Guest Blogger: June Bradham, Corporate DevelopMint
November 3rd, 2009 - Posted by June Bradham - No Comments
Setting Your Board up for Success
As fundraisers, our day-to-day objective is pretty obvious: to raise funds. But our long-term mission is always something loftier: to have a social impact. We aren’t simply squirreling away coins to fill our coffers. We are securing the means to effect change, to build great institutions of learning, to find cures, to purify water in distant villages, to save lives.
And we all know that, for our communities to believe in our cause the way we do, we need champions. We need impassioned, skillful partners who are willing and able to support our mission financially. Who are these caped men and women? They are actually closer than you think.
Over the years, Corporate DevelopMint’s research and experience have taught us that board giving is one of the primary drivers of fundraising success. We’ve also come to understand that how much board members give corresponds directly to how satisfied they are with their overall experience. Combined, those two findings mean that creating a stellar board experience will lead to stronger giving. A board that is engaged by meaningful work and passionate about a worthwhile cause is a formidable fundraising force indeed. There is, however, an additional and very important underlying factor at work here: telling the story among our social networks.
Let’s think about how our “community” is getting bigger and our social networks are expanding as a result. These expansions give us the opportunity to increase our social impact. Our reach was once limited to our homes, our workplaces and maybe the few nonprofits at which we volunteered. Now, those networks can stretch across the country and reach other continents. Today, with a few clicks of my mouse, I can offer my expertise to a nonprofit in California seeking advice. A few clicks more and I can help a 20-year-old woman in Africa get her business off the ground. Even my presentations are no longer just for the 40 people in my audience. The audience members tweet their experience to their friends, who download my presentation online and share it with their social networks. Suddenly, my words, my thoughts and my guidance can have a national—or even international—social impact.
These connections and moments of impact are directly influenced by how satisfying individual board members find their board service. In fact, when we get together at the 2009 Governor’s Nonprofit Leadership Conference in Dallas, I’m going to be talking about one unique way your nonprofit organization can increase its social impact—through improving board dynamics. Specifically, we’ll discuss what organizations can do to increase the effect their boards have on fundraising, and the social impact the organization can have in turn on the issues and needs that drive their mission. In short: the more engaged the board, the greater the impact the nonprofit will ultimately have.
Here are just a few of the strategies we’ll discuss that can set up your board for success:
- Create a compelling, exciting message to engage your social networks in your cause.
- Enlist the right people to join your board and help you articulate your message to tens of thousands of potential donors, all of whom are within your far-reaching social networks.
- Ensure that those people never lose the fire for your organization that brought them to you in the first place.
I look forward to meeting with you in Texas, and to talking with you more about lighting the fire within your board members and using the power of a happy, passionate board to spur fundraising and deepen social impact!
Tags: Board Development·Board Members·Governor's Nonprofit Leadership Conference·Leadership·Leadership Development·Nonprofit Organizations·OneStar Foundation·Social Impact·Social Media·Texas