Key Takeaways

The Afternoon the Math Stopped Being Abstract

I got on a call with a development leader at a growing organisation last week. The organisation is doing serious work, has grown steadily, and is planning the biggest thing it has ever attempted.

We went through it in order, and the numbers came out plainly, without any defensiveness, which is a good sign about the person telling me.

Annual revenue in the mid-single-digit millions. A capital need to build the thing. A separate operating need on top of it, because the new facility does not run itself and the public funding everyone was counting on eighteen months ago is not something anyone is counting on now.

Put together, the total need is more than ten times what the organisation currently raises in a year.

Then I asked the question I always ask, and it is the only question in this piece you actually have to remember.

“How many donors do you have right now? Active in the last two or three years, plus or minus.”

Active in the last twelve months, just under 500. Anyone who has given at least once in three years, roughly 600.

There was a pause on the line. Then, dryly: it is a thirty-something percent compounded growth rate. No big deal.

That was the moment the plan stopped being a plan and became a math problem. And it is the reason I want to talk about a feasibility study, because it was the next thing on the table.

What Is a Feasibility Study Actually For?

The textbook answer is that a feasibility study tests whether your donor base can support a campaign goal, identifies your lead prospects, surfaces objections, and gives your board the confidence to authorise the effort.

That is a real function. I am not going to tell you these never make sense. But I want to be honest about what I have actually watched happen in twenty years, and here it is.

The Study That Changes Nothing

I said this on the call, and I will say it here.

Nine times out of ten, feasibility studies are ways for consultants to earn money.

Now, the useful version of that claim is not the cynicism. It is the test underneath it. Before you commission a feasibility study, ask one question: is there a finding that would change how you behave?

Think it through honestly.

If the study comes back and says your donor base can support the goal, you proceed. If it comes back and says your donor base can support seventy percent of the goal, you proceed anyway, because the need did not change and the building does not get seventy percent built. If it comes back and says the goal is unrealistic, you almost certainly still proceed, because the roof still leaks and the waiting list still exists and the board has already told the community what it intends to do.

If your need is a specific number, your need is a specific number. You have to figure it out. And then you go.

A feasibility study that cannot change the decision is not research. It is an expensive form of reassurance, and the money would have been better spent on the first six months of campaign staffing.

Who Should Be in the Room With Your Donors

Here is my second objection, and I hold it more strongly than the first.

I do not like it when a consultant interviews your donors.

The feasibility study interview is, structurally, the best major gift conversation available to you. You are sitting with your highest-capacity supporters, asking them what they think about the future of an organisation they care about, asking them where they see themselves in it, and listening to their hesitations before those hesitations have hardened into a no.

That is not market research. That is cultivation. It is the exact conversation our post on how to turn a major donor into a partner argues you should be engineering on purpose, and a feasibility study hands it to a stranger with a clipboard.

There is a counterargument, and it deserves a hearing. Donors will sometimes be more candid with an outsider than with the chief executive whose feelings they are trying to protect. That is true. It is a real advantage, and it is why some organisations get value from the third-party format.

But weigh it. You gain a slightly more candid answer to a question you could have asked yourself, and you give up twenty relationship-deepening conversations with the twenty people who will decide whether this campaign works. On balance, in an organisation with under a thousand active donors, that trade is bad.

You should interview your donors. Not somebody from the outside.

Why Do Organisations Commission Studies They Do Not Need?

Two reasons, and neither of them is stupidity. Both are entirely human.

The Permission Purchase

Boards are being asked to authorise a number that terrifies them, and they want cover.

A feasibility study is a way of converting an act of institutional courage into a procedural step. If the study says yes and the campaign later struggles, nobody in the room made a bad call. The process was followed.

I understand the impulse. I have watched capable, well-meaning boards spend real money purchasing the ability to not be the one who said yes.

But the courage does not actually get outsourced. It just gets deferred, at cost, by about five months.

Founder Freeze

The second reason is quieter, and I see it constantly.

Sometimes when founders get to a certain level, they start to freeze when it comes to fundraising strategy. They know how to do the program expansion strategy. But they freeze and get into their own heads about the fundraising part, because they have been able to control all of it before and now they cannot.

That is founder freeze, and it is one of the most predictable growth ceilings in this sector.

Program expansion is legible to a founder. You add a site, you hire staff, you serve more people, and the causal chain from decision to outcome is short and visible. A capital campaign is the opposite. You do a great deal of work, correctly, for eleven months, and then a single family decides in a conversation you were not in.

