Back in July I was wandering through my local greenhouse/landscaper with a handful of 50% off coupons earned by buying a ridiculously overpriced Christmas tree the previous December. They expired in two days.
After lots of googling and peppering the staff with questions, I went home with a back seat full of knock out roses and one hydrangea.
FYI, I am used to planting in the Midwest, where the soil is amazing. Just casually toss a zucchini plant into the ground and you'll soon be making enough zucchini bread to feed the entire neighborhood for weeks.
But now, I live in Georgia.
And the "soil" is literally mostly reddish brown clay. That's not a myth.
Thankfully, the helpful staff at the greenhouse had prepared me and sold me a bag of soil amendment (that seemed mostly like hard little black rocks mixed with dry black earth, weird). "Mix the clay with this stuff 50/50," they instructed. And so I did. And now from my office window I see hydrangeas, roses, and butterflies.
Capital campaigns work the same way.
When a school starts dreaming about a capital campaign, the conversation usually jumps straight to the exciting stuff: renderings! fly-through videos! brochure copy! It's easy to believe that because the vision is exciting, the whole community will jump in and give.
But if the "soil" of your school's giving culture is thick and dry because you haven't been regularly enriching and tilling it with opportunities to make a difference through giving to an annual fund, you may have a problem. That exciting, promising capital campaign will very possibly take a lot longer to complete successfully, and/or your participation will languish while you become disproportionately reliant on the top of the gift chart.
What gets skipped, more often than not, is the question that actually determines the proper plan for helping that campaign hit its goal: has this school spent the last few years preparing the soil?
I’ve been digging into a survey Generis ran with NextEd last spring involving 70 schools across the country and sharing real numbers on staffing, giving culture, and campaign readiness. And the pattern that showed up again and again wasn't subtle. More than half of the respondents were already in a capital campaign, and those schools also reported stronger annual giving and major gifts. That's not a coincidence. For many of those schools, the soil was ready.
Everybody wants the vase of fresh-cut hydrangeas on their counter but it's easy to overlook the regular feeding and care it took to get those fluffy purple blooms.
Here's my point: annual giving is easily underappreciated.
We get tired of hearing ourselves repeat the same talking points. It's boring. We think no one's listening. Sometimes it's a "set it and forget it" situation.
But actually, annual giving is the soil for our healthy, beautiful garden.
Annual giving is where trust gets built, where donor habits form, where your team learns what works. A capital campaign doesn't create generosity out of nowhere. It draws on generosity that's already been growing, hopefully steadily in your annual fund.
The survey data gave us clear descriptions of what "high-performing" schools look like, and what "under-resourced" schools look like.
These are the three big takeaways that speak directly to a school's ability to sustainably and successfully mount a capital campaign and should be carefully considered in the context of your school's development program (or lack thereof). If you're like many schools I know, number three may hit you the hardest.
Staffing is the fertilizer
The first big finding from the survey was hard to miss. Schools raising $500,000 or more annually almost always had professional fundraising staff and institutional infrastructure behind them. Schools raising under $100,000 rarely did.
That tracks with what most of us already suspect, but it's instructive to see it confirmed in the numbers. Investing in a development office isn't a nice-to-have once you're already big or if you’re on the way there.
Staff is the critical nourishment that makes everything else possible. You can't grow strong donor relationships out of a role that's wedged into someone's already-full job description, no matter how talented or tireless that person is.
Warning! The survey was also pretty clear about this: just hiring someone isn’t a quick fix. Without establishing realistic expectations of the staff, investing in them with real training, and supporting them as leaders engaged in the work of development, a new hire can end up frustrated and under-resourced, and results won't follow. So be careful.
Data demonstrates that without the “fertilizer” of trained, supported staff, your school is highly unlikely to be raising what it could be. If that’s you, the soil, in this analogy, isn’t getting tilled. It could be hardening right underneath you. And when the time comes that you need that building or gym or other capital project, you’ll have a lot of makeup work to do.
Your Parent Participation Rate Tells You What’s Really Going On.
I found this survey result particularly interesting because this topic is one of the top three questions I get when teaching at conferences.
