Fundraising for Social Change, 8th Edition

chapter FIVEThe Importance of a Good Board of Directors

Anyone who has worked in the nonprofit sector for more than a few hours knows that one of the most vexing problems most organizations have with fundraising is an inability to recruit and maintain board members who willingly and enthusiastically help with fundraising. This problem has led to a small industry of people who train boards, write about how to build a fundraising board, create materials to give to board members, and so on, and another small industry of people who dispute whether you can or even should put together a board that does fundraising.

We are firmly in the camp that board members need to give money and raise money, and that organizations can realistically build boards with that expectation in place (with a few exceptions). Such a board does not require wealthy board members or board members with connections to wealthy donors. The fact that active governing boards that also fundraise are in the minority is discouraging, but when the fundraising board model does work, it creates healthy and vibrant organizations. There are very few examples of boards that do no fundraising but otherwise govern healthy organizations.

There are three main reasons that boards don't fundraise:

• They don't know that it is part of each board member's job.
• There is no accountability: they are not appreciated for doing their work or sanctioned for not doing it.
• Their dislike of asking for money is allowed to excuse them from doing ...