Helping Boards Who Won’t Ask for Money to Fundraise

Some individuals including board members refuse to ask for money. What can people do who will do anything, but ask for a donation to support fundraising? A lot. This video includes just three of Karen’s ideas.

Transcript of Helping Boards, Who Won’t Ask for Money to Fundraise

Hi, I’m Karen Eber Davis. Welcome to Added-Value video. Let’s talk about how board members can help with fundraising without having to ask for money. Now oftentimes, there are people in your organization, board members included, who are willing to help you do anything except ask for money. So this is a video about how and what they can do to help you.

The first thing to ask them and encourage them to do is to give generously. Now, when they are board members, this is really useful because it helps your credibility. People say, “Oh, look, that board member believes in this group enough to give money. And if they’re willing to let their gift—if it’s substantial—be bragged about, that even helps more. So giving generously is the first no-brainer way to help a nonprofit that you care about who we will do anything except ask for money. Giving your own money, it’s not asking for money.

So the other thing they can do is help you to find people who might be part of your community who you could then include in your programming and include and perhaps be donors. And the way they do this is they simply screen people who they meet. There you say, having a coffee with the new acquaintance, and they say, “Hey, what nonprofits are you involved with?

If there’s a match with something you do or an interest, they bring that person’s information to you, and together you can figure out how to do the next step with them. How do you get them involved? They never have to ask for money, but they may ask them to come to an event or to meet you at some point for coffee. Those kinds of things. Another way that board members can do is to  help get involved with fundraising all the parts of fundraising, and there are many that have nothing to do or little to do with actually making a request.

For instance, when gifts are received a thank you from a board member or a call to a donor can be very, very helpful so that donor to realize the gift was important enough to gather the attention of the board, it was important enough that if they would like, they could talk to this board member and ask questions. So they have a contact. So they create a relationship.

There another thing they can do, is they could host events at their office. We might not even invite anyone, or they might invite their acquaintances to come, not asking for money, but it could be an information sharing. This is what we’re doing. This is how we work together and we’re look for volunteers, for instance. So lots of ways to have people help you who are board members that don’t involve asking for money. I’ve just listed three. There are more in my newsletter and you can sign-up with the link I put below.

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