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Campaign Assessment and Review: What Was Accomplished and What Was Learned  It's
over. The campaign is finished. The thank-you's have been said and the
money counted. However, before closing the book on a campaign for good,
you should take one last look at it. The days immediately following a
campaign are the time to analyze what went wrong and what went right,
which fixes worked and which didn't.You
should assess and review every fund-raising campaign, and you should
make a record of what you find. Evaluation is the final procedure in a
well-organized fund-raising campaign, and the report you write based on
that evaluation is the organized record of the knowledge you acquired.
File that report and it will be a database for you to draw on. Hindsight
is 20/20. Turn it into foresight for the next campaign.All the
participants in a campaign should be asked to evaluate their area of
responsibility and the volunteers with whom they worked. You want to
determine what the campaign did well and not so well, which expectations
were realistic and which weren't, which tools worked and which didn't,
and who performed well and who didn't. Solicitors, team captains,
division chairs, and campaign chairs should each make their own
evaluation, but no evaluation is more important than that of the staff
members charged with designing, organizing, and running campaigns. They,
after all, are the ones who are going to have to manage the next
campaign, so it is from their perspective that we will look at the
evaluation process.The
farther away you get from a campaign, the less you and others will
remember, and every day you delay your evaluation is a brick in the wall
of inertia you must climb to start the process. Begin your evaluation
the day after the close of the campaign. Let's
start with the things you want to learn. What is it you wish to know
about a campaign that can help with the next one?
The
answers to those eight questions can be synthesized from an analysis of
information from five different sources:
At
first blush, the question of whether the goal was realistic seems to be
self-evident. If it was achieved, it was. If it was missed by a lot, it
wasn't. However, like most things in life, the issue is not that simple.
A goal easily achieved could have been an unrealistically low goal or
the result of a totally unexpected large gift, while a failure to meet a
goal could have been due to a poorly designed or executed campaign,
rather than the goal having been set too high. Whether or not the goal
was realistic is a question that may have to await the answers to the
other seven questions. In
assessing how well prospects were rated and evaluated, you need to
determine if there was a consistency of results. Did the vast majority
of donors give substantially under their rated level? Did a large number
of previous donors reduce their gifts or decline to contribute
altogether? Was the ratio of new donors to new prospects contacted in
line with that of previous campaigns? This information is easily
obtained from an analysis of gifts and pledges. The
best way to determine the effectiveness of the organizational structure
of the campaign is to look at the campaign's interim progress reports
and to interview those who took part in it. What we are searching for
here is not isolated instances of persons failing to perform their jobs,
but a pattern of underperformance. Was there a division where a number
of team captains came up short? If so, the division chair may have been
spread too thin, and a division co-chair may have been needed. Do the
progress reports show a pattern of solicitors having a hard time
following up with their calls? If so, there may have been too many
prospects assigned to each solicitor. Look at how the pyramid of
campaign management was structured and determine whether that structure
had weak points. If the weak points were many and spread throughout a
single level of the structure or if they were grouped vertically within
one part of the pyramid, then it is likely that there was a problem in
structure. If the weak points are random, and no pattern can be
identified, then it is likely that they are a result of poor individual
performance. To
find out how well the tools in the solicitation kit worked, ask the
solicitors. Query them individually either by phone or in a
questionnaire, or convene a focus group or groups. If you go the route
of a focus group, make sure that you keep the group on topic. Don't let
them rehash the entire campaign. Focus their attention, and they will
provide a better, more detailed analysis. Also, be sure to draw your
participants from a number of teams. Analysis
of how the kickoff meeting went is best done right after the event. Your
evaluation of it should be based largely on a review of your notes and
the comments you collected from participants at the time. To this you
can add new information, such as problems that occurred during the
campaign with material that was covered during the kickoff meeting.
Progress
meetings and progress reports are the maintenance procedures of a
fund-raising campaign. If they uncovered problems and helped you to
track the progress of the campaign, they did their job. Did you do
yours? Did you hold all scheduled progress meetings? Was attendance
good? Did you issue reports and the campaign newsletter immediately
following each meeting? Did you respond immediately to problems
identified at the meetings? What
you do to fix the problems progress meetings uncover can make or break a
campaign. In order to fix a problem, you have to be prepared to act as
soon as it is identified. Go back to your progress reports and see how
long it took you to solve problems. Were you able to replace a missing
volunteer, add new prospects to the list, get slow-acting solicitors
moving, limit the damage of negative publicity, and handle any of the
myriad other things that can go wrong in a campaign quickly and
effectively? If the problem came back in the next meeting or if results
slipped as a result of it, the answer is no. If that is the case, ask
yourself what went wrong and how you could have dealt with the problem
differently. Evaluating
the development office is a relatively straightforward process. Were
gifts booked, calls made, and acknowledgements sent accurately and
according to schedule? If not, you may need to change procedures or
personnel before the next campaign. Until
this point, you have been looking for breakdowns in the organizational
structure or procedures of the campaign. Now look for persons who
failed. This is the most delicate and often the most important part of
your post-campaign assessment. Campaigns live and die by the quality of
volunteers who work them. People who don't do the job need to be weeded
out. The last thing you want is a division chair, who fell down,
becoming next year's annual campaign chair. Actually
identifying the persons who failed is the easiest part of the entire
evaluation process. First you look at the results. Did the solicitors,
team captains, division chairs, and campaign chair deliver as expected?
Ask the campaign chair how the division chairs performed, the division
chairs how the team captains worked out, and the team captains how well
their solicitors performed. Once
you have gathered all the above information and analyzed it, you are
ready to write your report. For your own file make it no-holds-barred.
Evaluate everything and everyone ruthlessly, but with no personal bias,
and do it very confidentially. However, you will need to share the
results of the assessment with the campaign chair, the board's standing
development committee, and the chair of the board of trustees. For these
audiences you need to write a report that accurately documents how the
campaign progressed, but does not point a finger at particular persons.
Present the evidence, and indicate what actions were taken to solve
problems. Let the readers draw their own conclusions. If
the first rule in evaluating a campaign is don't wait, the second is get
the evaluation done quickly. You should be finished within a week of the
campaign's close. It's time to move on to other things. Those
are my views on the subject. What are yours? I welcome your comments and
suggestions: tony@raise-funds.com
Note: Additional resources are available on my website to help you make your next campaign your best campaign. You may access them by using .pdf and/or .html methods as follows:
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