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.
I want to be careful here, because this is not a story about bad board members. Most board members who slow fundraising down do so out of care, caution, or a version of loyalty to the organization that shows up as risk aversion. They joined the board because they believe in the mission. The friction usually comes from somewhere honest: a fear of asking friends for money, an old memory of a campaign that went sideways, a genuine uncertainty about what their role even is when it comes to raising funds, or a quiet sense that their relationships are the one form of value they bring and letting go of them feels like giving up their seat at the table. This distinction matters, because it changes what can shift within the board.
What I see most often is a board of directors' role that was never clearly defined. Staff and consultants know their job is to build the pipeline, write the appeals, run the events, and steward the relationships. Board members often have a much fuzzier picture of what is being asked of them, and fuzzy expectations produce hesitation. Hesitation, multiplied across a full board, starts to look like resistance even when it is really just uncertainty wearing a formal jacket. The gatekeeping around personal contacts comes from a related place. When a board member has never been shown how staff will steward a relationship with the same care they would, holding on tight feels like the responsible choice rather than the controlling one.
The organizations that move past this do a few things differently, and none of them involve confronting the board or waiting for individual members to become more comfortable on their own. Board members do not "help with fundraising," which means nothing and asks for everything at once, but something a person can actually picture themselves doing. Introduce me to three people in your network who care about this issue. Write a short note to five donors you already know. Attend this one event and bring a guest. Precision turns a vague expectation into an action a board member can complete and feel good about completing.
A short workshop on how to talk about the organization in a hallway conversation, practiced together as a board, does more for fundraising capacity than another slide deck about the case for support. People do not resist asking for money or making introductions because they lack conviction in the mission, but rather resist because they have never had a low-stakes chance to practice the conversation.
Board members separate governance from gatekeeping, both the kind that shows up as revisiting decisions already made and the kind that shows up as holding contacts too close. A board's job is to steward the organization's health, and that includes real oversight of strategy and budget. It does not include re-doing a fundraising plan that the staff and the board already approved together, and it does not mean every donor relationship has to run through one person indefinitely. When a board member sees staff introduce a prospect with the same warmth and follow-through they would bring themselves, the instinct to hold on loosens naturally, because the relationship is being cared for rather than handed off.
If three board members hesitate on the same ask or introduction, that hesitation is telling the organization something true about where the case for support is not quite right, or where the board still needs more grounding in the fundraising strategy. Reading that signal and adjusting is a very different posture than pushing through it and hoping compliance follows.
None of this work requires a difficult confrontation, but rather treating the board the way I encourage every client to treat every stakeholder in a fundraising strategy, with the assumption that they want to succeed, paired with the structure that actually lets them.
The Executive Director I mentioned at the start rebuilt her board's fundraising role around exactly this approach, one specific ask and one short training at a time. Within two quarters, the same board that had been slowing the plan down, including the member who once kept every introduction to himself, was opening doors the staff had never been able to reach on their own. The board changed their realtionship to fundraising though some simple steps and set the organization up for success, which is heartening for a team that previously felt stuck.