Founders who have built something from nothing are, almost by definition, people with a high need for agency. Handing that much of the outcome to other people’s choices is genuinely hard. So they reach for the thing that feels like control, which is another round of planning.

This is not a character flaw. It is a predictable response, and the fix is structural rather than motivational. You give the founder a defined role with defined reps and a defined calendar, and you stop asking them to feel comfortable first.

When Is a Feasibility Study Actually Worth It?

I promised I would not just be against something, so here is the affirmative case. Commission the study when one or more of these is true.

1. You genuinely do not know who your top prospects are

If nobody has done wealth screening, nobody has built a gift table, and nobody can name the twenty people who would have to say yes, then you have a prospect identification problem and a study will help. If you have already done that research, as the organisation on my call had, you are paying for work you have completed.

2. Your board will not authorise the campaign without one, and you have tried

Sometimes the political reality is the reality. If a study is the price of a board vote, pay it and be clear-eyed that you are buying a governance outcome rather than an analytical one. Budget accordingly and keep the scope small.

3. The campaign goal has a plausible chance of being wrong by an order of magnitude

There is a real difference between “is it 30 or is it 36” and “is it 8 or is it 36.” Studies are poor at fine calibration and useful at catching gross error. If you are in gross-error territory, that is worth checking.

4. You are entering a donor market you do not know

An organisation planning to raise the majority of a campaign from a region, an industry, or a donor segment it has never worked in has a genuine information gap. That is what research is for.

Notice that three of those four are information problems. If your problem is confidence rather than information, a study will not fix it, and I would rather you spend the money on somebody who will sit with your leadership every week and make sure the visits happen.

What Should You Do Instead of Pausing?

The organisation on my call described itself, accurately and honestly, as being in a strategic pause. Reassessing how to present the campaign, in what phases, on what timeline.

I want to be careful here, because I am not against pausing. I am against a particular thing that wears a pause as a costume.

A Pause Is Only Strategic If It Is Strategic

A pause is only strategic if it is a strategic pause. Not “we do not know what to do, we are afraid.” Pause.

The best thing to do in fundraising is to keep moving. When you stop, you stop, and you lose momentum.

Here is the test. A strategic pause has a defined question, a defined decision-maker, and a defined end date. “We are pausing lead gift solicitation for six weeks while the board finance committee determines whether the operating model works without public funding, with a decision at the October meeting” is a strategic pause. It has a shape.

“We are in a strategic pause” with none of those three things is a stall wearing a strategy costume. And stalls are expensive in a way that is easy to underestimate, because the cost does not show up as a line item. It shows up as the lead prospect who was warm in June and is now committed to somebody else’s campaign, the steering committee member who has stopped forwarding your emails, and the internal belief, which sets like concrete, that this thing was probably never going to happen.

Momentum in fundraising is not a motivational concept. It is a set of live conversations that decay at a measurable rate when you stop having them.

Run the Ratio Before You Run the Study

Before you spend anything, spend an afternoon on this instead.

Take your total need, capital plus incremental operating. Divide it by the number of donors who have given in the last twenty-four months. That is your required average lift per existing donor if you raise the whole thing from people who already know you.

For the organisation on my call, that number was somewhere north of $75,000 per active donor. Which is not a campaign plan. That is a signal that the campaign cannot be funded from the existing file at all, and the actual strategic question is not “can our donors do this” but “where do the other donors come from, and how many years does acquiring them take.”

That reframe is worth more than any study, and it costs you one spreadsheet.

Then run the second ratio. A feasibility study exercise that shows your donor base has capacity roughly equal to your need is not encouraging news. Capacity is theoretical, and it is spread across every other organisation those donors support. I generally want to see meaningful headroom between assessed capacity and the goal, because you are not the only claim on that money. When capacity and need are close to identical, that is tight. That is real tight.

Interview Your Own Donors

Take the twenty people at the top of your gift table and get in front of them yourself, over the next ninety days, with no ask.

Tell them what you are considering. Tell them the honest version, including the part where the public funding assumption changed. Ask them what they think, where they would want to be involved, and what would make them hesitate.

You will learn everything a study would have told you. You will learn it faster. And at the end of it you will have twenty people who feel like insiders rather than twenty people who got a phone call from a research firm.

Two of them will tell you something that changes the plan. One of them will volunteer a number. That happens more often than people expect, and it rarely happens to a consultant.

