Board Meeting Bingo
In various conversations at Bridge and ANA conference recently, there was an undercurrent across organizations and fundraisers: my board won’t let me do X because Y. Or, conversely, my board is insisting we do Z despite my protestations.
The person saying this is often a seasoned development professional, respected by their peers but not as respected in their own organization’s conference room. There, wild guesses, optimistic thinking, or opinions refreshingly free of rationality hold sway for some organizations.
This gives you two options: 1) try to convince your board not to go down these alleys and 2) have fun with it. Here at Agitator | DonorVoice, we say “why not do both?” (Also, there’s Firing Lousy Board Members, an excellent resource on getting the right folks aboard, if you will.)
So here is the first-ever (that we know of) Official Nonprofit Board Meeting Bingo Card. Simply take the phrases you think are most likely to occur in your board, put them into a free bingo card generator, and mark your bingo card as your board members say these items. If you get BINGO in under an hour of discussion, it’s a nice reminder to update your resume and aim for greener pastures.
And to try to convince your board, we’ve linked to relevant Agitator content that can help you combat these “pearls” of “wisdom.”
For your bingo card pleasure:
- It’s time to rebrand!
- Training isn’t in the budget.
- I don’t like X, therefore we shouldn’t do it.
- Those fundraising pictures are too sad.
- I give my time; I don’t need to also give my money.
- What about our Charity Navigator rating?
- We can do it all online.
- We need to focus on younger donors.
- We need to focus on Millennials. (yes, this is different from younger donors, because there’s some generational nonsense sprinkled on top)
- But X channel is so expensive; we need to lower our fundraising costs!
- That’s too political – we can’t do advocacy work.
- Younger generations are entirely different.
- We can’t afford to invest in fundraising.
- I won’t ask for money.
- We need to be more active on channel-of-the-week (e.g., TikTok, Snapchat).
- We don’t need to raise money on the site; we can use Facebook’s donations.
- Our target audience is everyone.
- If they can’t raise money, let’s bring in someone who can.
- All our donors need to know about all our programs.
- Direct mail is dead.
- We need to focus exclusively on wealthy donors.
- We need to focus on events.
- No one answers survey questions.
- It’s National Our-Cause-Here Day – we need to make a huge push!
And a couple we don’t have blog posts for (yet):
- It’s our Xth anniversary; we should use that as part of all of our campaigns. No one cares. It doesn’t have anything to do with the donor or with the impact the donor will have. Therefore it’s irrelevant to fundraising. It could be even worse than irrelevant if you are reminding readers how low you haven’t solved the problem you were created to solve.
- Let’s do our own Ice Bucket Challenge. This wasn’t created by the ALS Association – it was a grassroots effort that you can replicate only by empowering your constituents, not top-down efforts. From my recent book The New Nonprofit:
“If you’re like me, you had board members and leaders asking you why you didn’t do something like that when it came out. … while the Ice Bucket Challenge raised both money and awareness for the ALS Association in the United States and the Motor Neurone Disease Association in the UK, it was created by neither. It wasn’t even associated with ALS until after it had been shown on The Today Show. Like political professionals, what we can control is an ever-decreasing portion of the communications about us. And, as we try to control what we can’t control, we only prevent ourselves from being talked about, a greater sin.”
That should get you to a 5×5 grid, but what else belongs on the board bingo board?
Nick
14 responses to “Board Meeting Bingo”
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Ah yes, Nick…the WTF moments over & over &… In fact, I just tweeted about this a few days ago > Power dynamics in boards/orgs/fundraising. “I know more than you, Missy, because I’m wealthy…because I’m a white guy…because nonprofits aren’t really competent businesses. If only you NGOs would operate more like for-profit businesses, all would be well.
Of course, fundraising isn’t a real profession…just a bunch of nonprofit peeps who invented stuff. No academic research, no real professionalism… You know. The whole usual bunch of sh*t.
Even government treats nonprofits as kinda dumb and not-so-wise. And then there’s all those watchdog groups who invented insults for overhead. (I wonder what their overhead is?! Hmmm…)
Thanks for this, Nick. And hey every board member and dumb boss out there… Read CompassPoint’s 2013 UnderDeveloped Report. And read all the research on fundraisers leaving orgs. All because of the abuse directed at fundraisers and decent CEOs by their boards and board members.
hi Nick, love it… I’ve always been most fascinated with boards when they walk in the board room, they put their jacket on the hook with all their business sense on it, they make (or worse, not make) decisions about the nonprofit (and of course we can’t spend any money!!).
Then after the meeting they put their jacket with their business sense back on, walk out of the room and invest thousands of dollars to grow their business.
Sadly, what I see is that these bingo card expressions aren’t just uttered at the board level, but also at management, so (seasoned) development officers when hired to actually raise some money, are having to deal with this as well… hence the high turnover in fundraising world.
sigh.. and here we go again.. round and round we go… it’s playing bingo on the merry go round..
