GuideStar Blog

I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that CampaignCounsel.org is the best capital campaign consultancy in the world! We have great success stories, amazing projects, smart-as-a-whip team members, and an impressive scope of experience. To my dismay, however, our company is not hired by every organization that is going into a campaign. The reason? We are not the best consulting company for every project.

Heading into a capital campaign? Then you’re probably going to need a capital campaign consultant. But perhaps not for the reasons you think you do.

Capital campaign consultants have one primary quality that, no matter how hard you try, you don’t have. They are outsiders!

You can’t be an outsider to your organization. As a staff person or board member, you’ll never have the kind of external credibility and political power that an outside expert will have.

That said, other than being an outside expert, you can do many things to move your campaign along just as well as—or even better than!—a consultant.

In the remarkable book The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, authors Richard and David Susskind explore the changes affecting professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants, management consultants, tax advisers, financial advisers, architects, journalists, and even clergy. Professionals, they say, “have knowledge, experience, skills and know-how that those they help do not.” And technology and the Internet are radically shifting the way people access expert information.

In this post, the second in our series about the new trends in capital campaign fundraising (part 1 appeared last week), we explore whether, why, and when you will need an experienced consultant to guide you through your capital campaign.