Every executive director I’ve talked to has lived some version of this standoff. You need the board to be more involved in fundraising. So you bring it up at a meeting, gently, and you watch the room go quiet. A few people nod. Nobody volunteers. And at the next quarter’s meeting, you’re having the same conversation again.
When a board member hears “help with fundraising,” most of them picture the one thing they dread: calling a friend to ask for money. They don’t want to do it, they don’t think they’re good at it, and they’d rather quietly contribute in other ways than admit that out loud. So the ask lands, nobody moves, and everyone feels a little worse about it.
The problem was never that your board wasn’t willing to fundraise. It’s that everyone in the room hears “fundraising” and thinks “the ask,” when the ask is only a sliver of what fundraising actually is.
That assumption is the difference between a board that was assembled and one that was built. An assembled board is a collection of good people who said yes to a vacant seat. A built board is one where someone thought about what each seat needs to contribute before the ask ever went out.
Wealth Is Only One Contribution of Three
Our framework starts with what each board member brings to the table, and we group those tangible contributions into the 3 Ws: Work, Wealth, and Wisdom.
Work is the willingness to roll up sleeves between meetings, to take on the committee assignment and see it through. Wealth is access to financial resources, either through personal giving or through the donor doors a member can open. Wisdom is judgment: the member who asks the question nobody else thought to ask and keeps the board from moving quickly in the wrong direction.
Most members lean toward one of these, sometimes two. That’s normal. The right question for a governance committee isn’t “is every member a Wealth member?” It’s “does the board as a whole have all three covered?” Every member is still expected to give a monetary gift that’s meaningful for them, because that’s what makes the board’s asks credible to everyone else. What isn’t required is that every member be the one making the ask.
When you expect every seat to deliver Wealth, you’re misreading both what you have and what you need. The Wisdom member who keeps your strategy honest is not failing because she’s uncomfortable making an ask. She’s doing exactly what you recruited her to do, even if nobody named it that way at the time. Treating her discomfort as a performance problem is how good board members start wondering whether they belong on the board at all.
Much of Fundraising Isn’t the Ask
If the 3 Ws describe what members contribute, the ACE Qualities describe how they shape the way the board works together.
Ambassadors carry the organization’s story into the community. They talk about your work at a dinner party and over coffee with a friend, building awareness with people who don’t know you yet, and they do it without ever making a direct ask for money. Connectors work their own address book. They know the person you need to reach, and they make the warm introduction for you, instead of you having to make a cold call yourself. Energizers keep the development effort alive through the long stretches between campaigns. They’re the ones who make sure a donor gets personally thanked and who keeps the committee moving between galas instead of letting it stall.
Almost everything a healthy development effort runs on lives in those three qualities, and none of it is the cold ask your members are dreading. The board member who swears he “can’t fundraise” is very often a natural Connector who has never been asked to open a single door. He pictured the phone call asking for money, said no to that, and assumed he had nothing to offer. Nobody told him opening the door was the contribution.
That’s the cost of leaving these qualities unnamed. You have Ambassadors who’d gladly tell your story to a room full of people, Connectors who would make the personal introduction if you asked for that instead of asking for a check, and Energizers who could carry the team through a dry spell. The capacity is already in the room. You just have to identify who has which strength, and approach each person accordingly.
The board member who swears he “can’t fundraise” is very often a natural Connector who has never been asked to open a single door.
An Assembled Board Hands Out a Mandate. A Built One Casts the Roles.
An assembled board hands every member the same vague fundraising expectation and hopes it sticks. A built board casts the roles instead. It knows who its real Wealth members are and leans on them for the giving and the major-gift doors. It knows who its Ambassadors are and points them outward, into the rooms and conversations where your story should be getting told. It stops asking the Wisdom member to behave like a development officer and lets her do what you recruited her for: ask the hard questions before the board considers making a potentially expensive mistake. The work gets distributed by strength, not by a one-size-fits-all rule that fits almost no one.
None of this happens by accident. It happens when a governance committee sits down and maps who brings what quality, then matches each contribution to the right member instead of mandating the whole room to go out and do the same thing.
What This Changes for You
The goal was never to turn ten reluctant people into ten fundraisers. That was always going to fail, and the failure was never about willpower or commitment. It was about casting people in a role that didn’t fit them.
The real move is to build a board where development is everyone’s business in the way that fits each seat. The Wealth member gives, and also opens the doors only she can open. The Ambassador carries the story. The Connector makes warm introductions at exactly the right moment. The Energizer keeps it all from stalling out. Everyone contributes, nobody is miscast, and the quiet standoff at the board meeting stops happening, because you’re finally asking each person for the thing they’re already good at.
Have you ever sat your governance committee down and mapped who actually brings which W, and who’s an Ambassador, Connector, or Energizer? If not, that’s where I’d start. It’s the kind of work I walk boards through in a fundraising workshop, and it’s the conversation I have all the time with EDs who are frustrated with the room going quiet every time fundraising comes up. If it sounds like yours, let’s talk.
–Jeff
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
