Board

Many board members have fears and anxieties about fundraising. They often do not have any experience of fundraising so would rather leave it up to someone else to ask for money. This results in frustrated and tired fundraisers. If you’re in this situation, then it is likely that your board doesn’t grasp that raising funds is a team effort and everyone in the organization has a role to play.

Therefore, I propose that instead of using the word "fundraising" with your board, a better way to engage them is to use the word "partnerships."

Board members need to put their weight behind organization building. And they can start by giving their nonprofit these five priceless gifts.

The contribution made by people who are chairs of boards is increasingly being appreciated within the voluntary sector. Chairs not only keep meetings of their boards to task but are an essential part of the "top team." Chairs can also assist in projecting a positive face of the organization to partners, commissioners and other key stakeholders. It is therefore no wonder that some third-sector organizations invest considerable resources in finding their next chairs. Here are some suggestions on how boards should approach the process, based on our experience of helping charities to find new chairs.

The fundraising professionals on your staff know what they're doing. (I hope.) You should assume they are working from a position of knowledge, not ignorance. It can be confusing that something like telephone fundraising works when you personally hate it. But think of it this way: As a board member, you live on a steady diet of green eggs Benedict. It's a little richer than the green eggs and ham that a more typical donor gets. They like green eggs and ham. You would too, if you were them.

You must move away from scarcity-based board recruitment where you beg people to fill vacant holes on your board and instead create a recruitment strategy that identifies the right people with the right skills, experience and networks who will become your partners in bringing more money in the door.

I wanted to expand the Nonprofit Blog Carnival concept in May. So, I reached out to real nonprofit people and asked them to also write an anonymous letter to their board volunteers. These people are executive directors, fundraising professionals, board members, donors, community volunteers, consultants and frontline staff. I promised everyone anonymity in exchange for their submissions. I hope you enjoy this real look at real issues that our community deals with on a daily basis.

Marc Pitman, founder of FundraisingCoach.com, wrote "Ask Without Fear!" and released an accompanying DVD of the same title based off his R.E.A.L. acronym: research, engage, ask, love. In April 2011, Marc spoke with FundRaising Success about board members and fundraising.

If your board has a long history of fundraising “failures,” what lessons have you learned from those “failures”? If you haven’t stopped long enough to examine what’s behind those disappointing results and instead doubled down on your effort to get your board aggressively fundraising, that’s where physics come in. Or at least an observation from the beloved physicist Albert Einstein, who defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Know any fundraisers who say "yuck" about fundraising? Show them this Jeff Brooks column, "How to Love Fundraising," from the April 2007 issue of FS — and set them straight!

In the December 2011 issue, Larry Raff, president and principal of Copley Raff and author of the Giving Take Blog, discussed how a simple exercise could help fundraisers get over their fear of making the ask, in his article, "The Paradox of Asking."