Schools with parent participation above 50% weren't just getting lucky by having a bunch of generous families. Those schools also tended to report stronger donor stewardship practices and a more established culture of giving.
Schools with under 10% participation tended to be smaller, understaffed, leaning hard on events to do all the work, and they were missing the systems that keep donors engaged year-round.
What’s the typical response to a low participation rate?
Incentives. Contests. Big flashy tactical approaches.
BUT YOU’VE MISSED THE POINT.
A low participation rate isn't a sign that your parents don't care.
It's a signal that something in your advancement practice is off. Your internal alarm bells should be going off. Something’s missing.
In my experience, what’s missing is almost always clear, regular communication that builds trust over time. That, and methodical, authentic relationship management.
A big “give day” with pizza parties may move the needle for a moment (and there’s actually nothing at all wrong with them!) but if that’s what you’re building your annual giving program around, your soil is slowly drying out and you don’t even know it.
Parent participation is a cultural indicator. Treat it more like a dashboard warning light than a scoreboard. If yours is low, what’s missing in your development operations? Your soil is definitely missing some nutrients. Take the time to figure out what’s missing now before you need strong, broad community support for a capital campaign.
Relationships are the root system
The third big finding was maybe the most practical one for your day-to-day work and has huge implications for your future capital campaign: relationship-centered strategies consistently outperformed events.
Higher-performing schools, defined as the ones meeting bigger goals and holding strong participation, put their energy into three things: personal donor meetings, stewardship, and communicating real impact.
That’s the day-in, day-out vital cultivation of deep roots.
Under-resourced schools, on the other hand, tended to lean more on events, run simpler annual giving programs, and see less traction with major gifts.
Listen, I love events. They don’t call me a “gala queen” for nothing. They aren’t a bad tool and they can produce some results. But when a school gets over-reliant on them, giving starts to feel transactional. Donors show up, get something in return, and go home. That's not the kind of relationship a big campaign can lean on when you're asking someone for a much bigger gift a few years down the road.
Roots grow slowly and underground, and real donor relationships develop the same way. An auction doesn't build roots. A heartfelt thank-you call does. A timely handwritten note does. A conversation where you share with someone what their gift did for a specific kid does.
Are you growing a live oak, anchored by deep roots that run as wide as its branches, or a laurel oak, standing tall on roots that lie just below the surface? When it comes time to launch a capital campaign, you’re going to quickly discover the answer.
What ready soil actually looks like
Ideally, here's what I'd want your school to be able to say before you open a capital campaign feasibility study:
- You have dedicated advancement staff (not a business manager doing this on the side) and that role has the training and leadership support to succeed.
- Your annual fund has grown steadily, not just one strong year that happened to land before the campaign kickoff.
- Parent participation is trending up, and that trend is coming from real relationship work, not last-minute incentive pushes.
- Your team already has a rhythm of personal donor engagement, meetings, stewardship touches, impact updates, all happening well before anyone mentions a campaign.
If most of that list is true for your school, you're not starting a campaign from scratch. You’re planting seedlings into rich, black soil capable of growing tall, fruitful vines, just like I did in my vegetable garden in Illinois.
If your school can’t quite say those things yet, that's okay too. That's just information. It tells you where to put your energy this year, and it's a lot more useful to know that now than to find out after you’ve shared the renderings at Back to School Night and everyone expects you to produce quick results.
The bottom line
James Clear dropped an insightful truth bomb in his book, Atomic Habits, “you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” A capital campaign is just a big number and a bunch of pretty pictures unless the systems underneath it can carry the weight.
Annual giving is where those systems get built. It's lower stakes, it happens every year, and it's where your school learns how to ask well, thank well, and steward well, long before the ask gets bigger.
Skip that work, and your campaign is asking donors to trust a vision that your relationship hasn't earned yet.
So before you start dreaming about the floor plans and fly-throughs, take a real look at your soil. Annual giving isn't the same-old-same-old thing you do in between campaigns. It's the thing that makes the successful campaign possible. Now’s the time to dig in and till the soil, before you need it to grow something big.
Here's more content to help you lead your organization better: The Donor Who Never Left and Why Planned Giving Belongs in Your Fundraising Strategy
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