Is your board afraid of fundraising? You’re not alone. Most boards find the whole subject taboo. Here’s a real-world example. Imagine that your nonprofit faced the following challenges: Most of your board members are both unskilled at fundraising and anxious about doing it. (Sounds familiar, right?) You board gathers only twice … [Read more...]
Asking When Everyone Else Isn’t
This is a difficult story to tell, because it’s about one of the hardest days in recent memory: September 11, 2001. And it’s a fundraising story – but one you’ve never heard before. You may remember the chaos and confusion that gripped the nation – not only in New York and Washington, but pretty much everywhere. People glued to their … [Read more...]
The Donor Next Door: How to Use Your Donors to Train Your Board
Does your board resist fundraising? Do they find the whole subject distasteful? If so, you are not alone. I’ve been teaching boards to raise money for more than twenty years, and demand is endless – because the vast majority or nonprofit boards do a lousy job raising money. Why is this so challenging? It boils down to three … [Read more...]
Yes We Can: Two Exercises to Inspire Your Board
When I worked as a development director, I gathered our program staff once a year to brainstorm “what if” questions: What if we had all the money we needed? What if we could focus on the work we wanted to do without worrying about the budget – what would we do? What if we had the capacity to try new things and do our work … [Read more...]
Boards and Fundraising: Three Tasks Everyone Can Do
If you ask fundraising professionals to describe their deepest and most enduring fantasy, the answer would sound something like this: “Give me a wealthy board filled with wealthy people who will ask their wealthy friends for money.” Sure, those boards exist, but they are very, very rare. Unless you work with a legacy institution – a … [Read more...]
Find the Courage to Train Your Board: 6 Simple Tips
How do you cultivate courage...specifically the courage to try new things, like training our boards to raise more money? Our colleague Beth Raps, who was kind enough to review an early draft of our book, recently asked us that question. Like Fundraisers, Trainers Need Courage If you listed the attributes of successful fundraisers, … [Read more...]
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