In this pre-reading from the 2007 Gathering, George Overholser, Founder and Managing Director of NFF Capital Partners, examines why nonprofit capital fundraising often backfires, and how organizations can adapt traditional capital campaigns to fix the problem. Overholser says that nonprofits must learn to extend the role of traditional capital campaigns so that they finance entire nonprofit businesses—the entire balance sheet of a healthy enterprise, not just buildings or endowments.

However, this approach requires a new form of investment to distinguish "equity-like infusions" from the other revenues they raise. The challenge for nonprofits? Changing their methods of tracking money, so everyone can tell whether long-term revenues have kicked in sufficiently to make further infusions of equity unnecessary.