When there’s the will but not the way, board members have a few choices.

They can send a board member to a fundraising webinar or other training session, then rely on their note-taking abilities to bring the material back to the rest of the group.

They can hire a trainer (like Cause Effective) to jumpstart their board’s fundraising savvy.

Or (and), they can leaf through Andrea Kihlstedt and Andy Robinson ‘s new compendium of fundraising training exercises – Train Your Board (And Everyone Else) To Raise Money – and design a training program to help their board members get off the dime and start raising funds.

The idea behind Kihlstedt and Robinson’s book is that everyone has the power to facilitate better board fundraising.  Instead of waiting for an outside expert, we around the table can pick an exercise – or a series of exercises – to help our board strengthen its fundraising muscles and get started.

Reading it, I had a vision.  What if a board decided to run one of these 15-30 minute exercises at every board meeting? Wouldn’t that be a terrific statement of the value of fundraising in our lives?

Exercises range from the classic “Features and Benefits: What are we selling?” to a more specialized “Shall We Meet? Overcoming Objections By Phone.”

But what’s particularly nice is that the tone is pitched toward the board member most willing to put their toe in the water.  “Come on in,” you can sense the authors saying to them as they coax their fellow board members into fundraising activation. “We can do this together.”

There’s something so powerful about that message of “we.”