The Shasta Community Health Center didn't dance around the issue. It labeled the opening section of its case statement, "Challenge." And the very first sentence delivered a deluge of bad news:

"Without building a new health center, Shasta County's primary source of health care for the working poor and indigent, Shasta Community Health Center, will close." The deadline for shutting down: June 2001.

But that didn't happen. Today Shasta Community Health Center thrives. It pursues its special mission ("...providing preventive, acute and chronic health care services to the economically or otherwise disadvantaged") at five attractive locations.

Shasta ultimately raised $4.5 million in that desperate first capital campaign, guided by Capital Quest consultants. Who deserves the real credit, though? The consultants? A bit. The Shasta health professionals? Absolutely; because they had a credible story to tell. But in the end the true heroes are the donors. They solved this particular problem by investing in the project. Without the donors, success wasn't possible. With the donors, it was.

Treating your donors as the crucial solution to an important problem will do your fundraising a world of good. When you take that approach (it's called "donor-centricity"), you shift responsibility -- and the credit -- for achieving the vision off your shoulders and onto the donors' shoulders, where it properly belongs.

Donors want that responsibility -- and they deserve the credit that ensues as well, once lives are saved, the world has changed, and the vision expressed in the case is realized.

Do not write your story as if donors are merely kind, generous bystanders. They are not bystanders. You cannot achieve what you set out to achieve without gobs of donor support. Make that point brilliantly clear. Write the donor into your story, as the essential solution.