information and data. And that can take time - there's a diocese that we're working with and that committee meets four times a year.

If you want to get on that quarterly meeting, you have to have your information presented and packaged and ready a month beforehand. And if you don't make that, then you're waiting an additional minimum of four months. So, you know, some committees meet every month. Some don't even have a committee. It just goes to a department and they approve it or they don't approve it or they ask for more information. So everyone's a little bit different, but you're going to need approvals to do most of these steps along the way. And so you want to build that into your timeline.

aggierobison: Exactly, and I think it's also helpful to find out what are the requirements that have to be met before you can build or renovate if you're doing a project like that, right?

AROB: Yeah.

aggierobison: And a lot of dioceses say if you're building a new building or if you're doing renovations that cost more than, I don't know, say $100,000 - whatever the number is in your diocese - you have to have raised 100% of the money or you have to have 100% of the money in hand, which is a whole other issue, or you have to have a certain percentage in hand, right?

AROB: Yep.

aggierobison: And sometimes they might make a desk and loan to the organization that you then pay back as pledges come in, but it might only be up to a certain dollar amount that they'll make that loan, right?

AROB: Yep.

aggierobison: So there are lots of factors there. It's really good to sort all that out well ahead of time so you know exactly what your requirements are.

AROB: Yeah, so if you're a school or a parish or a campus ministry or even a nonprofit within a diocese that kind of fits under that umbrella, it can seem... I'm going to go to bat for the diocese in this part of the conversation. It can seem like a very tedious process, a very arduous process, and it almost kind of feels like they are... that sometimes it may feel like they're your rival trying to squash your dreams and not let you do what you want, right? And that's not the case, right? Dioceses are there to protect the diocese, but also to support the individual organizations within there, whether that's the parish or the school or the campus ministry or whatever. And the reason they might have tedious and arduous and onerous requirements is because the past has required that.

So you mentioned a diocese that requires parishes or a building project to have 100% cash in hand. So I've worked in that diocese and I said, this is crazy. We're talking about years before this building's going to be built. And yeah, why is that? Oh, because the diocese is in debt, you know, tens of millions of dollars from parishes that started building and then didn't have the money come in, never had it committed, said they did or were approved to go forward, and then all of a sudden the buildings are there and somebody's got to pay for it. So there are steps along the way, but treat your diocesan counterparts as partners and over-communicate with them and you'll be in a lot better position in the end.

aggierobison: Exactly. So if you want to do a deeper dive into that kind of project management piece that we've been talking about here, we did a virtual summit on campaigns probably a couple of years ago now, and we had a talk from Sarah Dupre at Arkansas' campus ministry about doing just that, her experience during all of those project management pieces of the new building during a campaign.

You can access that actually for free. If you go to petrusdevelopment.com/141, you'll see access to get those talks from the virtual summit for free there.

AROB: Yeah, that conversation, that discussion from Sarah is phenomenal. I mean, she learned so much going through this process, working with the building committee, working with contractors, working with the diocese. And she shared all of that in great detail on that summit and just a wealth of information there.

So definitely I'd encourage you to check it out. What was the link again?

aggierobison: petrusdevelopment.com/141

AROB: There you go. Thanks, man.

aggierobison: Great. I want to finish up with one final question here that we get pretty frequently. We're thinking about doing a campaign. How are we going to fund our annual fund through the campaign? What's that going to look like, you know, during it and then after the campaign?

AROB: Yes, so depending on where you're starting, right? If you have an active annual fund, you're doing fundraising, that is a benefit to your campaign because you have that pipeline of donors and you have communication lines already opened up, you have processes, all of that. But then there is a concern, well, we raise $200,000 annually for an annual fund. Can we still ask for that as well if we're raising $2 million for this new project? The answer is yes. You can, and organizations are successful doing that all the time.

In fact, St. Mary's of Texas A+M, who you mentioned, they just built the new church that you talked about, that Bishop David Konderla envisioned 20 years ago, and they raised over $30 million for the building, and their annual fund fundraising efforts increased over the course of the campaign to the point where now I believe they're bringing in $2.5 million annually through their annual fund. So it does require some strategy. It requires some intentionality. Petrus is happy to help you to craft that intentionality and come up with that. But the fact of the matter is, yes, it can be done and you can be successful in both if you approach them strategically.

aggierobison: Love it. Anything else to add on preparing for a campaign, Andrew?

AROB: There's always going to be some reason why you should put off a capital campaign, right? Always. There's an election coming up, or you know the church across town is doing a campaign, or our development director is out for the next six months on leave. Whatever. There's always going to be a reason why you should put off a campaign. And yet, if you never say, "There are obstacles, there are going to be challenges, but we're going to move forward anyway," then you won't ever have that increased impact that the projects that come out of a campaign will produce for your organization. So be strategic, be smart, but also be bold in getting out there, planning capital campaigns and executing on them.

aggierobison: Excellent. Great. Well, thank you for joining us today, Andrew, and we'll see you back in a couple of weeks.

AROB: Can't wait.