Note: This is the second of two posts adapted from an online conversation between Train Your Board partners Bob Osborne and Andy Robinson. You can find the first portion here. Join the debate! We welcome your comments.

Bob
Any alternative structure – different from the traditional 501(c)(3) – would need to address fundraising. If an alternative structure does not have fundraising as big part of the board’s role, then we are leaving fundraising to staff. Staff-based fundraising equals writing grant applications to institutional funders, since this is the only kind of fundraising employees can do, on their own, at any scale.

Do you care about equity? What’s less diverse, more conservative, and wealthier than charitable foundations? You’re not going to build any social movements based on foundation money. You need individual donors. To scale an individual donor program, you need volunteers and yes, maybe a board.

That’s my progressive case for the current board structure.

Also, I’m not sure board’s skew wealthier and whiter because of the time commitment required. I think most organizations simply don’t try that hard to recruit diverse board members.

However, I am curious if you’ve seen any interesting alternatives. Yes, I agree, the current system is far from perfect – and it may be the one we’re stuck with, the best of many imperfect options.

Andy
First, I think your critique of staff doing a poor job engaging their board members is spot-on. There’s a correlation between board engagement and output. If you don’t invest much, you don’t get much. On the other hand, if you treat board members as thinking partners, good things will happen.

AND … with the understanding that boards are required by law, there’s a business question about whether boards are cost centers or profit centers.

To answer your question: Yes! Years ago, I consulted with a grassroots advocacy organization – $500,000 annual budget, six to eight employees– that created an all-staff approach to major gifts fundraising (in their case, donations of $250 and up).

Twice per year, for two weeks at a time, they would pretty much shut down the organization. Everyone who worked there — all staff! – would focus on fundraising. Week One was training, role plays, and scheduling donor meetings. During Week Two, every employee would meet with three or four donors per day to ask for their support.

They raised about $200K per year, or 40% of their budget, through this strategy.

For me, one benchmark of a “culture of philanthropy” or a “culture of fundraising” is this: everyone who works at the organization, not just the development department, is involved in fundraising in some way.

Obviously, the model described above wouldn’t work at a daycare center or health care facility or homeless shelter, where you can’t free up all the staff for two weeks. Nonetheless, aspects of this strategy could be adapted to their specific circumstances and limitations.

And no, the board wasn’t involved. It’s challenging to plug volunteers into the all-hands-on-deck-for-two-weeks model.

I occasionally lead a workshop called, “Give Up on Your Board! An All-Staff Approach to Major Gifts Fundraising” based on this approach. People show up because the challenge of boards and fundraising never goes away. Many groups are seeking a different approach to fundraising that’s less reliant on volunteer board members.

Bob
Interesting! I can see your model working for small, community-based organizations. I think it gets tougher when we start looking at organizations with larger budgets.

In my experience, organizations can get away with staff-driven fundraising until they need to raise a large amount of money for something like buying their building or making a big programmatic push of some kind. In other words, a fundraising campaign. Eventually, almost every organization needs to do this. If you don’t have the structure in place – including an engaged board – it’s tough to quickly create it.

One last point. We tend to look at the board as something separate from the organization, a necessary evil, something to be tolerated. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Recruit board members who share your vision and values – period! When you do that, the challenges we’ve discussed cease to be problems because everyone is working toward a common goal. There isn’t this dichotomy between board and staff. It becomes one organization with different people playing different roles.

This is a useful conversation, Andy. I’m not sure we’ve resolved anything, but I’m still intrigued with the idea of alternative structures. I think innovation is always worth exploring.

Andy
I agree, Bob. My takeaway is this: smart, thoughtful people can disagree about this stuff. In fact, we should disagree! Otherwise, we’re just accepting the orthodoxy without testing it and, I hope, reinvigorating it.

Enjoyed our conversation. Thank you!