Feasibility studies (sometimes referred to as planning studies) empower nonprofits to make the best possible strategic decisions for their major fundraising campaigns. This early part of the campaign planning process sets up organizations to succeed in both the short and long terms, ensuring campaign success and driving future impact and growth.

However, you won’t conduct these studies in a vacuum. To maximize their benefits, your organization must prepare and be able to clearly articulate your preliminary campaign plans and the broader context of your operations and needs.

If you’ve conducted a capital campaign before, you’re likely familiar with feasibility studies. If not, we’ll provide a quick explanation before covering six crucial pre-study steps that you need to check off beforehand in order to make the most of your study once it’s time to begin.

What is a feasibility study?

A traditional campaign feasibility study consists of interviews between your organization’s key stakeholders, like major donors, funders, and partners, and a fundraising consultant about your preliminary campaign plans. This step occurs early in the campaign, once you’ve established but not yet finalized your plans.

In these interviews, stakeholders will provide their thoughts on the campaign’s plans, objectives, fundraising goal, general direction and vision of your organization, and more. The consultant will then distill the findings into a concrete report and recommendations to help shape the campaign’s next steps.

The purpose of a feasibility study is to provide a nonprofit with clear insights into the thoughts and opinions of its most important stakeholders (whose involvement and support will be critical to the campaign’s later success). Using their input, the nonprofit can then adjust the plan and goal to bring them more in line with what the stakeholders consider realistic, impactful, and/or achievable, hence the term “feasibility” study.

Important note: Today, many organizations, fundraisers, and consultants prefer the term “planning studies” over “feasibility studies.” Why? There are a few reasons:

  • The “feasibility” of preliminary campaign plans typically isn’t as cut-and-dry as this term implies. Nonprofits can adjust their fundraising goals or the overall scope of the campaign, but it’s generally unlikely that they will choose to fully cancel such a large-scale project. Capital campaigns bring major long-term benefits and address critical capacity and strategic needs, so they’re not planned (and pre-planned) impulsively.
  • These studies require broader analysis and context; stakeholder input on campaign plans doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The organization’s overarching purpose for the campaign, current capacity and infrastructure, the state of its current finances and development pipeline, and more all need to be taken into account when developing recommendations for a planning study. “Planning” better implies the full strategic scope of these exercises.
  • Campaign studies also bring further-reaching benefits than simply giving you the green light for your campaign. When their recommendations take the full picture of your organization’s performance into account, you’ll receive a more comprehensive roadmap for improving your campaign plans. Refine and follow them to conduct a successful campaign, and your organization will enjoy long-term benefits to its capacity, operations, and institutional knowledge beyond just reaching the fundraising goal.

Because of these distinctions, it’s recommended today that nonprofits planning capital campaigns seek support from consulting services that offer more holistic planning studies rather than just interviews and recommendations.

Crucial pre-study steps to complete

So you’ve decided to hire a fundraising consultant to help you conduct a planning study for your upcoming capital campaign—what should you do before getting started?

As mentioned above, effective planning studies draw from the complete context of your organization’s current state, performance, and strategic goals. First and foremost, you need to be able to clearly articulate this full story. And since you’ll be working with a third party, this shared understanding will be essential to ensure you get the most valuable and accurate insights from the study.

In their guide to feasibility/planning studies, the fundraising experts at Graham-Pelton outline six key elements to think through before beginning. Take the time early in the planning process to answer these questions:

