How to Ask Your Board for Introductions (and Actually Get Them)
You reach the end of the board meeting, the development update has been given, and you say the sentence. Take a look at your contacts this month and think about who might be a good fit for us. Heads nod. One person writes something down. Thirty days later the room reconvenes, nobody has sent you a single name, and you say the sentence again in a slightly different order.
I know how that happens, and it is almost never that your board does not want to help. What I have learned is that who do you know works more like a mood than a request. It hands a busy professional an open-ended research assignment with no name attached, no deadline, and no clear picture of what a good answer would even look like — and then holds them quietly responsible for not finishing it.
The sector data lines up with how that feels from your chair. In Boardable's 2019 Board Engagement Survey of 640 nonprofit board members, staff, volunteers and consultants — nearly nine in ten from boards with fewer than twenty members — only 15.1 percent said all of their board members try to make introductions and open doors for development. Another 27.2 percent said all board members are expected to, and few actually do.
Why "Who Do You Know" Lands Nowhere
Duke Haddad, a longtime fundraiser who writes for NonProfit PRO, tells a story about a development director new to her job who handed her board the organization's list of its top 100 donors and asked whether anyone would open a door for her. She got zero response. The part worth sitting with is his own admission right after it: he had done the same thing in his career and gotten the same result.
Nothing was wrong with the list. The problem was the shape of the request. A hundred names asks a board member to do three jobs at once — scan for recognition, judge whether the connection is strong enough to mention, and decide what to do about it. Any one of those is enough for a reasonable person to set the page down and genuinely intend to come back to it on Saturday.
That same Boardable survey holds a number I keep coming back to. Asked how their board shows up for development work, 28.8 percent of respondents chose this description: board members will help, if they are asked to do something specific. That is close to a third of boards where the willingness is already sitting there and the only missing piece is specificity. Haddad's piece points to Gail Perry's list of what makes board volunteers back away, and the two items that keep surfacing are cold calls and a lack of training, structure, coaching and support. Both of those sit inside your control, which is the practical heart of getting a board actually raising money rather than waiting for a more connected one.
Do the Homework Before You Open Your Mouth
The shift that changes this is deciding network mapping is your job, not theirs. You build the list. They confirm, correct, and act on it. A board member cannot hold your prospect list in their head, but almost anyone can look at five names on a sheet of paper and tell you which two they actually know.
Take the top twenty or thirty names in a major gifts pipeline and run them against what you can learn about your board — employers and former employers, alma maters, other boards they serve on, their church or synagogue, the civic clubs, their spouses' work. LinkedIn does a surprising amount of this for free if you are connected to your board members. Some of the same habits that make donor research productive apply here, just pointed sideways at relationships instead of down at capacity.
Then rate the relationship honestly, because not every connection is an introduction. I use three tiers:
They would take this person's call. A real door, and the only tier that produces an introduction.
They know each other socially. Good for an event invitation or a tour, rarely for a meeting request.
They recognize the name. Useful intelligence for your notes, though it opens no door on its own.
Sorting the connections this way keeps you from spending a board member's goodwill on a relationship that was never strong enough to carry it, and it keeps the resulting sheet short. Five names a board member can read in ninety seconds will outwork a hundred names, the same way thoughtful donor segmentation outworks a single mass appeal.
Building a network map, rating the connections, and turning them into personalized one-page sheets for each board member goes much faster when you are working from a repeatable process instead of starting at a blank document every quarter.
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Ask One Person at a Time, With One Name in Front of Them
The ask for an introduction does not belong in a board meeting. It belongs in a twenty-minute coffee or a phone call where one board member is looking at one sheet with their own name at the top. Group settings reward whoever says the least, and they let everyone assume somebody else is better positioned to help.
When you sit down, a request that works has four parts, and it is worth rehearsing them until they come out plainly:
The name. One person, said out loud. Not a category, not a sector, not "anyone in commercial real estate."
Why this person. One sentence on why they belong on your list, so the board member is not guessing at your reasoning.
The specific next step. An email introduction to you. A tour with the two of them. A seat at their table in April. Name the thing.
What you will handle. Everything after the introduction — the scheduling, the follow-up, the eventual conversation about money.
That fourth part removes most of the fear in the room. Board members go quiet when introductions come up not out of selfishness but out of a private conviction that saying yes means asking their friend for money over dinner. Tell them the introduction is the whole assignment, and the yes gets much easier.
Then make the smallest version of the ask that still moves something. Haddad's piece lists several from Amy Eisenstein worth keeping on an index card — a tour of your facility with a friend, a colleague asked to volunteer, a small reception at home, a one-on-one with your board chair. A house gathering for six is often a bigger step forward than a gala table for ten.
One more habit costs you fifteen minutes and changes the completion rate: write the introduction email for them. Draft a short forwardable paragraph in their voice, send it the same day, and tell them to edit it however they like. A board member composing from scratch will move it to next week. A board member with a draft in their inbox will hit send from a parking lot. That is the same principle behind recruiting board members who will actually help you fundraise — you are looking for people who will do work that has been made clear, not people who will invent it.
And give them a way out. "If that connection is not as close as I think, tell me and I will take it off the list" costs nothing and protects the relationship you most need to keep, which is the one with your board member.
The Introduction Is Not the Finish Line
Here is where most of these efforts quietly die, and the same Boardable survey points right at it. Sixty-four percent of the boards surveyed had no protocol for tracking the progress of to-do items between meetings, and 60 percent reported no interaction among members outside of meetings at all. Whatever momentum a good conversation created in your office evaporates over the four weeks that follow it.
So build the follow-up before you make the ask. When a board member sends the introduction, respond within forty-eight hours and copy them so they can see it landed. When the meeting happens, tell them what came of it in two or three sentences — not a report, just the human version. That loop turns a one-time favor into a habit, and it is where an introduction becomes a real cultivation step inside moves management rather than a nice thing that happened once in March.
Track the asks somewhere your development committee can see, with a name and a date beside each one, and bring the list back up at the next meeting. Not to shame anyone. A short list of completed introductions read aloud does more to recruit the quiet members than another appeal for participation will.
Some board members will want to go further than the introduction once they see how it goes, and that is worth planning for rather than improvising — getting them ready for an actual donor conversation is its own piece of work, and so is what happens after a new prospect says yes, which is where a 90-day stewardship plan earns its keep. It also helps to notice what a board member is standing on when they make the call. Someone who gives personally can write "I support this myself" in the first line, and that sentence carries more weight with a prospect than anything your case statement will do for them.
Many of the people your board introduces you to will be thinking about giving over decades rather than quarters, and the conversation about how a gift is structured is often what turns a warm introduction into long-term support.
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Where to Start This Week
If this is sitting in front of you and the next board meeting is close, here is what I would tell you to do before it:
Pick ten prospects, not a hundred. The ten you most want a conversation with in the next six months.
Spend one hour cross-referencing them against your board. Employers, schools, other boards, LinkedIn. One hour, one pass, no perfectionism.
Schedule coffee with the one board member most likely to say yes. Start with your easiest relationship, because your first attempt is also your practice run.
Ask for one introduction, with one specific next step, and offer to draft the email. One name, one action, and a draft sitting in their inbox that afternoon.
What gets me genuinely excited here is how small the change is compared to what it moves. All you are doing is trading one vague sentence at the end of a meeting for one name on one page in front of one person who already wanted to help and did not know how. Most boards are more ready for that than we give them credit for.
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.