8 Ways to Get Your Board Fundraising in 2025-2026

Board Members can be better fundraisers. Can I get an Amen!?

Having served on 10+ nonprofit boards (and Clemons-Associates team members having served on dozens more…), we are acutely aware of this challenge.

Let’s step back and think about when, why and how we are training, coaching, inspiring and encouraging Board Members to become active participants in your fundraising activities – whether that is Annual Giving, Year-End Giving, Super Tuesday or associated with a Major Gift campaign.  

Forget a Top 10 – let’s focus on the Top 8!

Imperative #1: Onboard Them Yes, onboard them! Clemons-Associates supplies plenty of free resources and best practice templates relative to onboarding tools and tactics surrounding new Board Members. Activites can include:

• Clarifying Roles and Expectations Describe the board's role in fundraising; Clearly outline the board's responsibility in supporting fundraising efforts, including providing leadership, guidance, and resources. 

• Setting expectations:

  Establish clear expectations for board member participation in fundraising, including financial contributions, cultivation activities and involvement in events or campaigns. 

• Creating a board agreement:

  Consider creating a formal agreement that outlines fundraising expectations and responsibilities, similar to a contract. 

Imperative #2: Train Them

Yes, train them!  It takes 1,500 hours of instruction to cut hair in Oklahoma (and this is not a ding against our beautiful hair stylists!) and yet we send our board out into the market to represent the organization with virtually ZERO training. As a best practice and before Board Members are engaged in any fundraising activities, they should be formally oriented and acclimated to the organization’s vision, mission and values, programming, activations, case studies, IMPACT ON LIVES and the use of funds (from contributed gifts, grant awards and pledges).

They should learn the most effective ways to ‘tell your story’, cultivate, solicit and steward contributors. They should know what a great meeting looks like and how to conduct them. Fundraising can and should be win/win, rewarding experiences good for ALL parties. Otherwise, you have failed them and they’ll continue to say, “I’ll join your board and do anything but fundraise.”

Imperative #3: Coach Them

Yes, coach them! Clemons-Associates has developed half day and full day workshops for ministries, nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. In fact, every community college in the state of Oklahoma has commissioned Clemons-Associates to create and deliver curricula/resources with a key focus on Board Member recruitment, engagement and retention. It is mission critical that continuous coaching (including fundraising) be incorporated into each board meeting agenda – and an even better idea to have a third-party consultant brought in to formally communicate best practice systems, methodologies, tactics and strategies. See our related blog article.

Bright Idea: Have the consultant deliver best practice approaches in ‘likeminded’ fields of your organization. For example, in youth development, we might showcase the $10M raised for Boys&Girls Club; in private education, we might showcase the $9M campaign for the Corn Bible Academy; for veteran services, we can showcase the multi-state $10M campaigns for Veterans Community Project; for humanitarian initiatives, we might showcase annual giving for Water4; in higher education, we might showcase the reorganization of Oklahoma City Community College Development Department.    

Imperative #4: Inspire Them

Yes, inspire them!  Board members are generally professionals in their career and well-respected citizens in the marketplace. They are not typically ‘subject matter experts’ in your programming areas even though we can assume they have some personal or professional connection to your ministry, nonprofit or educational institution. Beyond their fiscal and legal oversight, they will do what they’re asked/required to do.  But if they’re inspired by a great vision and are part of strategic planning to fulfill that vision, they will have more ownership and be inspired to raise the funds for it. So don’t look at them as a group that rubber stamps what the staff seeks to do, rather partners in strategic planning, goal setting, funding and celebrating.

Bright Idea: Have a Board Member stand up at your next Board meeting and explain their involvement in the fundraising process, how they worked cohesively with staff and how they contributed to landing a five, six or seven figure commitment. Have them expand by explaining how these monies impact lives of targeted constituents, recipients and benefactors.

