Board Fundraising: How to Get Your Board Actually Raising Money
Fundraising is item seven on the agenda. It lands after the financial report and the program update, it gets about eleven minutes, and it ends the way it ended last quarter. Someone says the board really needs to be more involved in fundraising. Everyone agrees. A few people study the table. The chair moves to the next item, nothing about anyone's week actually changes, and three months later you have the same conversation with the same eleven people.
If you have sat through that meeting, you already know the strange part. Almost nobody in the room is against fundraising. They joined the board because they care about the mission, and most of them would tell you privately that they wish they were doing more. BoardSource's Leading with Intent study of nonprofit boards found that 76% of chief executives said their board did not spend enough time on fundraising. That is close to a consensus, and still nothing moves.
I ran that meeting for years in ministry, and I ran it badly. What I have learned since is that the gap between wanting to help and actually helping has almost nothing to do with willingness. "Be more involved in fundraising" is simply not a job anyone can do on a Tuesday.
The Trap Hiding Inside "The Board Should Fundraise More"
Before we talk about how to fix it, there is a finding in that same BoardSource research worth sitting with, because it complicates the obvious answer. Executives who placed the very highest level of importance on fundraising rated their boards lower across several other key areas of performance. Boards that treat fundraising as the board's whole purpose end up weaker on strategy, on relevance, and on impact. Pressing harder on the one lever makes the rest of the machine worse.
That is not a reason to stop asking your board to raise money. It is a reason to stop asking in the way most of us ask. A general, recurring appeal to the board's conscience produces guilt, and guilt produces quiet. It also crowds out the governance work that makes an organization worth funding in the first place. This is not a failure of effort on anyone's part. The structure is doing exactly what a vague expectation always does, which is nothing in particular.
The baseline is often shakier than we admit, too. In an OpX360 study benchmarking 155 nonprofits, 27% reported that their board members are not all active donors. If a quarter of boards have not settled the simplest question of all, it is not surprising that the harder one goes unanswered. Getting every board member to make a personal gift is the floor, not the ceiling, and it is worth having that settled before you ask anyone to open a door for you.
Here is what makes the effort worth it. Giving USA 2026 put total American charitable giving at $617.20 billion for 2025, with individuals accounting for $394.2 billion of it. Roughly two of every three dollars given in this country come from a person, not an institution. Your board members are already standing inside the networks where those people live, and no amount of staff capacity will substitute for that. They hold the relationships. You do not.
Ninety Percent of the Work Is Not the Ask
This is the reframe that changes board meetings, and I wish someone had handed it to me a decade earlier. In a session on the board's role in fundraising, longtime governance consultant Chuck Loring said in a BoardSource Leadership Forum session that board members can be great fundraisers and never ask for money, because ninety percent of fundraising work is cultivation and ten percent is the ask.
Read that again next to what your board members actually say. When someone tells you they are not comfortable asking people for money, they are describing ten percent of the work and declining one hundred percent of it. They are not refusing. They are picturing the only version of the job anyone has ever described to them, deciding they would be bad at it, and stepping back. Nobody ever told them about the other ninety percent, which most of them would be genuinely good at.
The other ninety percent looks like this, and it is all real fundraising:
Opening a door. An introduction from a board member to someone in their circle, with a warm word attached, is worth more than any letter you will write this year.
Making thank-you calls. Twenty minutes, ten donors, no ask. Board members are unusually good at this because the donor knows they are a volunteer.
Hosting. Six people in a living room, a short story about the work, and no pledge cards anywhere.
Coming along. Sitting quietly in a donor visit while staff carries the conversation, then telling the donor at the end why they serve.
Naming names. Reviewing a prospect list and telling you which three people they actually know.
Speaking about the work. At a Rotary lunch, at church, at a dinner party where someone asks what they have been up to.
Every one of those is a step in moves management, and every one of them feeds directly into a major gifts pipeline you are probably trying to build with staff time you do not have. And when the ask finally comes, it matters that somebody makes it. Loring's first point that day was blunt and, in my experience, entirely correct: the number one reason people do not give to an organization is that nobody asked them.
