What is a Capital Appeal? A Capital Appeal is a campaign to raise a capital sum, often within a given time frame, for a specific project.  Capital appeals are frequently associated with appeals to raise large sums of money to fund the acquisition, construction or renovation of a building or other large project.

A Capital Appeal fund is often required in addition to the regular money raised by supporters every year to help fund the day-to-day running costs & services provided by your charity or not for profit organisation.

So where do you start?  A carefully researched fundraising plan will be required that identifies how you will go about raising funds for the Capital Appeal.  The case must present a convincing reason for a prospect supporter to make a generous gift.  The campaign needs to identify enough prospects, with sufficient means to give at the required amount, to hit the target.

Factually researched Wealth Intelligence matching, available from Advantage^NFP , will help you to identify the liquid asset millionaires “hidden” within your supporter database, who can give or influence a single gift of at least £5,000.  You may have a liquid asset millionaire within your database that already gives a small donation every month, but that has a much greater potential gift capacity.

This is where your Capital Appeal ‘case for support’ must be a well researched and comprehensive document.  The capital appeal may be an excellent opportunity to go back to lapsed supporters with a new, fresh opportunity for support.  A specific project may generate new supporters, re-envision existing supporters and even develop regular giving from ‘one-off’ cash givers.

Once the Capital Appeal business plan has been established; a ‘gift guide’ has been drawn up based on internal research of the organisation’s capacity to raise different types and sizes of gift and an outline of the type of supporters has been identified, you will need some way of recording and monitoring the appeal details.

The Advantage^NFP Fundraiser Capital Appeals module fully integrates with Advantage^NFP  Fundraiser and enhances the functionality already available to support your fundraising, membership, marketing and alumni needs.

An appeal will typically be defined within a time period and overall target amount. This can be broken down into a ‘Table of Gifts’, a number of discrete gift ranges and expected volume of gifts at each range.

Prospect supporters can then be established for each gift range in the Table of Gifts and a series of cultivation tasks distinguished and allocated to fundraisers to move each prospect through the pipeline.

Fundraisers can record the outcome of each cultivation stage and track the progress of each prospect from start to finish.

Reports summarising the progress against the appeal can be produced, along with number of supporters and their status at each stage in the cultivation process.

For more information about Capital Appeals and to see how this relates to your fundraising, membership or CRM database please contact marketing