Ownership Begets Responsibility, Yet Again…

We hosted a roundtable here last week called: “Creating An Inspired Board-Staff Fundraising Partnership.” A mixture of staff and board members discussed their frustrations and victories in moving board members along the continuum from avoiding staff phone calls to carrying out assigned tasks to taking responsibility for soliciting new askers.

One recurring premise was getting true board buy-in on fundraising strategies – if the staff thinks it’s a great idea to do a dinner-dance at the Pierre but none of the board members feel they’ll be able to get their friends to attend, guess what? They won’t be able to get their friends to attend.

Likewise, one staffer lamented that his board members didn’t give him many names for his annual appeal – but the fact is, they were handed that task and told to obey, not brought through a soul-searching discussion in which the board itself concluded this was a good idea and they were going to try their darndest to bring in contributions from everyone they knew. Undertaking a Valentine’s Day fund drive needs to be a conscious board decision to produce full-hearted board involvement.

Creating internal fiefdoms is one way to encourage board members’ ownership of turf – carving out pieces of the fundraising puzzle that different members can take charge of. For example, one person takes on responsibility for the annual appeal, one for the house party, one for the Fall Fiesta – with board and staff fundraising leadership overseeing a whole composed of each mini-leader’s bite-sized domain.

Related to that, Board leadership development was another persistent theme. Looking ahead 3 years (at a minimum) so that you’re recruiting for the leadership you’ll need in the future, rather than for the board you needed yesterday, means that the nominating committee needs some pretty strategic players at its helm. The nominating committee doesn’t actually have to possess access to all the organization’s potential contacts in its back pocket – but it does need to know how to ask for help and to draw connections from and between people.

Staff’s role in supporting board member initiative was the final revelation to many around the table. Yes, we all want board members who email us at 6:30 am with a fundraising idea they’ve had in the shower – but even board members that motivated still need us to send them the follow-up email, the materials, the nudge, and the thinking-power that a 50+-hour-a-week (and who’s counting) full-time job allows nonprofit staff to track.

In the final analysis, board members are volunteers. The dog gets sick, the kid flunks a Spanish test, someone’s workload gets doubled – in other words, life intervenes. A true board-staff partnership builds a structure that respects those impediments to board fundraising performance – and then vaults above them.