Developing a case for support is a vital part of every capital campaign. It is also something that every fundraising campaign and every nonprofit, whether involved in a capital campaign or not, can benefit from. This purposeful process of gathering ideas and evidence will help you to establish your importance in serving your community and provide compelling reasons for donors to give to your organization.
What Is a Case for Support?
The very best cases for support weave together the image of the nonprofit, its role in the community, and how fulfilling that role benefits those it serves and the community.
A case for support is an authoritative internal document. It is the foundation for your communication efforts that will move people to give to your organization. It is long and detailed, and designed to house all the information and evidence you need to make your case through your other external communications vehicles, like brochures, slide decks, and websites. It should clearly communicate the needs of your nonprofit and demonstrate how filling those needs will ultimately benefit your community.
Your case for support can guide every piece of communication your organization shares with your community and your donors. From website copy and social media posts to grant applications and donor appeals, a case for support can keep all your communication ideas coordinated and on track for success.
We compare a nonprofit’s case for support to an investment strategy that beautifully outlines the potential donor’s return on investment. A good investment strategy doesn’t focus merely on the needs of the company. Rather, it focuses on how investing in the company will benefit the investor. The case for support document should hold all the elements needed to make the case for investment by a donor.
How Do You Start a Case for Support?
The case for support is developed by gathering ideas from multiple audiences, including internal staff as well as community leaders and donors. Cases for support are often generated during a capital campaign feasibility study when donors and community leaders are asked for their perspectives on the organization and its project. By including external viewpoints, you gather information from the potential donor’s perspective: What is important to them about your organization? What resonates with them about your services in the community? How do they see your organization benefiting the area? If you only have the internal perspective, you may miss out on important points about your nonprofit’s impact on the community and your donors.
Through the study, a nonprofit should solidify its image, its role in the community, and how it benefits the community. These elements all become key parts of the case for support for the specific capital campaign project.
If you are developing a general case for support outside of a feasibility study, consider interviewing some of your most engaged donors and volunteers to uncover their views on your leadership, your mission, your services, and why they support you. Gather all historical organization and program data, funding priorities, cost estimates, strategic plans, and mission and vision statements—anything that will add evidence and shape your case.
Assemble a team of people—around 15 people from inside and outside the organization —who will help provide input. From that group, choose three to five who you can count on to work closely with you during the process. Plan for multiple drafts and revisions with your small group and a round or two with your larger group as the process plays out. Plan to share with your greater leadership group as well.
Identifying Need Versus Benefit
Your case for support should outline the needs and benefits of your specific capital request or your organization and its programs in general. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate the difference between needs and benefits:
We had a client in Kentucky with a serious problem: An ice storm in late spring fell a tree onto a housing unit for at-risk teenage girls. The house was destroyed. Thankfully no one was hurt, but rebuilding the house would cost approximately $2 million.
Right around the same time, a nonprofit home healthcare agency in New Mexico approached us. The executive director and her board were losing market share to for-profit agencies, so they wanted to diversify their offerings. Their community didn’t have a dedicated hospice house, and people who needed inpatient hospice care had to make a one-hour drive down a two-lane mountain road! The director wanted to build a six-bed hospice house that would cost over $3 million.
Both organizations had needs that could be quantified. In Kentucky, an ice storm left 30 young women sleeping on cots in the gym. These ladies had horrific pasts—abandonment, sexual and physical abuse, drug addiction—and now they had lost the one home that made them feel safe. In New Mexico, the lack of a hospice house meant turning away multiple patients every year who needed inpatient care.
In Kentucky, our case for support focused on helping these young women become happy and productive. In New Mexico, the case for support focused on ensuring that terminally ill patients and their loved ones had positive end-of-life experiences. Highlighting these benefits, rather than focusing on the organizations’ specific needs of a new roof and a new structure, is what drove the campaigns to successful completion. We helped each organization construct a case for support that showed the potential donor (the investor) how his/her gift (investment) would help the community (ROI).
Tone of a Case for Support
A case for support can be written in first or third person, although writing in third person gives it a more objective tone. Many nonprofits err in focusing too much of their case on emotion. The communications that stem from the case for support may take a more emotional tone, but the case itself should focus on facts and figures to articulate the donor’s potential return on investment in helping a nonprofit to realize a solution.
Again, the case for support is not intended to be a stand-alone document. Rather, it provides the building blocks for newsletters, brochures, grant requests, and video scripts. Think of it as a depot of information that can be pulled from depending upon the nonprofit’s need. For example, if the nonprofit needs to write a grant request, the information from the case for support can be cut-and-pasted into the request with the funder’s areas of interest woven into the response.
Elements of a Case for Support
A case for support for a capital campaign is a long document that touches on all the pertinent elements of a capital appeal. A general case statement can do the same for a nonprofit looking to organize its communications and fundraising efforts.
A thorough capital campaign case for support blends internal and external interview findings with nonprofit data and includes these elements:
- Overview: a brief historic overview of the nonprofit—when did it open, who does it serve, how does it benefit the community, as well as accolades.
- Mission and Vision
- Administration and Board of Directors
- Challenge/Current Situation: What operating, programmatic, or infrastructure shortfall brought about the nonprofit’s desire to seek capital? Use data to illustrate the scope of the problem. This is the nonprofit’s “Need.”
- Opportunity/Solution to Current Situation: How will you resolve the issue or issues? If this is a general case for support, include information on each of your programs and their impact. Once the capital is raised, how will the nonprofit’s users and the service region benefit? This is the nonprofit’s “Benefit.”
- Project Budget and Business Plan: The Business Plan is needed if staffing and/or expenses are increasing. This shows financial readiness or break-even point.
- Project Timeline: When will the project begin and end, including time for fundraising?
- Summary: a blend of overview, challenge, and opportunity that summarizes the needs and benefits of reaching the capital goal. Why does this project matter? Focus here more on benefits; donors give more to solutions rather than challenges.
Refine your case for support through multiple drafts shared with your team, your board, and your key stakeholders. Incorporate their language and perspectives to help your case hit home with the widest audience. Use the process to build buy-in, vision, and excitement. And don’t create it and let it sit on a shelf. Revisit and revise as your organization changes and grows.
Tying It Together
The case for support should answer many questions for you, your team, and for your eventual audience: What are you raising money for? If you’re successful in raising the funds, what will your greater impact be? How will that improve your community?
With this centralized set of ideas, language, and evidence for your organization, you will be equipped to communicate in an organized and thoughtful way.
Through the process, you will define your purpose and objectives, establish a clear vision for your organization, and build excitement and buy-in with internal and external constituencies.
Do you need a case for support example to get you started? Here’s one for a library capital campaign and one for a healthcare campaign.