Conduct a Capital Campaign Feasibility Study: 5-Step Guide

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A capital campaign feasibility study, also called a campaign planning study, helps nonprofits prepare for major fundraising campaigns. By analyzing your fundraising infrastructure and potential for financial support, an effective study helps you lay the groundwork for a bold, ambitious, and successful campaign.

If you’re planning your nonprofit’s first capital campaign or working on one for the first time, you likely have a few questions. This guide will cover all the essentials:

Understanding the basics
Why nonprofits hire consultants for feasibility studies
5 steps of conducting a feasibility study
The outcomes of an effective study
Graham-Pelton’s approach

Understanding the what, why, and how of campaign planning studies will allow your nonprofit to navigate this crucial early step of your campaign with confidence. Let’s get started with some essential background information.

Understanding the Basics of Capital Campaign Feasibility Studies

What is a campaign feasibility study?

A capital campaign feasibility study or planning study consists of research, interviews, and analyses that seek to measure a nonprofit’s preparedness to undertake a proposed capital campaign. An effective feasibility study results in a recommendation on whether to proceed with the campaign and offers a set of suggested adjustments to the campaign plan to maximize the chances of success.

At Graham-Pelton, we call our traditional feasibility study a Campaign Confidence Study. That is because the purpose is not to deliver a simple yes-or-no verdict on whether a campaign is feasible. It is to give leaders evidence-based confidence in the campaign’s potential and a clear understanding of whether, when, and how to move forward successfully.

What’s the purpose of a fundraising feasibility study?

A feasibility study does not flatly tell you whether or not you can conduct a capital campaign. The purpose is instead to gauge your readiness to reach your working campaign goal.

A study will give you a clearer sense of your current fundraising capacity, your prospect pipeline, and what adjustments you may need to make to your plan and goal to succeed. Note that this process requires already having a preliminary plan and fundraising goal in mind. Even a study that states your nonprofit is not positioned to begin a capital campaign should include recommendations for improvements to get your organization to a place where the campaign can proceed.

Truly helpful campaign feasibility studies go beyond industry standards, offering a roadmap to achieving ambitious goals and transformational giving for your nonprofit. Jump ahead to learn more about our methodology and team of fundraising experts.

What does a feasibility study entail?

When you undertake a feasibility or planning study, expect to encounter these activities and steps:

Researching your current major donor prospect pipeline
Assessing your organization’s fundraising capacity and preliminary campaign plan
Interviewing various stakeholders to discuss their impressions of your organization and the need for a major campaign
Analyzing all findings to compare readiness and perception to the campaign plan
Developing recommended next steps and strategic adjustments

This process will give you an accurate picture of your organization’s strengths and abilities, as well as measure the likelihood of support from key stakeholders and the broader community.

Because a feasibility study touches on so many aspects of your organization and requires impartial analysis, most nonprofits traditionally work with third-party experts to conduct their feasibility studies.

Who should be interviewed in a campaign planning study?

Stakeholder interviews are a key part of a feasibility study. These interviews typically include:

Major donors and prospects
Board members
Key leaders, staff members, and volunteers
Other community partners, sponsors, and funders

Remember, the success of a major fundraising campaign hinges on your nonprofit’s stakeholders’ campaign buy-in and financial support. These campaigns are all-hands-on-deck undertakings. You need to be sure that your community understands and is energized by your nonprofit’s vision for growth.

What are the different types of feasibility studies?

Today, consultants offer several different types of campaign feasibility studies. A few types of studies you might see include:

Traditional studies. Traditional capital campaign studies follow the standard process of testing internal capacity, determining funding goals, and assessing overall organizational readiness.
Accelerated studies. Established nonprofits with strong visions, supporter bases, and prior experience with capital campaigns may be able to launch an abbreviated feasibility study that runs parallel to early campaign management. This approach can be beneficial for organizations that are committed to launching a capital campaign and confident that they will move forward with a campaign.
Self-guided studies. Do-it-yourself style feasibility studies forgo a consultant’s involvement and are instead conducted by the nonprofit. A self-guided study can be a practical and cost-effective choice for smaller or more straightforward campaigns, provided the organization has the capacity to gather candid feedback, assess findings objectively, and translate insights into a sound campaign plan. For larger, more complex, or higher-stakes campaigns, however, an external partner can deliver significant return on investment by bringing rigor and objectivity that can strengthen campaign strategy and ultimately position the organization to raise more.

