Archive for April 12th, 2009
“Capital Campaigns” by Andrea Kihlstedt is now out in a 3rd edition
Around this time last year, I had the pleasure of working for several months with nonprofit consultant, trainer, and fundraising specialist Andrea Kihlstedt on the third edition of her book, Capital Campaigns: Strategies That Work.
When we first got together, Andrea showed me a copy of the second edition. Being familiar from visits to the Foundation Center in New York City with the existing literature on fundraising, I knew at once the book was good: unusually authoritative, and also unusually practical. Andrea told me she didn’t want to just update the content - she wanted to make it more readable as well. She’d surveyed clients who relied on the book, and the only negatives they had reported were that some of the chapters seemed long, and the prose a little intimidating.
Andrea had gotten her publisher to agree to a friendlier, more modern layout for the new edition. That by itself would be a help. She also hoped to make chapters shorter by passing drafts to me as she completed them, so that I could recommend cuts. Beyond that, she asked, did I have any other suggestions to improve readability? In fact I did. Based on a close analysis of several chapters, I came up with some simple recommendations she could use while revising.
