Board member fundraising expectations that hold

Your board voted to support fundraising three years ago and nobody wrote down what that meant. Three members give, eleven do not, and the chair calls the subject awkward.

One page, four expectations, signed every year

Write four expectations on one page: a personal gift, a named way of opening doors, attendance, and one committee. Choose one of three ways to state the giving number and write that sentence out. Every member signs the page in the same month each year, before renomination, and a candidate reads it before the seat is offered. The chair, not staff, holds one scheduled conversation in month thirteen with anyone who has not met it. That is the mechanism, and it belongs with the decisions a fundraising strategy settles before a plan is written.

The rest of this guide is how to write those sentences so a member can keep or miss them. An expectation that cannot be missed is a preference, and a preference cannot be enforced by anyone, including a willing chair.

Two things upstream of this page matter. Recruitment is where the number is first said out loud, which is the subject of the board composition matrix. The board’s commitments then appear as counts in the annual fundraising plan, where staff targets sit beside them.

The four things a member does

Four, not seven. Every one of them can be counted by a person who is not in the room, which is the test a commitment has to pass before it goes on the page.

The second row is the one that answers the member who says they are not a fundraiser. Opening doors is not asking. A member who will never make an ask can introduce, host, sign a letter, thank a donor by phone, or sit quietly in a meeting so the funder sees that a trustee turned up. BoardSource makes the point that some members, because of their profession or position, may be prohibited from certain kinds of solicitation, listing journalists, judges, chief executives, and development staff of other charities, and says to seek other opportunities for those individuals to support the organization in a meaningful way. Write that alternative into their copy of the agreement rather than leaving them to infer it.

What does not go on the page: a dollar figure the member is expected to raise from others, a revenue line to own, and any variation on helping with the gala. The National Council of Nonprofits describes the board’s legal duties as care, loyalty, and obedience, and its resource role as ensuring the organization has what it needs. Ensuring is not producing. Staff produce.

Collect the annual conflict disclosure in the same signing month. Form 990 Part VI asks whether directors were required to disclose conflicts annually and the answer is public, so run one cycle, not two.

Three ways to write the giving number

The giving sentence is where boards stall, because all three structures work and each one costs something. Write one of them out and stop debating.

The equity trade-off is the whole argument. BoardSource is direct that a giving policy “should not eliminate capable and valuable individuals from joining the board and contributing other skills and expertise”, while also recommending an expectation of 100 percent board giving at a level personally significant to each member. Those two sentences point at the third structure. A minimum gift makes the board easier to run and harder to diversify. Which members a floor screens out depends on where you set it, and the risk worth naming out loud is that it lands on the seats your recruitment brief flags for program expertise and lived experience.

There is a fourth option people ask for and it is not on the table. Give or get lets a member substitute money raised from others for money given. The evidence runs against it. In a six-year study of more than 100 New York City boards, reported by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, boards expected to give rather than give or get showed higher average board giving, and a give policy avoids the counting arguments and the one-time corporate gift that replaces a member’s own sustained support. Those organizations are far larger than yours and the dollar figures do not transfer. The direction does.

An expectation that cannot be missed is a preference.

The amount question, answered in the right order

Participation first, amount second. BoardSource’s policy guidance says plainly that funders often ask whether 100 percent of board members give, and no funder has ever asked for the mean. A board of fifteen where every member gives $250 answers the question on the grant application. A board of fifteen where four members give $10,000 and eleven give nothing does not, whatever the total says.

The national picture is a board that requires a gift and declines to size it. In BoardSource’s 2021 Leading with Intent survey, 67.8% of chief executives at organizations that fundraise said members are required to make a personal contribution with no minimum or exact amount specified, 18.6% said a minimum or exact amount is specified, and 13.7% said no contribution is required at all. Among the boards that do name a figure, the same survey puts the mean required amount at $2,803 as reported by chief executives.

Treat that mean as a landmark, not a target. The floor moves with your budget and your gift pyramid, and the useful question is where a board gift should sit relative to the gifts you already receive. For a hypothetical $7M organization whose major gift tier starts at $5,000, a $1,000 board floor says a trustee gives less than a first-time major donor, which is a sentence you do not want said in a solicitation meeting. The figures in that example are invented and carry no source.

If you set a floor, expect it to behave like a floor. The New York study reported by AFP found that boards with a stated minimum gave a median well above that minimum, and that setting an explicit minimum was associated with higher giving. The risk of a number is not that members will give exactly it. The risk is who reads the number and decides not to join.

