When the Board Is Part of the Fundraising Problem

I recently sat in a strategy session with an Executive Director who was tired of watching her fundraising consultant and staff build a fundraising plan, only to have it stall at board meetings.

It's common for a board member to ask for one more round of data before the campaign can launch, or for another to want to revisit the case for support that the staff already spent three months refining. A third quietly declines to make personal introductions this year, as they have for the last three years. And then there is the board member who holds onto their own contacts tightly, willing to make the ask themselves but unwilling to let staff or the consultant build a relationship with those donors directly, which means every gift from that network runs through one person's calendar and one person's mood. None of these behaviors are specifically meant to sabotage fundraising strategies, and each individual moment looks reasonable on its own, but the cumulative effect is a fundraising strategy that doesn't do what it's supposed to do.