The Interview Informs the Ask
Earning the Right to Raise Capital: Part 2
In Part 1, we referred to a concept called “asking rights,” which can be generally defined as having the appropriate amount of credibility and relevance required to launch a campaign. Asking rights are an essential prerequisite for raising capital and, in our experience, are the most predictive metric for fundraising success.
Yet, they won’t be obvious in your balance sheet and no one will mention them in a board meeting. In fact, they are largely invisible and inherently difficult to assess. Nobody thinks much about asking rights until, just like your building’s foundation, they aren’t strong enough.
So how do you measure these all-important asking rights if they aren’t obvious on paper, and how do you get a sense of where your organization stands before you're standing in the room making the ask? The answer lives inside a feasibility study, and more specifically, inside the confidential interviews upon which it is built.
Statistical data is essential, and a feasibility study cannot be properly done without it. Yet, without the key layer of understanding that can only arrive in the form of “closed-door” interviews, your organization would be attempting to raise money with one hand tied behind its back.
While it would be easy to assume interviews are mere questionnaires and data gathering that can be performed by anyone, they are the opposite. Interviews are purposeful conversations, held in confidence, with a forward-looking purpose.
When executed correctly by a skilled interviewer, interviews reveal what prospective investors actually think, their level of influence, patterns relative to other interviewees, and whether they have a strategic role in the campaign beyond the mere financial.
To achieve these outcomes and both gain as well as understand asking rights, your interviews require two components:
Investors and community leaders will rarely tell your board chair, in a room full of people, that your plan feels underwhelming or that leadership hasn't yet earned their confidence. But they’ll tell a confidential, third-party interviewer exactly that because there's no breach of etiquette and far less at risk behind closed doors. Without confidential interviews, the most influential leaders in your community have no viable avenue to be heard—or worse—to be involved.
Some organizations skim past interviews (or do “surveys”) and avoid third parties coming in to “air out the dirty laundry.” But remember, the goal of a confidential interview is not to glean positive or negative feedback–it’s to know things that will inform your campaign’s alignment, relevance, and consequently, asking rights. Good, bad, or indifferent, these truths will either come out in the interview and give you a true understanding of campaign feasibility, or when the time comes to raise money and commitments remain flat.
Most conversations organizations have with investors look more like surveys. Pleasant, informative, and forgettable. The interviewer asks his or her questions, lists answers, and is one step closer on the feasibility study’s punch list. Fast forward one year and the prospect wonders if their voice was ever heard in the first place. This is survey work, and it doesn’t tell you much.
In contrast, a well-executed interview can move the needle before the campaign launches. Your prospect is on the interview list for a reason–they have something important to contribute, be it financial resources, leadership, insight, or influence. Treat them as such. We recommend doing your research and setting a specific goal for what the interview is meant to achieve. That way, you can secure financial commitments, identify motivated leadership, and ensure the campaign's core tenets are relevant to your top investors before it even launches.
Not just anybody can achieve these ends. It is important to enlist an experienced interviewer who is capable–in real time–of connecting a prospective investor’s leadership, peer networks, financial interests, and other resources to a plan still taking shape. It is often an invitation in its own right and the first moment an investor starts to believe in a campaign that doesn't exist yet.
When put in these terms, it is simple to see how confidential interviews led by a solid interviewer have almost nothing to do with diagnostics or data gathering. They are the foundational set of insights that inform a feasibility study.
A feasibility study answers far more than a simple “go” or “no go” verdict because the interviews inside it answer something far more specific. Before a campaign ever launches, they answer:
But most of all: do we have our asking rights?
Confidential interviews do more than tell you whether a campaign is feasible. They show you where your organization stands with the people whose support will determine its success—and what needs to happen before you ask them to invest.
In fact, the findings can shape the campaign itself: who to ask first, what to ask for, how to position the plan, where resistance is likely to surface, and which leaders need to be at the table. In that sense, the interview is not simply part of the feasibility study; it is the beginning of the campaign.
And perhaps more importantly, it gives your organization something difficult to get any other way: an honest understanding of what your stakeholders believe before you ask them to act on it.
If you're preparing for a campaign and want to know what your top investors actually believe before you ask them for more, let us know. We’re happy to talk through what that conversation could look like.
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