Campaign architecture for a $12M capital campaign
The Low Income Investment Fund set out to raise $12M for entrepreneurs in the care economy: early child care providers, hospice centers, and developers building community-rooted real estate. I built the internal machinery that let the campaign run.
Low Income Investment Fund, a national CDFI
Strategic Projects Manager, Impact Capital and External Affairs
October 2023 to present
Fundraising infrastructure, narrative strategy, cross-functional project management, systems implementation
🧭 Where this sits. Community development finance, at the source. This is where I learned that a campaign’s ceiling is set by its plumbing rather than its pitch, and that federal policy is the strongest hook a fundraiser has if someone bothers to translate it.
🧩 Context and challenge
Raising money at this scale is rarely a money problem. It is a problem of vision, infrastructure, timing, and whether an organization can turn urgency into collective momentum before the window closes.
Four teams had to move in sync — Development, Communications, Policy, and Program — each with its own language for the same work. Meanwhile the operational backbone underneath them had never been built for a campaign this size. Aligning the story and modernizing the systems turned out to be one job, not two.
🛠 What I did
Wove the Inflation Reduction Act, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and the CHIPS Act into the narrative arc, creating hooks that pulled housing, climate, and workforce funders toward the same table.
Co-authored the Case for Support and project-managed it to completion, reconciling how Development, Communications, Policy, and Program each described the same work.
Reconfigured the CRM to track funder engagement and proposal progress, so relationships stopped living in individual inboxes and became something the team could see.
Introduced it, then institutionalized it — the harder half — so every campaign workstream had one place to live and a practice that outlasted the campaign.
Built a prospecting practice on Instrumentl and proprietary databases, qualifying funders against what the campaign actually argued rather than against sector keywords.
Translated what the programs achieved into language built on equity, urgency, and policy relevance, without flattening what the work actually was.
⚙️ Tools and systems
Salesforce
Instrumentl
Airtable
Google Workspace
📈 Outcomes
The campaign’s ceiling was set by its plumbing, not its pitch.
The point was never only to raise $12M. It was to build the infrastructure that moves capital efficiently to entrepreneurs the financial system routinely overlooks, and to do it in the care economy, where the businesses are small, the margins are thin, and conventional underwriting rarely reaches. Systems, messaging, and federal funding strategy were one piece of work, not three.
