The Case for a Campaign: Today and Always

Updated By: Steve Orr
June 3, 2026

Every few years, nonprofit leaders ask us some version of the same question: Is now really the right time to launch a campaign?

They asked it after 2008, they asked it after 2020, and they are asking it now. Federal funding continues to be under pressure, the tax landscape is shifting, and a market that has delivered strong returns is showing signs of volatility.

Our answer has not changed in more than 35 years of doing this work. A campaign succeeds or fails on three things: a compelling vision that donors want to invest in, leadership with the credibility and commitment to ask for transformational gifts, and a donor base with the capacity to respond. When those three conditions are present, the external environment rarely disqualifies a campaign. It shapes it.

The conditions that determine campaign success are largely within your control.

What a Campaign Actually Is

A capital campaign is a structured fundraising tactic that, when deployed well, consistently produces results that no other approach can match. Understanding why it works is the foundation for deciding whether it is right for your organization.

Four variables drive campaign performance:

1. A defined timeframe. Campaigns create legitimate urgency. A five-to-seven-year window focuses board attention, staff energy, and donor decision-making in ways that open-ended annual fundraising cannot. Deadlines produce gifts.
2. An ambitious goal. Campaigns ask organizations to set targets far larger than they would normally be comfortable discussing. A goal that feels like a stretch forces the internal conversations that need to happen: about vision, about capacity, about what your organization is actually capable of becoming. It is also usually advisable to make the campaign comprehensive, including most forms of operational funding and campaign gifts.
3. Multi-year and blended gifts. This is where campaigns fundamentally change the math. A donor who gives $25,000 annually might make a $150,000 pledge over five years. If they are willing to pair it with a planned gift, it can become a multiple of that. The blended gift, combining a cash pledge with a bequest or other planned giving vehicle, is the signature ask of a well-run campaign. In our experience, planned gift commitments now represent 30 to 40 percent of larger campaign totals. Goals should therefore be set significantly higher than the cash an organization needs today—a meaningful share of the campaign’s ultimate value will arrive in the future.
4. Leadership from volunteers and staff. A campaign is one of the most effective tools for identifying who truly cares about your organization—and who has the financial capacity and personal passion to lead. Campaign committees regularly become the pipeline for future board members, and the process of building and activating that committee is itself a long-term organizational asset.

But volunteer leadership is only half the equation. In our experience working across campaigns ranging from $10 million to more than $1 billion, the variable that most consistently separates transformational outcomes from adequate ones is the quality of staff leadership — specifically the CEO and Chief Development Officer. Their vision, their personal commitment to the campaign, and their fundraising skills are not support functions. They are the engine. A board chair cannot carry a campaign whose senior staff are not fully in it. And a talented development team cannot compensate for a CEO who is not willing to be present, personal, and persistent with top donors. When we assess campaign readiness, we assess people on both sides of that equation. The recommendations often include the need for training and coaching where appropriate.

One clarification worth making explicitly: campaigns are not necessarily a diversification tool. They typically dig deep into the individual major donor base, not across broader revenue types. If your organization is facing federal funding pressure, a campaign will not replace that revenue through corporate or government relationships. It will, however, require building and deepening the private major donor infrastructure that no policy change can take away. That is a different and more durable form of resilience.

The Wealth Transfer Is Already Underway

One dimension of the current environment deserves direct attention. As much as $124 trillion will transfer between generations over the next 25 years—and that transfer has already begun. Baby Boomers, the generation most loyal to the nonprofits they have supported throughout their lives, hold the majority of that wealth and are actively grappling with questions of legacy and values. Only roughly one-seventh is estimated to flow to charitable causes, but that fraction amounts to approximately $13.8 trillion. Philanthropy will not see a comparable concentration of philanthropic capital for generations.

The tax environment reinforces this. Regardless of recent legislative changes, the U.S. tax code remains extraordinarily favorable to charitable giving. Donors who want to direct assets to mission rather than to estate taxes still have powerful tools to do so—and campaigns, with their emphasis on blended gifts and multiyear commitments, are the ideal structure for those conversations.

One emerging tool deserves specific attention. Donor-advised funds, which now hold more than $250 billion in assets, have historically been understood as vehicles for current giving. That is changing. Several major DAF sponsors—including Fidelity Charitable and the National Philanthropic Trust, two of the largest DAF holders in the country—now allow donors to make irrevocable multiyear commitments from their DAFs. This is a meaningful development for campaign planning, and it is still underused by most organizations.

The nonprofits best positioned to capture this generational transfer are not the ones who will begin cultivating relationships when estates are being settled. They are the ones already in those conversations, at the depth that a campaign makes possible.

Feasibility and Readiness: Where Campaigns Actually Begin

The most common mistake we see organizations make is treating a feasibility study as a data collection exercise. It is not just data collection. It is the beginning of the fundraising process itself.

Orr Group has found that the most valuable information from feasibility comes through senior-level interviews, because the goal is not to tabulate responses. It is to engage the people who will lead and fund a campaign: board members, senior staff, and the organization’s most significant donor prospects. In those conversations, we are validating the case for support, identifying potential campaign leadership, and beginning the process of aligning top donors with the organization’s vision. A feasibility study done well does not just produce a report. It produces a campaign plan, a clearer case statement, and warmer relationships than before the process began.

Note: There is a place for surveys and focus groups, but these should be secondary to one-on-one interviews.

One common outcome from a feasibility study is a readiness period. Readiness is not a pause while an organization gets its house in order. It is active, strategic work. The readiness phase allows you to focus on the top of the donor pyramid: identifying your highest-capacity prospects, cultivating them with greater intentionality, and moving those relationships toward the transformational conversations that campaigns require. Starting the feasibility and readiness process now is not waiting. It is investing in the conditions that enable a campaign to succeed.

Is Your Organization Ready?

The right question is not whether this is an ideal moment in the economy or the political landscape. Those conditions will shift multiple times over the course of a five-to-seven-year campaign. The right questions are internal.

• Does your board understand what campaign leadership requires, and is it prepared to make leadership gifts and open doors?
• Do you have a strategic vision compelling enough that donors will want to invest in it, not just a funding gap to fill?
• Is your development team capable of managing major donor relationships at campaign volume?

If the answers to those questions are not yet clear, the readiness period exists precisely to address that. Organizations that run the best campaigns do not wait for conditions to align. They build them.

Orr Group has spent more than 35 years helping nonprofits answer those questions honestly and build toward transformational campaigns. If you are asking whether a campaign is right for your organization, that conversation starts with a feasibility assessment.

Steve Orr is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Orr Group. Steve draws from his investment banking and finance background to bring a problem-solving approach, a focus on metrics, and an outcomes-driven perspective to the nonprofit sector.