Is it hard to get your board members excited about raising money?

Our friend Judy Levine of Cause Effective just wrote a terrific piece about the possibility of board members training board members.

She delights in the idea that boards can use our new Train Your Board book to train themselves – without a consultant, professional trainer, or outside expert.

She refers to it as “The Place of We”, where board members envision themselves as a learning community: smart, self-motivated, self-taught, and mutually supportive.

Indeed, we’ve created our training cookbook with the idea that everyone can be a trainer, and everyone can be a fundraiser.

Create a Culture of Learning on Your Board

While reading the book, Judy had an idea.

What if a board decided to run one a fundraising training exercises at every board meeting? Wouldn’t that be a terrific statement of the value of fundraising in our lives?”

Training can become a standard part of your board culture. When people learn together, and practice together they become a stronger, more effective group.

To make it easy for you to create a culture of learning, we included a menu of training exercises just for that purpose in our book of board training exercises.

You’ll find a carefully selected collection of twelve exercises — one for every board meeting in a year.

Each month, you’ll have at your fingertips a brief exercise (15-30 minutes) to help your board members become more comfortable with every aspect of fundraising. Here’s the menu.

Set Up a Board Training Team

If you want to shift the culture of your board through training, someone has to set expectations, choose the relevant exercises, and decide who’ll facilitate each one.

How about recruiting a small group of board members to serve on a training team?

Their task? To make sure there’s something exciting and useful to learn at every board meeting.

If you’re not keen on creating yet another committee, then broaden the role of your Nominating Committee. Turn it into a Board Development Committee, covering every aspect of board work, including recruitment, orientation, evaluation and (our favorite) board training.

Use Board Training to Create a “Place of We”

Fundraising is a terrific training topic, but there are many other training areas that would get your board functioning at its best.  Imagine your board being expert in governance, financial management, running effective meetings, and many topics related to your program and mission.

You don’t have to personally train your board, and you may not need to hire a professional. Just give your board members the tools and opportunities to train themselves, then empower them to move forward – together – one step at a time.

As Judy says, there is something powerful about a place of we.