Great Boards for Small Groups: A 1-Hour Guide to Governing a Growing Nonprofit

Propel Your Board from Good to Great! Yours is a good board, but you want it to be better.• You want clearly defined objectives … • Meetings with more focus … • Broader participation in fundraising … • And more follow-through between meetings.You want these and a dozen other tangibles and intangibles that will propel your board from good to great.Say hello to your guide, Andy Robinson, who has a real knack for offering "forehead-slapping" solutions – "Of course! Why haven't we been doing this?" Take what he calls the "Fundraising Menu." Here, board members are asked to generate a list of all the ways (direct and indirect) they could assist in fundraising. The list is prioritized and then used to help each trustee prepare a personalized fundraising agreement that meets his or her specific needs, interests, and limitations.Simple, right? Yet the Fundraising Menu is the closest thing you'll find to guaranteeing a board's commitment to raising money.In a number of "How to Fix It" chapters, Robinson also homes in on specific problems, such as poorly attended meetings, spotty follow-through on commitments, inactive board members, narrow consensus, conflicts of interest, weak agendas, and much more. And Robinson doesn’t offer up easy nostrums. Quite the opposite. Over the past 20 years, as a board member, a volunteer, and a consultant, he’s put into practice what he preaches and stands unshakably behind his fog-burning advice.

Andy Robinson is most recently author of Big Gifts for Small Groups: A Board Member’s 1-Hour Guide of Securing Gifts of $500 to $5,000, published by Emerson & Church. Robinson has been raising money for social change since 1980. As a trainer and consultant, he has assisted nonprofits in 40 states and Canada, leading workshops on fundraising, grantseeking, board develoment, strategic planning, marketing, leadership development, and earned income strategies.