What the executive director may and may not do

The division is not a courtesy. It is what makes the agreement enforceable, because a staff member cannot hold a peer commitment between trustees.

The executive director may draft the page, supply every count, brief the chair before each conversation, thank every member who gives, run the training, and go on every visit a member arranges. The executive director may tell the chair, in writing, which members have not given by 31 December. That is the whole staff role and it is a large one.

The executive director may not ask a member for a gift, chase an unsigned agreement, raise attendance with a member, decide whether an exception is granted, or be in the room for the month thirteen conversation. Staff who do any of those things have taken a governance function, and the next executive director will inherit a board that expects staff to manage it. This is the same line the rest of the governance coverage draws between oversight and execution.

The accountability gap here is the largest number in the survey data. In Leading with Intent, 35.2% of chief executives said board members do not hold each other accountable for fundraising responsibilities at all and a further 41.5% said they do so only to a small extent, leaving 4.2% who said members hold each other accountable to a great extent. A board that will not do this to itself has handed the job to staff by default, and staff will lose.

Recruitment is where most of the damage is done. The same survey found 5.4% of chief executives said members receive no information during recruitment about fundraising expectations and 14.6% said they receive little, so one member in five arrives already misinformed. Hand the candidate the signed page of a current member, with the name removed, at the first conversation and not the third.

Month thirteen, when the gift has not arrived

Everything above is a filing exercise unless one conversation is already scheduled. Put it on the board calendar in the month after the fiscal year closes, for every member whose row is unmet: the chair, fifteen minutes, by telephone. A conversation that has to be initiated does not happen. One already in the diary does.

The script is four moves.

1. Name the fact, not the failure. “The fiscal year closed on 30 June and your gift has not come through. I am calling everyone in that position, so this is not a singling out.”
2. Ask the open question and then stop talking. “What is going on?” Wait. The answer is usually a lapsed pledge, a bad year, a spouse who handles it, or a grievance about the organization that nobody has heard yet.
3. Offer the three exits. Give now at any amount. Set a date this quarter. Or step off at the end of the term, with thanks and a stated last meeting. Naming the third exit is what makes the first two real.
4. Write one line to the member the same day, confirming which exit they chose and the date. Copy nobody. The governance committee gets the counts, never the transcript.

A member who chooses to step off is a success, not a loss. The seat goes back to the recruitment brief with a live gap attached, and the board you end up with in three years is the board that said yes to the page. Record the outcome as one line in the board packet so the pattern is visible to the governance committee, and set next year’s signing month and month thirteen date now on the board calendar.

What the plan asks the board for

The agreement is the board’s side. The annual fundraising plan is where it becomes a number staff can work with, and the translation is narrow on purpose.

The plan carries three counts and no dollar target for the board: the personal gift from every member by a date, the number of introductions each member will make, and the number of thank-you calls each member will place in the first quarter. Those counts come from the signed agreements, summed. If eleven of fifteen members have signed and four have not, the plan says eleven, and the gap is visible to everyone reading page two.

The board does not own a revenue line. Board giving sits inside the individual gifts line under the staff member who owns it, and introductions feed the major gifts pipeline without becoming a target of their own. A board that owns a line gets asked about it at every meeting.

When not to do this

Do not start here when the board is hiring or firing an executive director. The agreement asks members for something in a year when they owe the organization a decision instead, and a chair running a search has no attention left for fifteen conversations. Ask for the personal gift alone and come back after the hire.

Do not start here when fundraising is already the only thing the board talks about. The 2021 survey found that boards placing the highest importance on fundraising rated lower on setting strategic direction than boards that placed the least importance on it, 1.70 against 2.17 on the same scale, and the same pattern held for thinking strategically and for monitoring impact. If your last four meetings were about the gala, the problem is the agenda, not the agreement.

Do not write a minimum gift into the agreement in the same year you are trying to seat members from the communities you serve. You will get one or the other. Use the personally significant structure until those seats are filled and the new members have been through one signing cycle.

Do not apply the agreement retroactively to members recruited on a promise that no gift would be asked. Apply it to new seats and to renominations, and let the original cohort age out of it. A board that feels ambushed will vote the page down and you will not get a second attempt for three years.

And do not sign this page at all if nobody will make the month thirteen call. An unenforced agreement is worse than no agreement, because it teaches the board that signatures on this subject mean nothing, and it makes the next chair’s job harder than yours.