Phase the Campaign So Movement Is Possible

The best instinct on that entire call was not mine. The development leader described the shift already underway internally: rather than holding the whole thing until the full amount is committed, start the program in a space you do not own, serve the additional people now, raise a smaller tranche, and use the visible progress to attract the next round.

That is exactly right, and it is the practical antidote to the stall.

A campaign structured as one enormous binary event gives your leadership no way to act until everything is certain, which means the pressure to be certain becomes unbearable and the pause becomes permanent. A campaign structured in phases gives you something to solicit against next month.

Donors fund momentum. They can see it, and they are considerably more responsive to a project that is visibly moving than to a project that is visibly waiting.

What About the Money You Will Have to Spend?

There is one more thing I told this leader, and it is the part boards resist hardest.

You will have to invest more money. Anyone who tells you that you do not have to invest more money has never raised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

And in the same breath, the counterweight, because both halves are true.

I am cheap when it comes to spending in fundraising programs. I care about the return, not the top line. If you are spending nine hundred thousand to bring in a million, you are not making money.

Those two statements only look contradictory if you are thinking about the fundraising budget as a single number. Think about it as a portfolio of investments, each with its own return, and it resolves immediately. You spend aggressively on the things that return well, and you stop spending on the things that do not, and the total goes up because the mix improved.

Most of the organisations I work with have this exactly inverted. They spend a fixed, modest amount across everything, defend that amount as fiscal discipline, and have no idea which line items are actually producing. Our post on what it costs to raise a dollar walks through the three numbers that make this visible, and it is the fastest way I know to change how a finance committee talks about fundraising spend.

For a campaign of the scale on my call, the specific gaps were not mysterious. Grant capability built inside the organisation rather than borrowed. More capacity carrying major gift portfolios than one dedicated officer plus fractions of three other people’s weeks. Those are investments with legible returns, and they are the difference between a campaign that closes and one that gets quietly rescoped in year three.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a feasibility study typically cost, and how long does it take?

For an organisation in the $1M to $20M range, the common range is roughly twenty to sixty thousand dollars, with three to five months from kickoff to final report. The variable is the number of interviews. Before you sign, ask the firm what they will do if the answer comes back negative, and listen carefully to whether the response involves a recommendation to proceed with a revised goal. That answer tells you a great deal about what you are buying.

Our board chair insists we need one. How do I have that conversation?

Do not argue against the study. Ask what decision the board expects to make differently depending on the result. If the chair can articulate a specific finding that would change course, the study is worth doing, and you have just improved its scope. If the honest answer is that the board wants to feel more confident before committing, name that kindly and offer an alternative: a leadership-conducted round of twenty conversations, reported back to the board in ninety days, at a fraction of the cost.

Can we do a feasibility study ourselves?

You can do the interviews yourselves and you should. What you cannot easily do yourselves is the wealth screening and the gift table modelling, which are genuinely technical and worth buying separately and cheaply. Separating those two purchases is often the smartest move available: buy the analysis, keep the relationships.

We already did a study eighteen months ago. Should we refresh it?

Only if something material changed in your donor base rather than in your anxiety level. A shift in your public funding assumptions changes your operating need, not your donor capacity. If the original study still describes your prospects accurately, refreshing it will cost you another quarter and tell you the same thing.

What is the single fastest way to tell whether our campaign goal is realistic?

Look at the top of your gift table and ask whether you can name real people, by name, for the top three gifts. Not categories. Not “a family foundation.” People. If you cannot name them, the goal is not yet real, and no study will make it real. If you can name them, the question shifts from feasibility study to sequencing, which is a much better problem to have.

How do we keep momentum while the board deliberates?

Separate the two tracks explicitly. The board can deliberate about the total goal and the timeline while your leadership continues qualifying visits, stewardship, and the phase-one solicitation. Those activities do not require the final number to be settled, and stopping them is what actually costs you. Our guide to nonprofit fundraising plans covers how to structure a plan so that the strategic questions and the weekly activity are not hostage to each other.

Wrapping Up

You do not have a feasibility study problem. Almost nobody does.

You have a math problem, a sequencing problem, and a courage problem, and only one of those three is genuinely hard.

Run the ratio this week. Get in front of your top twenty yourself over the next ninety days. Phase the thing so there is something to solicit against next month. If after all of that there is still a specific question whose answer would change your behaviour, hire someone to go answer it.

Then move. A pause is only strategic if it is strategic.

Is Your Campaign Plan Built on Math or on Hope?