Imperative #5: Don't have them give you their Network

An antique approach is to request Board members to provide you a list of everyone they know. This is, in general, a terrible fundraising practice and should be abolished. If you involve them in strategic relationship-building rather than transactional fundraising, they’ll be much more willing to fundraise…and much more effective. Generally, for many small or mid-sized organizations, Board Members’ best use of time, energy and talent is cultivating, stewarding your organization’s current donor base rather than attempting to land new ones among their networks. Reminder: They must learn that fundraising is only 5% of gift solicitation and 95% about educating/cultivating/stewarding donors.  

Bright Idea: When engaging Board Members during a major gift campaign, explore which leaders have a personal and/or business connection to the targeted prospective donor(s). Relationships can include lots of angles to include golf buddies to church members to business peers to rotary club members. Make assignments with a specific timeline; support cultivation activites with staff engagement, programming invitations, tours and professional campaign collateral. Learn more here.

Imperative #6: Be SUPER organized and content intentional

First, make sure those board meetings are well-organized and rich in content. Adopt lots of strategic discussion and lots of programming showcased by your impressive staff, volunteers and subject matter experts (and include participants, constituents, recipients when possible). Second, make it a priority for Board members to experience programs firsthand wherever possible. This activity could count as a Board meeting within a fiscal year. Third, in the spirt of ‘no such thing as over communication’, adopt quick and easy ways to keep Board Members updated – this can include dashboards, blogs, e-newsletters, letter from the President and e-communiques. See our special blog on this subject.

Bright Idea: Adopt a tried and true STATE OF THE UNION template to communicate to your stakeholders in a timely manner. Key campaign metrics (think dashboard) are organized into a :30 second read for busy business leaders, funders, grantors, staff and volunteers. Learn more here.

Imperative #7: Have them experience your Programs

Sadly, of all the hours Board members contribute, most are spent in board and committee meetings. Clemons-Associates subscribes to an IMMERSIVE orientation to educate and inspire your volunteer leaders early in the process. For example, while I was a fundraising for a Division One university, we took newly-appointed Higher Ed Regents and their wives on an away sporting contest with a celebrated coach and winning program. We had them experience EVERYTHING from the chartered air service, to the training table, to the media interviews, to the X’s and O’s talk before the kickoff or tip off. Heck, we let them perform the prayer in the locker room! For a nationally recognized museum, we invited Board Members to spend a half day with a curator and visit the vault, perform research in the archives, attend a hands-on workshop, co-curate a themed attraction, create/plan an event and more. These types of activities give leaders an authentic, insider experience to what really drives and supports the organization.  

Imperative #8: Have them accompany staff

Understand your organizational bylaws and state law (relative to Board Members' potential conflict of interest relative to governance vs. operations), but, barring none, Clemons-Associates subscribes to the idea that the organization offers Board Members the opportunity to accompany staff on discovery calls, cultivation, solicitation and stewardship visits to gain experience and build relationships. 

The general idea is that by osmosis, Board Members become more comfortable and a better advocate in the spirit of corporate storytelling, sharing use cases, featuring programs and soliciting for select project funding.

Bottom line:

To effectively involve board members in fundraising, start by clarifying their roles and expectations, then provide education, training and coaching opportunities, and finally, encourage them to participate in various fundraising activities, including personal donations and peer-to-peer campaigns. And it's a good idea to arrange development activities between Board Member and key staff.

Do some research and review blog posts like the above to formally adopt a corporate position and east-to-follow protocol when it comes to Board Members and strategic fundraising.

While this is a straight forward post noting some solid guidelines and key takeaways, consider engaging Clemons-Associates for advanced consultative services. Our team has developed half-day and full-day workshops to help organizations fully understand the power of Boards and how they can be integrated into campaign design, planning and execution. We leverage best practice campaigns bringing out the best of an organization's impact for amazing results.

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Craig Clemons with Friend, Philanthropist and President/Founder/Board Chairman of Express Employment Professionals, Bob Funk, Sr.

Seeking expert assistance from seasoned professionals?

Contact Craig Clemons at craig@clemons-associates.com or one of our rock star associates for more details. Clemons & Associates is on standby to help you with brand identity, strategic messaging, campaigns, digital assets, programs/projects and/or development endeavors.