Why Nonprofits Hire Fundraising Consultants to Conduct Feasibility Studies

Nonprofits traditionally hire capital campaign consultants to conduct campaign feasibility studies. This tried-and-true approach brings a few key benefits:

First, and most importantly, consultants bring expertise from years of planning nonprofit capital campaigns of all shapes and sizes. They’ll analyze the study’s findings, recall past insights from similar situations, and develop thoughtful, custom recommendations for your unique nonprofit.
As third parties, consultants provide an impartial perspective to the process. Stakeholders may be willing to offer more candid thoughts to a consultant than they would if you conduct interviews yourself. A consultant can also take an objective view of your full capacity and readiness, giving you invaluable insights you might not have gleaned yourself.
Consultants also greatly simplify the process of conducting a study. After all, planning studies compile insights from diverse sources. Gathering this information, coordinating and conducting interviews, and acting on all this information will eat up your team’s energy during a time when there are many other important priorities.

Whether you partner with a consultant for just their planning study services or choose to continue your partnership for ongoing campaign support, securing professional guidance is a smart choice. Capital campaigns are major investments of your nonprofit’s time and resources—outside expertise, perspectives, and logistical help will safeguard that investment.

Initial Steps Before Working with a Consultant

There are a few important first steps you must complete before soliciting support from a fundraising consultant for your feasibility study. Answer these questions before researching potential partners for your study:

Why are we planning a campaign? What are its specific objectives?
What’s the financial goal that will accomplish those objectives?
What positive impacts will success have on our ability to serve constituents?
What’s the current state of our major donor prospect pipeline?
What is our current mix of revenue sources?
Who are our key external partners and funders that we’ll rely on during the campaign?

Having an initial vision for your campaign and its success is essential before working with a consultant. You can hire a third party to help you plan the preliminaries, conduct the feasibility study, and lay out a finalized strategy, but you have to take the first step.

Additionally, at this stage, you should know what type of feasibility study you plan to pursue. For example, at Graham-Pelton, we offer both an accelerated approach to campaign planning (CAPS™: Campaign Accelerated Planning System) and traditional feasibility studies (Campaign Confidence Study).

Our CAPS™ approach works best for larger, established organizations that have a clear campaign vision, solid internal capacity, leadership endorsement, and an active donor community, whereas our Campaign Confidence Study is best for any nonprofit looking for a more traditional approach to campaign feasibility.

5 Steps of Conducting a Campaign Feasibility Study

Once you determine that it’s time to conduct a planning study and contract a fundraising consultant to help, what next? What specific steps can you expect from the process? Let’s take a look:

These five steps will help you conduct your own campaign feasibility study.

1. Get clear on your messaging

To convince donors to offer their support, every fundraising campaign, regardless of its size, must tell a compelling story. Why should donors care about supporting your mission or your vision? What problem will your organization solve? How will their philanthropy drive real-world impact?

You’ll answer these questions and tell your unique story in your case for support, the seeds of which take root during your planning study.

Start with a preliminary case for support that you’ll test with stakeholders and potential donors to gauge the feasibility of your campaign plan. This guiding set of ideas should include a few key points:

Your vision for where your organization is headed
Your priorities and goals for the campaign
How accomplishing the campaign goals will push your vision forward
The impact your organization has had in the past
The tangible impacts that donations to your campaign will have on constituents and the community
The problem that your organization works to solve and why it’s urgent
The reasons why your organization is best positioned to solve this problem

Aim for impactful and focused messaging at this early stage, but remember that the overarching purpose of the campaign planning study is to reveal ways that your approach can be refined and adjusted. Cases for support are living documents that can evolve as your campaign plan comes into focus.

2. Engage internal and external stakeholders

Once you have a case for support to test, begin assessing varied perspectives from key supporters. This stage of feedback collection will often consist of a mix of two approaches:

One-on-one discussions with key leaders, potential major donors, and other stakeholders to collect qualitative thoughts and input on the campaign plan.
Surveys that are distributed among broader segments of the community to test the impact of your messaging as distilled in your case for support.

In both cases, the point is to collect unbiased feedback on your campaign plans and generate buy-in along the way. What do your various audiences think about your goal, plans, and message? Their answers will help you shape your messaging and approach for maximum impact.

This is the stage where an unbiased third party is most helpful for facilitating open, candid discussions. Consultants also bring the expertise and broader industry perspective that your team may lack, resulting in more comprehensive and enlightening survey results.

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3. Perform in-depth prospect research and data analysis

Next, dig deeper into your prospect and fundraising data to guide refinements to your plans and goals. This involves studying your existing pool of major and mid-level donors, measuring their potential support, and identifying new prospects as needed.

This step will influence your campaign goal more than any other, so it is critical to have confidence that the findings from your research are accurate and vetted. It is at this time that you’ll determine if you have the necessary financial support for your campaign’s current goals and get a head start on developing an engagement and solicitation playbook for later in the campaign.

