What Comes After Success? - An Episode about Capital Campaign Endings

Andrew and Rhen close out their capital campaign series by tackling a question many nonprofits don't think about until it's too late: What happens after you hit your goal?  

Please take note - the work isn't over!  Yes, take time to celebrate (pop that champagne!), but the real opportunity lies in what you do next. This is your chance to transform one-time campaign donors into loyal, long-term supporters of your annual fund.

Andrew and Rhen break down the essential tasks for transitioning out of campaign mode, including how to ensure those pledges actually turn into payments. Their advice centers on two key strategies: consistent communication and donor education.  Invest in your donors now, and they'll invest in your mission for years to come.

For the pledge redemption resource Rhen mentioned in the episode, check out our Petrus website by clicking HERE.  

On a different note, we share the good news Andrew shared during the episode.  This winter, you can get world-class fundraising training at half the usual price.

Petrus Development’s Basic Online Advancement Training, or BOAT, gives you a clear, proven roadmap to build a strong fundraising program for your ministry or to onboard new fundraising staff.

It’s designed especially for Catholic organizations that want to grow their annual giving, engage more donors, and raise more money, without feeling overwhelmed.

The regular BOAT registration rate is $1,499, but for Black Friday, you can join the Winter 2026 cohort for just $799. 

And, when you sign up, you’ll also receive an extended 90-day free trial of The Harbor, Petrus’s brand new fundraising membership community with ongoing training, templates, networking with other Catholic fundraisers, and access to experienced fundraising coaches to keep your momentum going.

Don’t miss it. The Black Friday deal ends Friday, December 5.

Learn more and register HERE. 

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:

01:10.89 Host Well, howdy, everybody. Welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. I am Rhen Hoehn from Petrus, and joining me today is President and Owner of Petrus, Andrew Robison. How's it going, Andrew?

01:20.45 AROB Great, Rhen.

01:21.83 Host Excellent. We're on part four of four of our breakdown of all the steps of a capital campaign. So if you missed those, go back and start from the beginning. We talked about feasibility studies. We talked about the campaign preparation phase. We talked about executing the campaign itself. Today, we're going to talk about the wrap-up of a campaign and transitioning back to your annual fund, which sometimes can be tricky for some folks. So let's jump right into it. We've gone through the silent phase of a campaign. We've gone through the public phase. We're coming up on the goal. Maybe we just hit the goal. What happens now in terms of the campaign?

01:55.48 AROB Great. So a campaign is a great experience to raise money for whatever your need is: build your new church, launch your endowment, add your 10 new staff members, whatever that is. It's also an excellent time, which we've been talking about, for bringing in new donors to your organization—first-time donors, lapsed donors, people that have given small gifts in the past. Maybe they make a big campaign pledge, and it's helpful to bring them in as campaign donors. But if that's where you stop, then you're not doing the work. You're not positioning the organization for long-term success without the next step, which is stewarding those donors, helping them have the best giving experience they can to your capital campaign. And while they're doing that, begin the work of communicating the ongoing operational needs of your organization and make it easy for them to transition their gift—their campaign gift—over to an annual gift. So it really does require great stewardship. It requires good communication, and that communication's messaging is: the work of this campaign was important, but the ongoing impact of what our organization does every day, every week, every year is so critical. Please continue to support the operations. And so the stewardship of your donors, the communication with them, and then the cultivation of their ongoing support to the organization.

03:42.65 Host Got it. So what does that look like? Let's say we've just hit the goal of the campaign. What needs to happen right away?

03:48.96 AROB Yeah, so I think it's really important to celebrate success, right? In the last episode, we talked about how the campaign can be a really rewarding experience. It can also be the most difficult or challenging experience of a fundraiser or executive director or leadership's time in ministry. And so it's important to take a moment. It doesn't have to be a long moment, but take a moment certainly to celebrate what you've accomplished and what the long-term impact and benefit is. So celebrating the success is critical. That can take a number of different ways, right? We've talked in past episodes about whether your organization should do a gala or should it do a benefit, right? If you don't have one, but people have been clamoring for a big event like this, this is the time to do a big event like this—to celebrate the success of a capital campaign. Bring people together, celebrate, talk about the impact, honor the donors who helped get you there, the volunteers who put in that work. It doesn't have to be a gala, but certainly something that allows you to do that is a great way to celebrate success. So it's important because it honors the moment and the success, and it's also a critical step in stewarding people for ongoing support down the road.

05:24.00 Host Excellent. And so I think that event is part of the stewardship. What are other best practices for stewardship? And does that look different for, say, one of the leadership donors to the campaign versus somebody else who gave in the public phase, maybe a smaller gift?

05:38.18 AROB Yep, so it does look different, yes. And when you move out of your campaign—let's say, for example, you built a new church, right? That's a great time for you to honor your key donors and your key volunteers in a way that can be permanent or even semi-permanent, right? So this could be a plaque on the wall with your campaign committee names, or it could be—if you've... A lot of people, when they're giving to big campaigns, especially building campaigns, there'll be naming opportunities. And so if somebody gave a gift that a statue is named in honor of their parents, for example, or them, that's a good way to bring those people in and to show them: this is a statue that you helped put here that you made possible. Thank you so much. So it's not a capital campaign example, but I remember I was working with a group, and they did a wish list at the end of Christmas one year. And part of one of the things on the wish list was they wanted to buy—and they had classrooms upstairs—they wanted to buy a crucifix for every classroom because they didn't have them. And so they spent, you know, whatever, and they got eight people that gave money to buy crucifixes for the walls. They put them all up. The development director took a picture and just texted that picture to the donors who did it with a thank you so much, here's a picture. And that single act was universally—I mean, it was kind of overwhelming how grateful people were for that small gesture. And so in a capital campaign, it's really important for you to honor the people that gave, whether there's a naming opportunity or not, but honoring those people that made significant investments, certainly. And that takes a million different forms. But the point is, personal and attentive stewardship is always going to be the most well-received.

