Fundraising Campaigns in Canada

Campaigns continue to be unrivalled as a means to attract the attention and investment of donors, mobilize volunteers and raise significant amounts of money. But given how much they have changed over the years, the best way to describe campaigns in Canada today is probably “The campaign is dead. Long live the campaign.”

Whether it’s a short six month campaign to raise funds for a specific project or a multi-year, multi-priority campaign with a goal in the hundreds of millions of dollars, campaign fundraising continues to be alive and well as a fundraising mechanism for Canadian charities.  But while there continue to be best practices from traditional campaign strategy, there has most definitely been an ascendancy of new campaign methodology and most of today’s campaigns look very different than campaigns did even ten years ago.

In our new report Fundraising Campaigns in Canada: What’s New, What’s Not New, What’s Next, we provide a comprehensive look at the trends and best practices in campaign fundraising today.  The report represents an amalgam of our years of experience with campaigns from coast to coast and across all sectors, and has been further informed by a survey that we undertook with our clients and friends this past summer.  The survey was sent to senior executives across all charitable sectors in Canada and the results were analyzed overall as well as by campaign size and sector.  In addition, we compared the results to those from our baseline survey in 2013 to see how this landscape has evolved over the past five years.