Outside counsel can play an important role here by providing data that’s not publicly available. Instead, organized prospect research during a study can include prospect tiering, data modeling, and predictive analytics. New technology is constantly emerging, like AI, and the right partner will connect you with these tools in support of your campaign planning.

4. Get your house in order

Once you understand how stakeholders view your organization and the financial capacity that exists within your database, it is time to examine your existing development operations.

An internal readiness assessment will review your staff and volunteer resources, existing fundraising capacity and capital, and the philanthropic landscape.

This in-depth look at your organization’s current abilities will reveal gaps that should be addressed to set your campaign up for success. For example, you may find that staff retention, training, technology, or other investments will be important for reaching your campaign goals and should be taken into account in your strategy.

If you seek outside support for this step, it’s important to consider your sector. Consultants experienced in your sector will bring the most relevant insights to the table. For instance, a hospital planning a major campaign would most benefit from support from a partner well-versed in grateful patient fundraising best practices.

By the end of this step, you’ll have a 360-degree view that allows you to approach your campaign as well-informed as possible.

5. Report the findings and make a plan of action

The findings of your study will identify how your organization can move forward to successfully execute your fundraising campaign in one of several ways—we’ll discuss possible outcomes below.

When working with professional counsel, the study’s findings will be clearly presented to you, with your next steps identified.

Whether or not you immediately move forward with your campaign, this last step in your study is a crucial part of ensuring success. Use this report to proceed to the next steps in campaign planning or address the concerns highlighted in the findings before moving forward.

The Outcomes of an Effective Campaign Feasibility Study

The final report from your consultant is the ultimate deliverable for your planning study, but what does this report help you actually accomplish? What are its potential recommendations and implications for your capital campaign?

An effective campaign study gives you a refined plan for your campaign and a better understanding of your organization’s readiness, stakeholder relationships, and any points of feedback. The specific recommendations you receive may fall into one of these rough categories:

Move ahead with your plan as-is without major changes to its goals
Adjust the campaign’s financial goal up, if the study revealed a surprising buzz of excitement and buy-in among prospects
Adjust the campaign’s financial goal down, if the study revealed fundraising, relationship, or logistical constraints that would make reaching your initial goal unlikely or greatly inflate the campaign’s overhead

Your consultant’s recommendations should pinpoint specific adjustments to make to your plan to support any changes to the campaign’s goal. In cases where a decrease to the campaign’s scope is recommended, your fundraising consultant will likely outline ways to further enhance your fundraising capacity before proceeding with the campaign.

Ideally, the outcome of a feasibility study is never to cancel the campaign outright.

Pre-planning considerations, the process of defining your objectives, calculating a working goal, and taking stock of your current capacity, should give you an immediate sense of whether any campaign is possible right now. If you’re at this stage of the process, remember that capital campaigns should be planned with real, current needs in mind, not just to celebrate occasions.

Graham-Pelton’s Approach to Campaign Feasibility Studies

Our goal is to equip your nonprofit with the insights and 360-degree view it needs to plan a truly transformative campaign.

Graham-Pelton offers two distinct approaches to campaign planning: the Campaign Confidence Study, for organizations seeking evidence-based confidence in whether, when, and how to proceed, and CAPS™, for organizations committed to moving forward with a campaign and ready to validate, refine, and accelerate the path to execution.

Here is an overview of how these two approaches compare so your nonprofit can determine which makes sense for your campaign:

	Campaign Confidence Study	CAPS™
Purpose	Build confidence in whether, when, and how to proceed with a campaign	Jumpstart campaign by combining early planning with immediate campaign activities
Nonprofit Profile	Nonprofits that are unsure of their readiness and need foundational data before proceeding with their campaign	Established nonprofits that are familiar with capital campaigns, have clear visions, engaged donor bases, and are committed to launching a campaign
Study Focus	Gathering data to assess readiness, scale, and potential	Campaign validation alongside planning and management
Study Outcomes	Evidence-based assessment of campaign readiness, viability, and potential; a preliminary case for support; and clear recommendations for whether, when, and how to proceed.	Evidence-based validation of campaign direction; a refined, campaign-ready case for support; activated leadership; and immediate priorities that sustain momentum and advance campaign execution.
Connection to Campaign Management	Campaign management services can be added based on the nonprofit’s needs and study outcome	Includes right-sized campaign management services

If you are still unsure which approach is best for your nonprofit, our team can assess your nonprofit’s goals, internal capacity, and campaign vision to recommend your next steps.

Begin Your Campaign Feasibility Study

The fundraising experts at Graham-Pelton can provide your nonprofit with everything it needs to succeed with its next capital campaign.

Learn more about our planning studies, and please get in touch if you have any questions.

Want to discover more capital campaign and development best practices? Check out these recommended resources from the Graham-Pelton team: