7 Email Marketing Myths That Are Hurting Your Fundraising Efforts

Here’s what happens in most nonprofit organizations: the development staff and/or executive director solicits major gift prospects — and the board is oddly AWOL from this part of the process.

If you work with a nonprofit board you know this is all too common a challenge. The board acts as ambassadors, hosts events, participates in gala committees, leads planning retreats, sits on committees, and sometimes even takes the lead on solicitation. But often, as development professionals, we find ourselves asking: Where’s the board when it comes to personal, face-to-face, major gift fundraising?

They say things like:

• “I’m not a fundraiser.”
• “Ask me to do anything else.”
• “I don’t want to ask my friends for money.”

The reality is that board members have relationships that make them uniquely positioned to ask for major gifts. No amount of training in fundraising skills can replace those relationships. Your task is to help board members find a way to get excited about tapping into and sharing those relationships.

Here’s a good news/bad news situation about major gift fundraising with board members: it is a relationship-first model. The “bad news” part is that this works really well only when the board member has an actual relationship with the prospect or donor. The good news is that most board members DO have relationships that can be tapped for fundraising purposes.

One of the most effective methods for helping board members identify their networks for fundraising purposes is an exercise called a board screening, or peer screening.

What Is a Board Screening?

The goal of a board screening is to help your board identify, rate, and prioritize prospects in a systematic and deliberate way.

In a board screening, you gather your board together and ask them to rate a list of known prospects or donors in terms of:

• Capacity to give (“How much could this prospect give if they were sufficiently motivated?”)
• Inclination to give (“How motivated is this prospect to give to your organization specifically?”)
• Connections (“Do I have a relationship with this prospect, and if so, what is the nature of the relationship? Do I know of others who have relationships with this prospect?”)

The information gained through a board screening can be incredibly valuable because:

• It allows you to access anecdotal information about prospect that you might not be able to find through a formal wealth screen.
• It surfaces connections between board members and prospects that can be activated for fundraising purposes.
• It helps board members feel ownership of the fundraising process. They become investors in the process, not just passive observers.

Who Should Attend a Board Screening?

A board screening is ideally in-person so that one board member’s recollection of a prospect can help stimulate another board member’s. In many ways it’s a group brainstorming exercise. So, the more people who attend, the more anecdotal information surfaces. But everyone who attends should be active participants in the exercise, not passive observers.

A board screening can involve:

• Board members only (good option for organizations that need to help board members feel more ownership of the fundraising process)
• Board members and senior staff (good option for organizations where the senior staff have longstanding relationships with prospects and donors)
• Board members, senior staff, and select volunteers (good option for organizations where engaged volunteers have longstanding relationships with prospects and donors)

In general, the more perspectives, the better.

How to Conduct a Board Screening

Step 1. Compile the List

Decide whose names to include on the list. Typically, this list includes:

• Your current major donor prospects
• Lapsed major donors
• Current mid-level donors
• High-capacity annual fund donors who have not yet been moved into a major gift conversation
• New wealth in your community (individuals or families who have recently gained significant wealth)
• Others nominated by board members, executive director, senior staff

Typically, you’ll want to arrive at a list of 100-200 names.

Step 2. Assemble the Group

In person works better than virtual for board screenings, though with a little creativity (and a little more logistical effort), virtual board screenings can work well too. Schedule a two-hour block. (Actually, schedule for two and a half hours or more, but tell them two hours; it can be very hard to predict how long a board screening will take. Participants tend to get very engaged!)

Step 3. Prepare the Materials

Assemble brief “prospect sheets” on each prospect, to be distributed to the screening participants in the room. Prospect sheets should include:

• Name
• Organization affiliation (employers, boards, etc.)
• Connection to your organization (volunteer, donor, event attendee, committee member, etc.)
• Wealth indicators (if available) such as real estate ownership, business ownership, foundation leadership, political contribution history, known gifts to other charities

Also prepare a rating sheet, which is a confidential document where each participant rates each prospect. (A simple spreadsheet that is given to each participant works well for this; it can also be in a digital format if you’re conducting a virtual screening.)

Step 4. Facilitate the Session

Open the meeting by reminding everyone of why they’re there, and of their responsibilities around confidentiality. Go through each prospect, one at a time, on a screen that everyone can see. Allow the group to share information about the prospect. As the facilitator, you’re in the role of surfacing the connections (“Is anyone in the room connected to this person?”) and calibrating the group’s thinking (“Based on what the group says, what’s a good estimate for capacity?”).

While the group is discussing each prospect, each participant should be completing their individual rating sheets.

Step 5. Compile the Results

After the session, compile the individual rating sheets into a single master rating sheet. Your goal should be to identify:

• Your highest-priority major gift prospects
• Board members (or senior staff, or volunteers) who are connected to those prospects
• Next steps for each prospect, including who will take the lead in cultivating and soliciting those prospects

What to Do After a Board Screening

A board screening is not an end in itself. It’s an information-gathering exercise to inform the next steps in the cultivation and solicitation process. Some next steps you might take after a board screening include:

• Set up one-on-one meetings between board members and prospects
• Connect board members with prospects at events
• Have board members make introductory phone calls to prospects
• Have board members write personal notes on cultivation letters
• Have board members reach out on social media to prospects

Ultimately, the goal is to move the needle on the prospect relationship, getting it from wherever it is now to the point of being ready for a formal solicitation. Building moves management practices around the results of the screening will help keep the process moving.