Preparing a board member for a donor conversation gets much faster once you have a repeatable process for the briefing, the talking points, and the follow-up.
Want to develop your fundraising skills? Take a look at my Claude Skills page.
Explore the Skills
Give the Job a Name, a Number, and a Date
Once you have a menu, the work becomes assignment rather than exhortation, and that single shift does more than any speech at a retreat. "Ellen will help with fundraising this year" changes nothing. "Ellen will introduce us to two people from her firm before March 15, and I will do the follow-up" is a commitment a reasonable adult can either keep or renegotiate. Specificity is a kindness here. It tells a busy volunteer exactly when they are finished.
Three practices make those assignments stick. First, set the expectation before someone joins rather than after, which is why who you recruit onto the board quietly determines everything that follows. A board expectations statement signed at the start beats a difficult conversation in year three. Second, put fundraising on every board meeting agenda, not as a standing report but as a round of named commitments, with progress reviewed out loud and board members thanked publicly for what they did. Loring recommends exactly that, and it works for the plain reason that people do what gets asked about.
Third, ask for the thing that actually moves money. Of everything on the menu, the introduction carries the most weight and meets the least resistance, and it is the one most development offices never explicitly request. Give people the language to use, too. A board member who has read your case for support and practiced saying it in their own words is a different person in a coffee shop than one who is improvising. That preparation is a real piece of work, and it is why training your board for donor conversations belongs on the calendar rather than in the hallway before a meeting.
Board members are often the most capable givers in your orbit, and the conversation about a gift that outlives them tends to open long before anyone raises it.
Interested in learning more about how a whole life insurance policy could benefit your nonprofit? Connect with a team member at Sage & Main.
Connect with Sage & Main
What the Development Committee Is Actually For
Most boards respond to all of this by forming a development committee, and then the committee becomes the place fundraising goes to be contained. Four willing people meet monthly, the other eleven stop thinking about it entirely, and everyone feels the problem has been addressed.
Loring names the correction precisely: the development committee's role is to help staff engage the full board in fundraising, not to handle all of the board's fundraising responsibilities. That is a job description about influence rather than execution. A committee working correctly is assigning the menu, tracking who committed to what, and calling the board member who has not made their two introductions yet. It is a coaching function. A development committee that does more than meet spends most of its energy on the eleven people who are not in the room.
Measure it accordingly. Dollars raised is a lagging number that tells you about last year, and board activity is the leading one. Count introductions made, thank-you calls completed, and visits attended, and report those alongside revenue. Watching the right things is most of what separates the fundraising metrics that matter from the ones that just make a nice slide.
Where to Start This Week
None of this requires a retreat, a consultant, or a governance overhaul. It requires one different conversation.
Write the menu. Eight to ten specific activities, each with a number and a season attached. Two introductions by March. Ten thank-you calls in January. One house gathering before June.
Ask each board member for one door, not for help. One name, one introduction, one conversation. Then do the follow-up yourself so the ask stays small.
Rebuild item seven. Replace the standing fundraising update with a round in which board members report on their own commitments. Five minutes, spoken aloud, every meeting.
Put a name and a date on every line before the meeting ends. An assignment without an owner and a deadline is a wish, and it will still be a wish next quarter.
What has surprised me most is how much relief people feel when the job finally gets small enough to say yes to. Board members are not withholding effort. They have been handed an expectation they could not picture themselves meeting, and most of them have been quietly embarrassed about it for a long time. Tell someone their job is to introduce you to two people they already like, and the whole thing stops feeling like an audition. That is also where the deeper conversations tend to begin, including the ones about a gift that outlives the donor.
Give the work a name, a number, and a date, and then ask about it out loud.
C.J. Bergmen is a pastor, licensed counselor, and fundraising strategist who helps organizations and generous individuals approach giving with honesty and long-term vision.