Setting board fundraising expectations

Seven months into her term, a new board member opens an email about the spring appeal, sees a line about board participation, and realizes for the first time that she was supposed to give. Nobody had mentioned it. She sends 50 dollars, feels vaguely embarrassed about the amount, and never raises fundraising again. That silence is not her fault. Board fundraising expectations that show up after someone has already joined are one of the most reliable ways a small nonprofit loses the goodwill of a person it worked hard to recruit.

The fix is mostly about timing and wording, not about finding a number that makes everyone comfortable. There isn't one.

What board fundraising expectations actually cover

Three different things usually get bundled into one uncomfortable topic, and separating them is most of the work.

The first is money out of your own pocket. The second is money you help bring in from other people: an introduction, a sponsorship, a table at the event, a signature on a letter. The third is everything adjacent to both, like thanking donors, showing up when the organization is being looked at, and not disappearing in November.

Boards that never separate these end up with a shared vague sense that everyone should be "doing more on development," which produces guilt and no gifts. The board instrument puts the whole problem in a single item: "Every board member understands what is expected of them in fundraising." When that one comes back low across a board, it is almost never because people refuse. It is because nobody ever told them.

Why an amount meaningful to you usually beats a fixed number

On a community board with a retired teacher, a 29-year-old program alum, and the owner of a plumbing business, a flat 1,000 dollar minimum does one of two things. It quietly filters out the people you spent a year recruiting for exactly the perspective they bring, or it gets waived in private for some members and not others, which is worse. Now generosity is a negotiation, and only some people know it happened.

Asking every board member for a gift that is personally meaningful to them keeps the range wide on purpose. It lets a 40 dollar gift and a 4,000 dollar gift both be real. It also gets you to full participation, which turns out to matter more than the total.

The honest weakness is that "meaningful to you" is vague, and vagueness reads as "optional" to a certain kind of person. So pair it with two concrete anchors that are not dollar amounts. This organization should be among the largest charitable gifts you make this year, and you make it in the first quarter rather than the last week of December.

The honest case for a stated minimum

A stated minimum is not a bad idea, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It is unambiguous. It is identical for everyone, which is its own kind of fairness. It makes the recruitment conversation short. For an organization with a 2 million dollar budget and a board recruited partly for capacity, a 5,000 dollar give-or-get is defensible and widely used.

The costs are real too. A minimum narrows who can serve, and it narrows it along lines that correlate with wealth, which usually means along lines of race and age as well. It also converts a gift into a fee, and people do not feel about fees the way they feel about gifts.

If you want the clarity without the exclusion, state a target rather than a floor, and say the exception out loud in the same breath: if this number is a problem for you, tell the chair, and the answer will be yes. An exception that is announced in advance costs nothing. An exception that has to be requested in private costs you the person.

Why funders ask about 100% board giving

Grant applications ask what share of the board gave in the last year, and the honest answer is that they are not asking about the money. Board gifts at a small organization are trivial next to the grant being requested. They are asking whether the people closest to the organization, the ones who see the financials and sit through the hard meetings, put their own money in.

It is also a competence signal. Getting every member of a volunteer board to complete one small task by a deadline is a test of whether the board functions as a group. Boards that reach 100% usually have a chair who asks people directly. Boards stuck below it usually have a chair who sent an email.

BoardSource's periodic survey research on board practices tracks board giving across the sector and is worth reading before you decide what your own norm should be. If your participation is at 70%, the useful move is not to feel bad about it. It is to have an answer ready, and to know which conversations were never had.

Giving and getting are different asks

Give-or-get is popular because it produces one number, and one number is easy to administer. What it hides is that giving and getting draw on completely different things.

Giving depends on personal capacity. Getting depends on network, comfort with asking, and employer relationships. A board member with modest income who has worked in the county for 30 years and knows every business owner by name is enormously valuable at getting and will never be your largest donor. A quiet retiree with savings may be the reverse. Collapsing both into 5,000 dollars lets each of them satisfy it in the way they find easiest, and lets the organization never find out what either was actually capable of.

A better structure is to make giving universal and getting individual. Everyone gives something. What each person does to bring in money is negotiated one to one, against what they genuinely have: introductions, a company match, a willingness to host eight people in their living room. The instrument item that gets at this is "The board is actively involved in raising money, not only approving budgets," and boards often score themselves lower on it than on personal giving, which is usually accurate.

Say it before they join, not after

Every moment after the yes is a worse moment than the one before it. Before someone joins, the expectation is information they can act on. After they join, it is a bill they did not agree to.

Put it in the written role description, in a sentence anyone could read aloud. Say it out loud in the recruitment conversation, not as a caveat at the end but in the middle where the real content is. Then ask the candidate to say back what they understood. This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the one that works. A candidate who responds with "I don't think I can do that" has given you something valuable for free, and you now have a choice to make in daylight rather than a problem to discover in month seven. Building this into your process for recruiting new board members costs one paragraph and one question.

The annual conversation, and who has it

Once a year, someone has a five-minute individual conversation with every board member about their gift. Not a group email, not an agenda item, not a form. A person, one to one, before the fiscal year starts.

The chair usually does it, sometimes with the development committee chair splitting the list. The chair goes first, and the chair's own gift is already in before the first call is made. Three questions carry the whole thing: is this year like last year for you, is the timing workable, and is there anyone you would be willing to introduce us to.

The reason to do it annually rather than once at recruitment is that people's circumstances change and nobody volunteers that information. A board member whose situation tightened will usually just go quiet, and quiet gets read as disengagement when it is actually embarrassment.

If you want to know where your board currently stands rather than guessing, the board questions include the fundraising items above, including "I made a personal financial contribution to this organization in the past 12 months." Responses come back as counts and averages for the whole board with no way to trace any answer to a person, which is the only reason people answer that particular item honestly. It's free, it takes about eight minutes, and there's nothing to buy.

None of this makes a board of volunteers enjoy asking for money. What it does is remove the two things that actually stop them, which are not knowing what is expected and finding out too late to say no gracefully.