I get it all the time. “Jim our board (pick which kind) isn’t raising enough money for us. Could you come to their next meetings and tell them what they should be doing?”
My first response is, “Are you sure that’s what you really want?”
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t insist that fundraising is a profession that requires deep and broad skills honed over time and updated regularly – and then turn that delicate, sophisticated function over to someone with no experience and say, in effect, “Do our job for us.”
Fundraising should be done by experts, not by otherwise gifted amateurs. If we delegate it to others because they are wealthier, more powerful, or have access to people we don’t, we surrender our expertise and subject ourselves to becoming the recipients of bad advice and naïve suggestions, such as:
Bad advice
- You need a better elevator pitch
- You need to ask more often
- You need to ask for larger amounts
- You need to be more aggressive
- You need to hire more “super salesmen”
Naïve suggestions
If we got everyone to give (pick your amount) we could raise (pick your amount)! Why don’t you ask:
- Oprah
- Bill Gates
- Warren Buffet
- McKenzie Scott
- Michael Bloomberg
- Those that made the billionaires’ pledge
And on it goes. Add your favorites to the list.
So, you don’t want to cajole or browbeat a board into becoming more active fundraisers; you want to:
- Show them how they can use their access and abilities to augment and support your fundraising experts
- Be very specific as to where and how they can help, asking them to select from a menu of well- chosen, high-level tasks, each of which can be done in no more than an hour, and let them choose how many hours they want to contribute
- Provide toolkits that allow them to work gracefully and efficiently within your systems and protocols
- Provide them staff support to ensure their high-level abilities are being put to their best use
- Ask them to do tasks and put them in environments that allow them to glean more of the essential truths of fundraising including:
- Most of your support will come from current donors (and board members can play a powerful role in stewarding donors)
- You don’t raise more money by asking for more but by showing how and where more will make a bigger difference
- You don’t wow donors into philanthropic submission, you listen your way into alignments of interests
When you provide wise, productive, and rewarding ways for your volunteers to augment your fundraising, you better establish your expertise and build better philanthropic partnerships.
Jim Langley is the president of Langley Innovations. Langley Innovations provides a range of services to its clients to help them understand the cultural underpinnings of philanthropy and the psychology of donors and, with that knowledge, to develop the most effective strategies and tactics to build broader and more lasting communities of support. Jim has authored numerous books, including his most recent book, The Future of Fundraising: Adapting to New Philanthropic Realities, published by Academic Impressions in 2020.
