Your team has created the framework for an amazing capital campaign case statement — you’ve done the analysis, collaboration, and soul searching that is required to create this most important of documents. You now have a blueprint for your campaign and a solid scaffold to hang your proverbial hat on. Now you and your team are tasked with a new challenge: translate your case statement from print to web. It makes sense, why not leverage all this great content, imagery and strategy to reach as broad an audience as possible. You have the opportunity to repurpose it and target it to specific audiences, but how do you start? How do you reconstruct your sweeping, linear appeal into the bite sized chunks of digestible content required by web users? 

We’ve helped shepherded multiple Case Statements through this journey in our time working with Higher Ed clients and we’ve learned a few tricks along the way.

Pitfalls to Avoid

The major issue that most organizations run into when they attempt to go through this process usually involves being too married to the original vision for the Case Statement.

• You and your team have spent so much time constructing a story with a start and a finish and you can’t figure out how to disassemble and reassemble that into the various pages of a website.
• The Case Statement’s branding and graphic design game is strong and you are worried that it will get watered down in its web form. With good planning and modern web code you can integrate and even elevate all of your print collateral. And don’t forget to take advantage of the animations and transitions that are unique to web media.

Helping Your Capital Campaign Case Statement Soar on the Internet

If you truly want to make sure that you are fully leveraging your case statement while still creating collateral that takes advantage of all that the web has to offer, there are a few key things that you’ll want to keep in mind.

• First, throw out your table of contents for your Case Statement and rethink your larger content strategy. You want your content to be “discoverable” — that is, making sure that the content is housed in the place that is the most intuitive for the user. The information itself isn’t going to change – the way people are exposed to that information, however, will. For example: put your Core aspirations or “Pillars” front and center, feature them on the homepage but also give them their own individual landing pages and use them as a design pattern in your navigation, too. Heck, cross reference them in all your School and Center pages, you don’t know where folks will be first encountering your content so don’t be shy about repeating the important stuff in different settings.
• Think about the user journey that someone takes through a website as opposed to print and, most importantly, think about how they’re different. How do your personas change in print versus on the web? What do they share in common? The answers to these questions are what should be dictating many of your decisions moving forward. How will someone interested in supporting faculty research use the site differently from someone who is a booster of a specific college? How can you make the case statement read differently to those different types of users based on their different paths through the site?
• Make sure that you use all the great photography that makes your glossy case statement publication look so good. There is no reason a website can’t look as polished and highly produced as a magazine. Also make sure you take advantage of the editability of websites to update and refresh that photography and other content often.

You’ll also want to make sure that the process of translating your capital campaign case statement from print to web is as collaborative as it can be. Go out of your way to make sure that all the players are working together – meaning that the team that produced the case statement and your digital agency MUST be on the same page.

Beyond that, make sure that your website is providing strong calls to action and direct links to your donation portal for the various funds. Your ability to put giving opportunities at the user’s fingertips is much stronger on the web and this is where the online version of your Case Statement really shines. 

Likewise, you should also make your content as shareable as possible – people won’t be able to connect with it if it exists exclusively in a vacuum. This means social media integration on sites like Facebook, Twitter and even on professional networks like LinkedIn – and as much of it as you can muster.

The Benefits of an Organic Translation from Print to the Web

The benefits of this approach are as powerful as they are immediate:

• Not only does it help create a crucial consistency of message so that people get the same impression regardless of how they come into contact with your campaigns, but it also gives your goals the proper articulation needed to show people WHY they should care so deeply.
• Translating your case statement to the web also offers a number of additional benefits that you wouldn’t necessarily get in print – like the ability to leverage personalization to create a more intimate experience, and a way to immediately get your content into the hands of the people who can make the most positive impact.

If you’d like to learn more information on the types of things that you should be thinking about as you translate your capital campaign case statement from print to web, or if you have any additional questions that you’d like to go over with an expert in a bit more detail, please don’t delay – contact us today. As an aside, you can also view this list of the top 10 capital campaign websites that we recently published for examples of just how powerful web-based collateral can be when your mission statement makes the jump from print and onto the world of the Internet.