Board give-and-get policies are almost always problematic. Not the concept. The concept is sound. Every organization ought to have a standard level of personal giving and fundraising for which each board member is responsible. The trouble starts after the policy passes.
I have been the chief development officer, caught between a rock and a hard place, on this more times than I care to count. The board approves a board “give/get” goal, then ignores it. I am left carrying a number I cannot reach without them, and the CEO, the board chair, and the development committee chair all want very little to do with asking their fellow board members or backing me up when I do. So what do you do? I try to schedule lunches to explain the situation. I push the board chair to reach out; I send letters and emails, with permission, under the Development Chair’s name. Like so many of my colleagues, I do everything within our power to get the full board to give. To give something.
For years, I treated that as a fundraising problem. It is not. It is a financial stewardship failure, and it is the same failure that allows a board to approve a budget based on money that has not yet been raised, or that has never been raised at that level.
Here is the bullet from my September 2025 post, “What Your Nonprofit Board Is Actually Legally Required To Do”: Financial stewardship: directors are stewards of the funds, not spectators. Reviewing financial statements is not optional; it’s part of the job.
I want to make the case for the half of that sentence almost nobody makes. Directors are stewards of the funds, not just the funds sitting in the account. The funds. That includes the money the organization has told the world it plans to raise.
When a board approves a budget, everyone in the room takes the expense side seriously. Salaries, rent, the new program, and the insurance line that went up again. People ask questions. Someone always wants to know why.
Nobody treats the revenue side that way. Revenue is discussed as a forecast, the way you would discuss the weather. Staff produces it; staff will deliver it, and the board’s job is to hope. When the board does get involved, it is usually defensive. Staff proposes a number they know they can raise; the CEO and the board read that as sandbagging, and the goal gets pushed higher on the strength of a hunch.
Look at what the vote actually does. Suppose you approve two million dollars in spending against two million in projected revenue, and four hundred thousand of that revenue is a figure the development office was handed rather than one anyone has secured. You have just authorized spending against money that does not exist. That is not a forecast. That is a decision, and the people who made it are the directors. The duty of care asks whether they made it on an informed basis. “Development agreed they could hit the stretch amount” is not an informed basis. It is a handoff.
Most boards see one revenue number, and that is the root of the problem. A board that wants to steward revenue asks four questions about the number rather than accepting it at face value. How much of this do we already have, in cash, with no strings attached? How much has someone signed for in a pledge, grant agreement, or contract? How much is sitting in front of a real person right now, with a real amount and a real date attached, not just a name on a prospect list? And how much of it is hope?
That fourth number is the one that matters, and a single line on a budget is meant to hide it. Every organization has a gap. The sin is not having one. The sin is burying it where no one in the room can see it. The first time a board hears revenue broken out that way, the room goes quiet. That silence is the board doing its job.
A few things hide within that single number, and they are worth naming out loud.
Multi-year pledges are not cash. A five-year pledge is a five-year relationship with a donor, and relationships change. A business reversal, a divorce, a death, or a falling out with the chief executive can end that relationship. Even though a written pledge can be legally enforceable, I have seen very few cases in which anyone takes legal action against a donor who reneges. And remember what finance did with that pledge. It counted the entire gift as revenue in the year the pledge was made. So the statement shows a strong year, while the cash arrives over five years. The board reads a surplus that is not in the bank. If your budget treats year three as money already in hand, the board should know that is what it is doing.
Restricted funds are not yours. The most dangerous figure on a nonprofit balance sheet is a healthy cash balance that is legally spoken for. Donors impose restrictions on gifts, and those restrictions are enforceable. Spending restricted funds on operations because they happened to be sitting there is not a bookkeeping question. It is a real exposure, and it is the board’s exposure, not the finance department’s.
And a board cannot approve growth while starving the engine that produces it. I have sat in meetings where the board raised the fundraising goal and cut the fundraising budget in the same session. Nobody in that room thought they were being contradictory. They were treating revenue as effort rather than as investment.
So here is a test, in the same spirit as asking when a board last told the chief executive no. Pick any director at random. Without looking anything up, can that person roughly estimate how much cash the organization has, how many months of operating expenses that represents, and what portion of this year’s revenue is actually secured?
If the answer is no, that board is reviewing financial statements, not stewarding funds. These are two distinct activities, and only one is the job.
Which brings me back to the board’s own personal giving and getting. The board approved a revenue number. Part of that number is them.