Hi Nick – I’ve had my own version of Board Member Bingo for years, and I’ve used the game as an icebreaker at dozens (hundreds?) of board retreats I’ve facilitated. In my version, each board member gets a card and the goal is to fill in as many squares as possible with other board member’s names (this gets board members up and moving around and talking with one another). The squares contain things like “has made a major gift” and “has solicited a major gift” and “has a bequest in their will” as well as easier squares like “is an attorney”. When we debrief we have wonderful discussions about how there’s no one in the room with a charitable bequest, or there’s no attorney on the board (generally there is at least one). I’m happy to share my game board and the rules with your readers if interested.
Thanks – I think folks would love to see this. Thank you for sharing!
I’m not sure how to share this – unless you want to post it on your site. People can email me at amy@amyeisenstein.com.
I was feeling really good (read: smug) as I went through the list of phrases, noting that I’d have a pretty empty bingo card. Then I got to the first one that you don’t have a blog post for – the anniversary. Whoops! We’re heading into our 75th next year, and there’s a ton of enthusiasm at the board level for using this as a way to boost fundraising.
Would love to know the psychology behind these anniversaries – as you note, internal folks are drawn to them like the proverbial moths to flames, and yet they are tangential at best to our mission. I get the idea of showing that you are an established, trustworthy (hopefully) entity, but beyond that. (And no, we’re not an organization trying to end something or solve a problem permanently – we’re a library support organization, so we do need to keep doing what we’re doing…)
As you say, for organizations like yours, perhaps longevity is tied to trust? The challenge is that people might start to take you as a foregone conclusion – if they have been around for 75 years, they don’t need my support. This is not just boards; sometimes smart marketing people will insist that a timeline goes into marketing markets, as if “1956 – Harris K. Telemacher, Rigby Reardon, and Vincent Antonelli laid the cornerstone of our new national headquarters” bears any relevance to why someone would give today.
One way to deal with this is “yes, and”ing these comments. As long as you can make the transition from the past to the future, you can use this enthusiasm to make a case for present services, e.g., “When we were founded 75 years ago, we were a shelter from the storm – a place where any person could come for the knowledge to better themselves. That’s still our goal today, even if what that knowledge is has changed. You can be a part of this by supporting maker spaces that allows adults and kids to create the future and digital literacy classes that gives people the tools they need to succeed in today’s workforce or read an email from their grandkids…”
That’s pretty bad copy and you’d want to have one specific pitch rather than a double-tailed one, but you get my point. If people insist on bringing up the past, turn it to point the way forward (to the extent possible; sometimes we can do but nudge our boards…)
Thanks, Nick! You, me and our Director of Marketing are on the same page. Hopefully, we can keep everything looking forward and mission-focused.
(And thank you for understanding what libraries are about these days!)
I worked at a library when I was younger (right when we were switching from a card catalog to an electronic look-up system, which should date me nicely); they are absolute treasures!
I would like to have a copy of this Board BINGO game as well. I would like to personalize ours with the help of y’alls game. Thanks,
Browning
“We should get Oprah to be our spokesperson!” (when no one has any connection to her whatsoever and the cause is not one known to be dear to the celebs heart)
Oh, that’s a good one! I’ve also had the variant “does anyone know anyone at the Gates Foundation?” when you aren’t close to one of their mission areas.
LOL. Yes, this. For years, as a Philadelphia local, I was always hearing “let’s get Bill Cosby” (🙄) or Will Smith. Riiiiight. A consistent communications program works miracles, but few are willing to invest.
It behooves us as fundraising professionals to elevate the board discussion and get the niggling on tactics out of the board room where they do not belong. Professionals should be bringing their boards well thought out strategic funding plans that address the funding model for their organizations, with the historic and community demographic analysis, have an actual strategy based on some evidence, include the organizational investments needed with their level of risk and then attach the math/financial forecasts that follow from those investments. Simone is right to point out Underdeveloped. And I’d also like to note that the report reveals that 23% of organizations did not have a fundraising plan!!! (34% under $1million orgs.) 21% had no fundraising database (31% of under $1M). And 25% of CEOS said they lacked the knowledge and skills in fundraising to secure gifts. That’s all on those in the profession who are filling fund development jobs, folks. (And given the bare bones nature of most plans I’ve seen – barely more than a calendar with no math backing them up, they open themselves up to questions about their credibility). And because of low salaries for many nonprofits and thus their inability to compete with the big ones for staff, they have to get by on inexperienced fund development staff. But, when they do this, in my experience, they do little to nothing to train and provide ongoing coaching and mentoring. When we don’t act like professionals, we can’t get mad when the amateurs start giving us advice and micromanaging. Again, in my experience, board members when facing fund development will always default to their fears. So if we clutter our board meetings with tactical management questions detached from strategy and math (like what event venue, how many tickets they need to sell, or whether we should do dm vs email), we have provided on open invitation to our board members to take charge.