Fundraising Coaching Isn’t Just for Staff and Participants — It’s for Boards, Too

Typically, when you think of who can benefit most from fundraising coaching, you usually think about frontline development staff or peer-to-peer event participants. But nonprofit board members can benefit from this kind of support just as much. One of the most rewarding engagements I’ve done recently proved that!

I served on the board of Girls on the Run Los Angeles from 2019 to 2024. Their mission is to inspire girls to be joyful, healthy, and confident. They achieve this through an experience-based curriculum that integrates running with life-skills development, helping participants build emotional, social, and physical strength to successfully navigate life experiences. Like many nonprofit boards, members have a give/get donation requirement that is mostly raised through peer-to-peer fundraising. This April, the Executive Director and Board Chair invited me to host an informal fundraising session ahead of their fiscal year-end push that tied in with their 20^th Anniversary Spring 5K Run.

In advance of the session, the Executive Director and Board Chair asked each board member what their biggest fundraising challenge was. About half had already met or were close to their goal, but others felt hesitancy about activating their networks. The anxieties were ones I’d heard before: new board members not knowing where to start, returning board members not wanting to keep going back to the same people, and a few feeling like it’d be easier to just donate the money themselves rather than ask friends and family or put in the time to fundraise.

What I loved about this engagement is how casual it was. There was no stage or PowerPoint. Instead, we sat around a table in the backyard of a board member’s house on a sunny Saturday morning and went around the circle, each person taking a moment to talk. One person didn’t want to ask without an event she was participating in to anchor her ask first. One felt guilty asking during a major life moment. One was tired of going back to the same donors every year. One didn’t want to post on Instagram. This gave me an opportunity to work through each hesitation and tailor my responses to everyone.

I was able to share some of my standard advice that can very quickly help make fundraising feel more doable:

1. People give for two reasons — because you asked, and because they support you. Often it is not the cause or event that is leading a donor’s motivation to give.
2. Reframing fundraising from an ask to an invitation flips the script and changes your perspective. You’re not asking for money; you’re inviting people to be a part of something that matters to you.
3. Be specific, because a clear, meaningful ask is better than saying, “whatever you can give is fine.”
4. Follow-up isn’t nagging; it’s necessary for fundraising success. Most donations come after a second or third ask, and silence usually means that someone is busy or didn’t see your message, not that they don’t want to give.

We also got creative, ideating a “20 donations of $20 in 20 hours” sprint for GOTRLA’s 20th anniversary, and pre-set donation amounts tied to the organization’s milestones and stats, which helped create ideas for the board members while giving their supporters an easy, meaningful way to engage.

The feedback afterward was so encouraging. The Executive Director shared that everyone left with more confidence and concrete ideas to apply to their campaigns. And the Board Chair described the room as “buzzing” with fundraising ideas. It was a great reminder for me that some of the best coaching conversations happen casually and personally and don’t need a big production or a ton of time to be effective.

Boards are often a nonprofit’s most underused fundraising asset. Not because they don’t care, but because they don’t always have the tools, confidence or time to be successful. A short, candid session built around real fundraising hesitations can change that fast.

At Event 360, our fundraising coaching works for a wide range of audiences from nonprofit staff to peer-to-peer fundraising event participants, and even board members who need structure and encouragement to embrace fundraising to hit their goals.

If your board could use more confidence, we’d love to talk with you about what a fundraising coaching session could look like for your organization.

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