Managing Up: Positioning Your CEO/ED for Campaign Success
In a campaign, your Chief Executive Officer/Executive Director (CEO/ED) is not just a leader. Often, they are your lead fundraiser.
They are the ones casting vision, building trust, and asking donors to consider their most significant gift yet to your organization. And donors are not just investing in the mission; they are investing in their confidence in that leader.
But here’s the challenge: your CEO/ED is already carrying a full plate.
If we want them to show up powerfully with major donors, we cannot simply add more; we have to be intentional about how we support them.
Managing up is how we do that.
At its core, managing up in a campaign comes down to three things:
Know their priorities
Own what you can
Position them for what only they can do
1. Know Their Priorities
Before we ever ask our CEO/ED to engage in fundraising, we need to understand what is already competing for their attention.
Campaigns don’t happen in isolation. They happen alongside board dynamics, staff leadership, strategy decisions, and day-to-day operations. If we don’t account for that, we create friction.
When we do understand their priorities, we can:
Align campaign activity with what already matters
Be thoughtful about when and how we engage them
Reduce the burden of decision-making
If we want them to be effective fundraisers, we have to start by understanding their world.
2. Own What You Can
Your role is not just to support the campaign. It’s to create the conditions for your CEO/ED to succeed.
That means taking as much off their plate as possible. Sure, sometimes that is tasks and details, but often, the biggest asset is alleviating the immense brain-scape a campaign and donor strategy can occupy.
You should be owning:
Donor briefings and meeting prep
Scheduling and follow-up
Drafting talking points
Tracking next steps and movement
And when something does require their input, your job is to move it as far forward as possible before bringing it to them.
Don’t bring a blank page. Bring a draft.
A simple gut check—“Is this right?”—is often all that’s needed to stay aligned without slowing momentum.
3. Position Them for What Only They Can Do
There are moments in a campaign that only your CEO/ED can carry.
Casting vision
Building trust with top donors
Making transformational asks
Your job is to protect their time and energy so they can show up fully in those moments.
This means:
Preparing them clearly and concisely
Anticipating what they will need
Removing distractions wherever possible
When your CEO/ED walks into a donor conversation confident and prepared, everything changes.
Keep It in Front of Them
So, how do you do this? Every CEO/ED operates differently. Some need structured updates, others prefer quick touchpoints.
The key is not the system. It’s consistency.
Whether it’s:
A weekly priority email
A short standing meeting
Real-time check-ins
Your role is to make sure what matters most stays visible without adding noise.
Final Thought
Managing up is not about control. It’s about clarity.
Clarity around priorities.
Clarity around roles.
Clarity around where your CEO/ED is best used.
Because when you get that right, your CEO/ED is not overwhelmed; rather, they are focused.
And a focused, confident CEO/ED in front of the right donor is one of the most powerful forces in a campaign.
