When your board has no major donors

Your board members can bring more resources to the table than you may imagine!

A lot of “conventional” wisdom out there will tell you that nonprofit boards are supposed to be filled with people who can give substantial gifts to the organization. But the reality is that there are somewhere around 1.5 million nonprofits in the US, with an average of about nine board members each. While certainly there are many people on multiple boards, it is pretty clear that not every board member can be major a donor, even on the scale of whatever “major donor” means to a midsize or small nonprofit. Further, a lot of nonprofits, especially smaller ones or those in low population areas like small towns or rural regions, don’t have much of a pool of highly resourced individuals to draw from.

Yet there’s no doubt that board members have a responsibility to see to the financial health of their organizations. How can nonprofits without wealthy board members benefit from the resources that their boards bring to the table?

First, include your board members in brainstorming and planning for how the board can help with development. A small number of board members can work with your development staff (including the Executive Director) and present a plan to the rest of the board. When board members make the plans for how they will work and lead in finding resources, it can strongly increase “buy in” from the full board.

But what can board members bring beyond their own funding? Of course, there’s the obvious “ask an accountant to join the board,” idea, or some other professional that is routinely used by a board, such as a lawyer. There are other ways to leverage resources as well:

A few tried and true methods:

• Corporate “c suite” representatives can be invited to the board, in the expectation that they can help to bring the resources of their corporation along with them.

• Invite a representative from local media onto your board, in the expectation of increasing coverage for your nonprofit.

• Bring on someone with property that can be accessed for the use of the nonprofit.

• Invite experts in the field of your nonprofit to be advisers for programing and add credibility for funding requests.

A few less obvious possibilities:

• Invite people from local and state government to the board, to help with accessing public funding and other public resources.

• Invite representatives from local colleges and universities to assist in accessing campus facilities, college volunteers, expert advice, and public funding. In addition, gathering help from educational institutions can help in creating a needed “match” for some types of funding, for which educator match is easier to verify. One community education program added heads of education departments from two local colleges to their board, gaining connections that brought free meeting spaces for training, faculty volunteers to train the nonprofit volunteers, and most importantly, agreements to give college students options of volunteering with the nonprofit to fulfill education class requirements or campus volunteer requirements.

• Invite leaders from the “competition.” For instance, if your nonprofit is a nonprofit tourist attraction, consider having the leader of a for-profit tourist attraction on your board, with the expectation of that tourist attraction using its resources to help add value to your nonprofit attraction. A 50 year old outdoor music festival in Virginia had the owner of one of the most well-known tourist attractions in the area on their board. She routinely allowed the music festival to piggy-back free advertising onto her extensive marketing throughout the mid-Atlantic region.

  Another example for gaining the help of a leader from the “competition” is a greater willingness from the competing group to share other resources, create partnership efforts, etc. Careful planning can arrange this without the difficulty of conflict of interest.

• Last, consider the network and reach of others when you invite them onto your board. Many without personal wealth have very broad reach through their personal reputation or their profession. One small research nonprofit added a board member whose consultant job gave her access to organizations in the same field of research across the state. She basically “knew everybody who was anybody,” in the field and was an amazing resource to have on the board.

Overall, there are a lot of individuals whose nondollar resources can be leveraged to strengthen the financial health of your nonprofit. Go look for them!