Key elements to consider before a feasibility study, detailed in the text below

  • Purpose and objectives
    • Why are you conducting a capital campaign? What are the specific objectives that it will accomplish, e.g., funding a building renovation, equipment investment, an expanded program, or starting an endowment?
  • Preliminary financial goal
    • Roughly how much will it cost to complete your objectives? Are these costs fully representative of your preliminary campaign goal, or will you fold in any additional campaign-related expenses like consulting fees?
  • Projected impacts
    • What will successful completion of your campaign objectives accomplish for your mission? Consider both direct and indirect positive impacts, like expanded capacity to serve X number of additional constituents and improved relationships with donors to the campaign. Try to project direct impacts as precisely as possible.
  • Current prospect pipeline
    • What’s the current state of your development pipeline? How many major prospects can you already reasonably count on to contribute to the campaign, and at what giving levels? How thoroughly could you fill in a campaign gift range chart and/or depth chart today?
  • Current financial state
    • What’s the current makeup of your nonprofit’s revenue and expenses? How exactly will the campaign’s objectives be funded, and what types of gifts will you solicit (cash, non-cash gifts of securities, deferred planned gifts, etc.)? Do you have the infrastructure and processes to accept those gifts?
  • Partners and funders
    • In addition to donors, what other community partners, peer organizations, funders, and volunteer groups will you count on to help push your campaign forward? What roles will they play, and at what points in the campaign timeline?

Aim to answer these questions as thoroughly as possible before beginning work with a consultant for your planning study. You’ll likely need to collaborate across internal teams, but ideally, much of this information has already been determined during the earliest stages of the planning process.

What do these steps accomplish?

By working through these first steps and answering foundational questions about your campaign’s purpose and context, you’ll set your organization up for a smoother planning study (and, subsequently, a smoother campaign). How?

First, as discussed above, answering these questions gives your team and consultant a much clearer, comprehensive picture of the campaign to work with. The planning study will be able to progress much faster. The insights it generates will be more accurate and helpful, not only because your consultant will understand the full context but also because they’ll be able to bring that full context into their conversations with stakeholders.

Additionally, and very importantly, working through these questions helps your organization better articulate the vision for the campaign in general.

Remember, capital campaigns are complex, long-term undertakings. A consistent, guiding vision informed by all the elements listed above will keep your whole team focused on its north star, driving significant impact and growth by accomplishing the objectives. This consistency will translate into more unified teamwork and more compelling communication with donors throughout the entire duration of the campaign by helping you write an effective campaign case for support.

Conducting your planning study

Nonprofits typically turn to third-party consultants to conduct their campaign planning studies. That’s because consultants bring a few key benefits to the process:

  • Experience and expertise from past campaigns
  • An objective position from which to realistically analyze your organization’s performance and campaign plans
  • A more distanced position that can help stakeholders respond more candidly in interviews

Organizations sometimes conduct their own feasibility studies, although for larger nonprofits and major campaigns, a consultant’s expertise and objectivity are usually the best choice.

Think of investments in planning, strategy, and guidance as essential safeguards for your campaign—after all, you’ll devote a lot of time and resources to it in the coming months and years. Professional support gives you the confidence and organizational buy-in you need to move forward smoothly.

Once you decide to conduct a planning study and hire a consultant, what steps should you follow? The process will generally look like this:

  1. Complete pre-planning for your campaign and work with your team to clearly answer all the questions listed above.
  2. Form a small committee to lead the research and decision-making process. Set a budget for this consulting service and determine whether its cost will be folded into the campaign goal.
  3. Begin researching capital campaign consultants (ideally with experience in your sector, like healthcare or higher education fundraising, which will be a big plus) online and through referrals from peer organizations.
  4. Once you identify potential candidates, research their work and track records more thoroughly on their websites and by reaching out directly with any questions.
  5. Work with your team to narrow down a shortlist of your top candidates.
  6. Reach out to your candidates to ask about their proposal process. Some may ask you to submit a thorough RFP—which you’ll already have mostly completed by answering the key questions discussed above!
  7. Follow each candidate’s process, receive proposals, and review them.
  8. Compare the proposals and costs with your team, perhaps with a ranking system to quickly identify the favorite candidates.
  9. Make your choice, reach back out, and sign the contract.

This process may look different for each nonprofit and consultant, but in all cases, being prepared with answers to the pre-study questions will be helpful.

Follow the steps and tips in this guide, and you’ll be well on your way to launching your most successful campaign yet. Best of luck!