07:36.97 Host Excellent. So you've kind of completed the campaign. There are several things that were put in place during a campaign that need to essentially come to an end as it wraps up, right? One of the things that comes to mind is the campaign committee. What does it look like to kind of end that committee and wrap things up for them?

07:58.55 AROB Yep. So it's helpful and really a good idea to have a final concluding campaign committee meeting, right? So bring your committee together. You know, a lot of times over a campaign, you start with 20, and at some point people fall off. They're not really that involved. It can be frustrating. You say, "Ah, this person said yes, and then I haven't talked to them for a year and a half. They're not responding to calls." For the formal ending of the committee, I recommend people put all that stuff behind, invite everybody back to be part of the campaign committee final meeting, and celebrate success with them in a kind of small, intimate way. So, you know, this is a good way if it's an organization that has a priest and a rectory, right? Invite them all to the rectory for a final meeting, kind of bang the gavel, say we've completed it, and then have drinks and hors d'oeuvres after to celebrate. So wrapping them up is really important. You also want to start transitioning staff and volunteers from campaign focus to now annual fund focus. So a campaign can be all-consuming for staff when it comes to energy, especially at the end, right? If you're that close to the finish line and there's a mentality of like, "All right, everything is getting put aside until we cross this finish line. We have to do it." And so when you cross it, it's kind of like, "Okay, now what do we do?" And it's important to sit down if you're the leader of the organization or you're part of it to say, "Okay, let's sit down, talk about it, sort of debrief, do an after-action report." A lot of times if you have a campaign consultant, they'll do this with you. But to say, "Okay, the campaign is over. These are all the things that went well. These are the ways that we want to learn for the future. Now what's next is begin to transition back to focus on annual fund operational support."

09:55.05 Host Got it. And you're also kind of closing—when I think back to the preparation phase episode, a lot of things we put in place, it's time to kind of take them back down. So you build out a website for the campaign. You create all these materials for the campaign. In my experience, it seems like when it comes to the campaign website, it's good to kind of move that maybe to the history page of your website saying, "Okay, this happened these years, this is what was accomplished." You don't want it to just totally disappear from the record of what happened in your organization, but you also don't want to leave up those campaign giving options and such so you don't get random gifts or anything or confuse people when they go to make a gift, right? Same thing with all the materials you create, the letterhead, all the gift charts, all that. It's good, I think, to archive those so you can look back at them in the future and know what you did, know what things looked like, know what the branding was like, and pass it on to the next generations of staff so that they have a record of that.

10:52.11 AROB Yeah, I'm doing some work with St. Mary's at Texas A&M where I used to work, now as Petrus. I'm doing some consulting with them, and they have a really great practice: every appeal, every invitation, everything that gets produced by the development office—after it gets mailed or used or distributed, whatever it is—one copy of it gets put into an envelope and then labeled with what it was, when it was, and then it gets put in a file folder in a filing cabinet. So you can go back and open up the drawers of the filing cabinet. It goes back a couple of years now, but you can pull out any appeal, any invitation, any newsletter and look at it right there, which I think is a really good practice. It kind of sounds like, "Well, duh. Yeah. Why wouldn't that be a good idea?" And yet I don't know a lot of organizations that have that level of detail to archiving their materials. And so that's a really simple practice that I think can help future generations of fundraisers and staff down the road.

11:58.80 Host Great. Let's talk about pledge redemption. So you hit the campaign goal with pledges, but you might still be receiving gifts for another year or two after the campaign is done. Do you expect all those gifts to always come in? What does it look like to make sure most or all those gifts do come in over time?

12:17.94 AROB Yeah, you'd love to be at 100% redemption. The fact of the matter is it's not going to happen. So thankfully, religious organizations are usually the highest when it comes to pledge redemption. And so, you know, you look at symphonies or other kinds of social organizations or environmental causes, things like that—a lot of times they do struggle more with pledge redemption. But thankfully, religious organizations, people tend to stick to their pledge. Now, there's going to be cases when they don't, right? They move out of town and they say, "I just can't finish my pledge. I'll make one final gift and that'll be it," right? You hope for some kind of communication. More often than not, they're just going to stop responding, stop sending in gifts and kind of ghost you. So you want to account for that. In my experience with the campaigns that I've either been part of or that I've helped clients with, usually we're looking at like a 93 to 95% pledge redemption rate, which is really good. That number can change dramatically if you have one large pledge that doesn't get fulfilled, but for the most part, that's pretty standard. How do you keep that number high? Good communication, proper stewardship, and make it easy for your donors, right? Tara was telling me about an organization or an experience she had giving to a campaign, and she was trying to make a pledge payment and it ended up being much more difficult to make that pledge payment than she had hoped for. She's a fundraiser. She understands the ins and outs and that things can get tricky sometimes. And so she kind of went through it. But if you're making your average donors jump through a lot of hoops to make their pledge payments, they're just going to stop. And so make it easy. Really rely on simple, convenient payment ways—automatic pledges or automatic pledge payments. I was talking with somebody the other day and they said, "Well, you know, we want to use pledge payments and recurring monthly transactions." And they were like, "Well, that works for like $1,000 a year, but is somebody really going to make a $10,000 annual pledge payment on their credit card?" And I said, "You'd be surprised, and don't assume that they won't." Now it might be where they want that drafted once a year, right? So then you automate that. Most systems can automate monthly, quarterly, annually.

14:53.55 Host Yeah, yeah. 100%. My wife and I were just looking at making a pledge to a campaign last week, and you have to call them during office hours to set it up. Like, man...