When I was an early-career fundraiser working down south, I was hired as the Director of Development for a small theater company, and, honestly, I was a bit over my skis. But I have always been a quick learner. I built an individual-giving program, oversaw foundation support, managed government grants, and built a donor database in my copious free time. I was putting the pieces together for a strong development program. Additionally, I was supposed to work with the board.
The theater’s founder was still running the show, and the board reflected that. This was a founders’ board. It had 18 members, about 7 of whom were founding board members, including the founder’s partner and several people he had brought from his former organization. The nominating committee, composed of the two board members closest to the founder, recruited only people like themselves. That would have been fine if the nominating committee members had been strong, independent, financially literate board members. They were not. Several of them were far more interested in showing up on a Saturday to instruct the cleaning staff. You probably know the type.
Conflicts of interest ran rampant. The building’s owner served on the board. Actors seeking to be cast also served on the board. The development committee had been run for years by the same two people who chaired the nominating committee. They had decided they were finished with the work and had said so loudly, yet my phone rang every week from one or both of them, expecting me to defend every decision I made without their specific input.
The founder was a man of a certain age with a couple of health issues, none of which would have been a problem if he hadn’t also had a raging temper: the kind that came out of nowhere and was incredibly volatile. I began to dread our weekly meetings, so I bought a micro-recorder and started documenting them, in case he turned on me and wanted me out or complained to the board chair first.
The board chair was a well-meaning woman with a business background who seemed to understand the problems on the board but was unwilling to invest the time or energy to fix them. We were also operating in a conservative, not especially diverse community. Raising money for an arts organization means supporting an ethical and artistic vision, one that ideally connects with its community while still pushing it. I am not suggesting you pander to your audience, but you do need to get them into the theater. This founder was all about pushing buttons, and the seasons he programmed would have been a comfortable fit in a larger, more progressive city. The plays didn’t sit well with many patrons and donors. We received complaints and lost donors over it, in numbers I could measure show over show.
Eventually, I went directly to the board chair and told her I had documentation of the founder’s behavior. She was unfazed. She said the board already knew because the founder had complained about me first, even though I had never once lost my temper in those meetings. I had proof. He had brought a story. The board leaned toward his story.
That was the whole problem, in miniature. The board failed to step in and govern the organization. It ran on personality rather than structure, and some of the original members, who were more experienced than the founder in every practical sense, stood by him anyway, like Lot’s wife looking back at the city as it burned, until they too turned to salt.
A board has a real responsibility not only to protect an organization’s vision and mission but also to ensure the organization is well-run and financially secure. This one did neither. It was a perfect storm of founder ego, board acquiescence, and everyone seemingly in denial. I was too new to fundraising leadership to fully understand what I was experiencing, but I knew it wasn’t helping the organization.
What I took from that job wasn’t just a bad experience. It was a checklist. I learned to ask, before taking a full-time or consulting assignment, who sits on the board and on the nominating committee, and who they have recruited in the last three years. I learned to try to determine whether the board chair has ever overruled leadership or whether the organization was running on autopilot. I learned to ask what happens when a staff member raises a concern: does it go to a board committee, the full board, or does it die in a leader’s inbox? Those questions would have told me everything I needed to know about that theater before I ever took the job.
About two years into the job, I arrived at work to find a letter taped to my office door. It was my layoff notice. The founder had left it on his way out of town for an extended vacation. That says it all.