Online Resources to Strengthen Your Board

Susan Howlett’s website shares more information about how to strengthen your board. Visit susanhowlett.com for information about her book Boards on Fire! and free resources including:

• Resources for planning board meetings

• Board committee report templates

• Examples of open-ended questions

• Videos on donor retention and donor engagement after the other person responds. This is a muscle we’re not used to flexing, and we all need to get better at it!

Also, focus your board on articulating what impact your chorus makes, not on what you do. This is another area where we’re not particularly adroit, so spend some time at a board meeting figuring out how to share what difference you make for end-users, whether that’s your singers, your audience members, or others in your community. You may want to offer questionnaires to your singers or exit surveys to your audience members to discover how they describe your impact.

If we equip our board members with clearly identified stakeholders to approach and help them get comfortable engaging new people in conversations about your work, they’re more likely to succeed at this critical aspect of their role and champion your organization wherever they go.

How to Engender

More Effective

Fundraising

Problem You’re Likely Facing: Board members know they’re supposed to help garner financial support for your chorus, but

• They’ve asked all their friends to donate and they don’t know anyone with money.

• They equate “fundraising” with “asking for money”, which they don’t like to do.

Solution #1: Show board members that the most effective thing they can do to generate revenue is to keep the donors you’ve already got.

Donor retention across the nonprofit sector is very low, and the reason is benign neglect. Adopt this fundraising strategy: “Don’t lose anybody!” If board members pay more attention to the donors who have supported you in the past, they’ll be doing their job. u

Experience Our 29th Season

In priority order, they should shower love on anyone who gave you money during the last year, anyone who volunteered, and the people who attended your programs. If they have bandwidth after that, they should focus on people who gave in the recent past but not last year, former board, former staff, and former volunteers. A special focus on donors who’ve just given for the first time will result in the highest return on their investment of time and energy.

If board members have a plan for attending to these core constituents and spend their time deepening people’s sense of connection with the chorus, you’ll see increases in loyalty and generosity and those very people will bring in new audience members and new donors because they’re having such a great experience. So what does such a plan look like?

Solution #2: Create a fundraising plan that focuses board members on stewardship, not asking for support.

If we focus our leaders on raising money, they might burn bridges on their way to meeting a goal. But if we focus them on connecting key stakeholders to our work, we will end up with devoted fans and money!

Research tells us what people are longing for when they support a nonprofit, and the same research tells us that they’re not getting what they yearn for when they give. So create a plan for board members to deliver what donors want, and money will show up, regardless of the mechanisms you offer for giving.

Donors want to feel seen and heard and known and valued by the organizations they support. They want us to acknowledge that they’ve been coming to our concerts for years, or that they’ve volunteered or made in-kind gifts of goods or services, or that they’ve contributed money on top of their ticket purchases for years. They want opportunities to share their own stories of how our music has affected them and why they care about us. So create opportunities for board members to share gratitude through phone calls, handwritten cards, or at in-person events like post-concert receptions.

Donors want to know that their support has made a difference, touched someone, or changed something. So enlist board members to share stories of impact about your singers, your audience members, people you’ve sung for in the community— even your sponsors and other donors!

The most compelling stories are about one person at a time, not groups of people, and donors don’t need to hear grandiose results. Hearing that someone felt a sense of belonging is powerful. Or that someone who wasn’t sure about their singing now feels confident. Or that someone in your audience savored hearing live music in community again after feeling isolated. Donors want to feel a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves. And board members can create that by inviting people into authentic experiences of your mission. Invite a donor to attend a rehearsal and stand in the middle of the singers, completely surrounded by the music. Board members could invite donors to attend a conference call or Zoom call with the chorus’s music director or other top staff, during which they’d get insider information about the next season. Leaders could ask donors for quotes or stories about why they give, to be used in your program or social media. Or invite donors to be part of a task force or survey or private conversation in someone’s living room over a glass of wine. Being included in special moments helps donors feel like they’re partners in the life of the chorus.

If we invite our board members to prioritize relationship building over asking, and to prioritize the people we’ve already got over getting new people, our leaders will feel safer and more comfortable with the process of generating revenue—and they may not even have to ask! People who’ve been thanked and included will give more whenever they’re asked, whether it’s through mail, email, an event, or additions to their ticket purchases. And your board members will be happier too.

Your board members want to be an asset to your organization, but they need to be focused on the right conversations, the right people, and the right opportunities. Hopefully these suggestions will give you direction as you work to strengthen your board. n