How to Recruit Board Members Who Will Actually Help You Fundraise
The governance committee meets three weeks before the annual meeting, and there is one real item on the agenda. Two members are terming off, nobody has a replacement, and the slate is due. Someone mentions a friend from church who has done well in business. Someone else names a woman who already sits on two other boards. Both names go on the slate, both people say yes, and a year later you have two more good folks who attend faithfully, read the packet, vote responsibly, and have never helped you raise a dollar.
I have sat in that meeting, and I have been the one supplying the names. What I have learned since is that the trouble starts long before anybody takes a seat. Most boards get filled rather than recruited, and a board that gets filled in March will spend the next three years wondering why fundraising never quite takes hold. The work of building a board that raises money happens in the months before the invitation goes out.
Where Board Candidates Actually Come From
Ask a development director where the last three board members came from and the answer is almost always the same. Someone knew someone. The research bears that out. Writing in Stanford Social Innovation Review, a team drawing on BoardSource's Leading with Intent data reports that the two most common ways boards identify potential new members are board members' own personal or professional networks, at 96%, and the chief executive's networks, at 88%. Nearly every board in the country is drawing water from the same two wells.
This is not a character flaw in anyone. Recruiting from the people you already know is fast, and fast is what you need when the slate is due. But it has a cost that shows up years later. BoardSource's own recruitment guidance notes that in Leading with Intent, 43% of chief executives said they do not have the right board members to establish trust with the communities they serve, and that fewer than a third of boards place a high priority on knowledge of the community served. A companion BoardSource resource puts numbers on it: 32% place a high priority on knowledge of the community served, and 28% on membership within it.
For fundraising, the network problem has a specific and quiet cost. A person recruited through a friendship is usually recruited as a favor to the friend. They said yes to the person who called, not to the job. Nobody mentioned money in that conversation, because bringing it up would have made the call awkward, and now the expectation arrives eight months later in a board meeting, long after the person agreed to something they thought was different.
Recruit for the Work, Not for the Seat
The fix that has helped me most is almost embarrassingly simple. Write down the fundraising work before you write down a single name.
Not "help with fundraising." That phrase has never once produced an action. I mean the actual jobs, listed plainly:
Open a door to someone you have no way of reaching on your own
Make thank-you calls to donors in the week after a gift arrives
Host a small gathering in a home or an office and invite eight people
Tell the organization's story to a room that has never heard it
Sit beside you in a donor meeting and say what the mission has meant to them
Steward a handful of donors they already know personally
Only one of those involves asking anyone for money, and even that one is shared with staff. Most of what a board contributes to fundraising happens well before the ask, which is the heart of getting a board actually raising money in the first place. Once the work is written down, recruitment becomes a search for people who can do specific things, which turns out to be a very different search than one for prominent names. A retired sales manager who genuinely likes people and returns phone calls will do more for your pipeline than a well-known figure who attends nine meetings a year and knows the mission from the annual report.
One more piece belongs in place before you start calling candidates. A prospective board member should be able to explain, in their own words, why the work matters, and that is hard to do if the organization has never articulated it. Your case for support is the script people borrow when they talk about you at a dinner party. Write it before recruitment season, not during it.
Naming the work, drafting the expectations, and preparing the recruitment conversation all get faster when you have a repeatable process instead of a blank page.
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Say the Money Part Out Loud Before They Say Yes
Here is the moment where most board recruitment quietly goes wrong. The candidate is enthusiastic, the conversation is going well, and the person doing the recruiting decides not to bring up fundraising because it might cool things off. So the expectation never gets stated, and an unstated expectation is not an expectation at all.
That gap is common enough to be measured. A 2019 Boardable survey of board members and executives, reported in Stanford Social Innovation Review, found that 42 percent of respondents said their board has no expectation agreement for board members at all, and that close to 30 percent of board members would fundraise only when they were specifically asked to. Those two findings are the same finding. People do what they understood they signed up for.
So put it on paper before the invitation. A board member agreement does not need to be long, and a single page is plenty. It should name the personal gift expectation, which is its own conversation and deserves the care described in getting to 100% board giving without the awkward conversations. It should also name the fundraising expectation with a number and a timeframe, drawn from the list of jobs you already wrote down: two introductions a year, four thank-you calls a quarter, one gathering hosted — something a person can picture themselves doing on an ordinary Tuesday.
Then say it in the recruitment conversation, in the sentence most of us skip. Part of this role is helping us raise money, and here is exactly what that looks like for you. Some candidates will hesitate, and a few will decline. That is the system working. A person who declines in March has saved you three years of polite disappointment, and the ones who say yes will have said yes to the real job.
Cultivate a Board Member the Way You Cultivate a Donor
The other shift that has made the biggest difference for me is treating board recruitment as year-round cultivation rather than a springtime scramble. BoardSource describes recruitment as continuous work belonging to a governance committee, and its guidance is candid that board cultivation can take more time for certain candidates — the recommendation is to stay in touch, offer other ways to get involved, and revisit the board opportunity later.
Read that again and notice what it sounds like. It sounds exactly like moves management. Identify, qualify, cultivate, ask, steward. You already run this process for donors, and there is no reason the board prospect list should be managed with any less care than a major gifts pipeline. Keep a standing list of a dozen names. Watch how people behave when they have a small assignment. Committee service, an event team, a site visit host — these are the qualifying steps, and they tell you more about someone than any interview will.
Widening the circle beyond staff and board networks is also worth the effort. Organizations that have opened their board search beyond the usual two networks tend to report the same thing: the process surfaces candidates who go on to engage with the organization in other meaningful ways, whether or not they ever take a seat. Your volunteers, your longtime donors, your former clients, and your community partners already care about the mission. They are rarely on anyone's list, and they are the people most likely to talk about you without being prompted. Keeping that pipeline moving is the standing work of a development committee that does more than meet.
Board members are often among the most capable givers in your orbit, and the conversation about a gift structured to outlive them frequently begins long before anyone thinks to raise it.
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Where to Start This Week
Write the list of jobs. Six pieces of fundraising work your board could plausibly do, in plain language. Pick the three that fit your organization right now. This takes twenty minutes and it becomes the backbone of every recruitment conversation you have for the next five years.
Draft a one-page board member agreement and take it to your chair. Personal gift expectation, fundraising expectation with a number and a timeframe, meeting attendance. Write it so nobody has to guess what you mean later, when you sit down to ask a board member for an introduction.
Build a list of twelve prospects instead of two. Pull from volunteers, loyal donors, committee members, past clients, and community partners rather than the same three networks. Twelve names gives you the freedom to recruit for fit instead of for availability.
Put one cultivation step on the calendar with an owner and a date. A coffee, a tour, a small assignment. Then track board recruitment the way you track the fundraising metrics that matter, so the pipeline stays visible between annual meetings.
New members will still need real preparation before their first donor conversation, and that is its own piece of work worth doing well — preparing your board for donor conversations is where a willing recruit becomes a useful one. Recruiting well simply means you are training people who already expected to be trained. And once a board member has been doing this work for a while, the conversation naturally deepens, sometimes all the way into a gift that outlives the donor.
What I have learned is that the recruitment conversation carries almost all the weight. Tell people the truth about the job while they can still say no, and the ones who say yes will mean it.
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.