Key steps & stages in Case-building

Building a strong, professional quality Case for Support for your appeal takes careful planning and execution. It’s important to allow enough time in your timeline for each step to be done properly. The following key steps represent the critical success factors in Case building:

Establish your fundraising goal. A Case is built around the financial goal of your campaign and the individual funding Needs of your organization. It is difficult to develop a Case if these vital strategic aspects of your campaign have not been determined yet. Make sure you have established a realistic and achievable goal for fundraising, and that the leadership of both your organization and your campaign have signed off on this amount.

Define your “Needs”: The specific items your organization plans to spend the money on are the Needs that will be at the heart of your Case. It is difficult to develop a Case with a Needs list that has not yet been defined. Typically the Needs are determined by your organization’s long-term strategic planning process, not through Case building. Make sure you have determined a set of Needs items that your organization has committed to undertaking, and that the leadership of both your organization and your campaign have approved all the items on your list as their top funding priorities.

Assemble good background information: As part of the Case research and planning stage, your Case writer will need briefing information about your organization, your mission, your vision, the challenges in your field of activity, your plans for the future, as well as the individual Needs items. Gather whatever documents and other background information you already have on these various topics to give to the writer as a starting point. The writer will let you know what other information or documents are needed.

Decide who needs to be consulted: Consultation and consensus building is a big part of Case building. If you consult the right leaders among your organization and campaign team during the Case development phase, you will build consensus as you go along. This will ensure that once written, your Case and campaign will be well accepted and supported by your organization. Campaigns require strong internal support to be successful in soliciting external gifts. Your Case writer will interview these individuals to get their thoughts on the Case and how the Needs should be positioned.

The writer will also need to do Case research in preparation for the writing of the Case. This involves doing interviews with the people who are most knowledgeable about the organization’s future, its strategic priorities, and most importantly, the individual Need items to be included in the Case. Develop a list of these people early in the process and discuss it with your Case writer to ensure you have both the right names for consensus-building and Case research/briefing purposes.