Not Making the Case

Believe it or not, I actually looked forward to last June’s Board of Trustees meeting. Two years of capital-campaign planning were culminating in a day-long retreat at which trustees would digest and respond to, among other things, the case statement I’d worked on for about 18 months. I couldn’t wait to hear their comments.

That statement had been a labor of ... well, a labor, anyway. It resulted from dozens of questionnaires, interviews, follow-up e-mails, and countless drafts. Everyone was involved in crafting it -- top administrators, faculty members, students, and a few consultants. My job was to capture and distill a barrage of opinions and facts, and, in some instances, make judgments where conflicts arose.

I produced a 17-page document detailing why we needed to begin a campaign, how we had positioned ourselves for one, and what we needed the money for. It was textbook, complete with benchmarking statistics on endowment levels, professors’ salaries, and other budgetary data.

Page after page discussed the importance of student scholarships, athletics, faculty support, endowments, new buildings, and annual giving. I included a letter from the president inviting people to participate in the campaign, and even threw in a few bar graphs, pie charts, and tables, just to liven things up.

Everybody who read it liked it. People suggested specific tweaks here and there, but approved of its basic substance and tone. One of our consultants said it was among the best he’d ever read.

Another consultant, from the company managing our campaign activities, told me to trim it down to a more reader-friendly length -- about three or four pages. I was reminded of writing my dissertation abstract, which could not exceed 500 words. My first draft ran 2,000 words, every one of them absolutely necessary. Now I had to condense 17 pages, each critical, into three. I’d managed to whittle that abstract down to 500 words, on the nose, so I accepted the challenge, if not eagerly.

Once my red pen ran out of ink, the finished product, an “executive summary,” totaled about four pages. We sent it to board members well in advance of the retreat and expected them to read it before the meeting.

They did, and they certainly came prepared to discuss it. Our consultants began the session by asking the president to outline the contents of the case, after which we broke into three smaller groups to share our thoughts. I was eager to soak up the praise for 18 months of hard work.

As I swaggered toward my assigned group, one of the trustees asked me if I’d written the document in question.

I confirmed that I had.

“Hmph,” he snorted while opening his copy to reveal highlighted sections and ample notes in the margins. He then told the group that he reads only Nobel Prize-winning literature and The New York Times, and that this document had to compete against those for his attention. I thought the statement was good, but I hadn’t anticipated a trip to Stockholm.

My group dug in and I soon realized this would not be a fete but a gripe session. The trustees grumbled about the case being too superficial, claiming that I made assertions without proper evidence. True enough, though I pointed out that the document had been abridged from 17 pages, and that anyone wishing to read the longer version would find plenty of details.

But the problem ran deeper. They said it didn’t excite them, that it was pallid and lifeless and ... boring.

Hoping to hear a balanced array of opinions, I poked my head above the fray to eavesdrop on the other groups. More of the same. Their vituperative lashings flowed like lava as I scampered down Mount Ego.

“Not emotional enough,” some said.

“Lacks a visceral quality.”

“Rather bland.”

“Too dry.”

“Doesn’t tug at the heartstrings.”

“Who wrote this [fecal matter]?”

So the verdict was in: They hated it. They took 18 months of work, rolled it up, and swatted me over the head with it. Nimbus became nimrod. Nice try, bub.

Where had I gone wrong?

I’d written case statements before, for other institutions, and with great success. I knew what constituted a good one. But these trustees didn’t want a traditional case statement. They wanted something more akin to a campaign brochure.

Here’s the difference: A case statement presents a rationale for the campaign; a brochure presents an emotional appeal. The case statement is text-driven, black and white, and always appears in draft form so readers can recommend changes. The brochure is a glossy, full-color, high-end piece dominated by photos of the campus and faces. A case hinges on logic and data; a brochure hinges on testimonials.

We share the case statement with a small group of influential donors before the campaign even begins. The brochure appears as we approach the public phase and try to involve as many people as possible. While the content of the case will inform the brochure, the two are fundamentally different in appearance, tone, and use.

My descriptions may seem rather simplistic, and I’m not suggesting that a case statement must avoid all attempts to stir emotion or that a brochure shouldn’t present some rational arguments. But case statements aren’t supposed to make readers weep gently and write tear-stained checks. I’ve seen some statements featuring photos and testimonials (they ran far more than four pages), but they don’t approach the look of a public-phase brochure.

To their credit, our consultants enumerated those differences to the board. To their discredit, they did so toward the end of the session, after the trustees had already vetoed the case. Had they heard that delineation first and understood the proper context, then perhaps their comments would have been tempered and I wouldn’t have been left swinging in effigy.

Or maybe not. The truth is, what I think really doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter that college leadership and the consultants liked the case. The trustees are the collective audience for this document, the people who will determine whether or not we’ll have a campaign. If they don’t buy into the case, they won’t be zealous advocates for our cause. And they won’t cut checks, tear-stained or otherwise. As a writer, I had to win them over with the right substance, tone, and diction. I didn’t, so it’s back to the keyboard.

We in development joke that everything we do is derivative, that the fundamentals of fund raising fit every institution so evenly that it’s silly to veer from the norm. The old saw is that CASE actually stands for “Copy And Steal Everything.” We have wonderful books and articles informing us of best practices, including how to write the perfect case statement. And in most instances, these tried-and-true methods work well.

Other times we have to flick convention out the window. If a strategy doesn’t work for our institution or our board or our president, then it’s no good. If trustees want to weep, then by all means give those heartstrings a tug. They’re not wrong, and we’re foolish to think they are simply because they haven’t read the same textbooks.