Ep 193: Most Nonprofit Boards Get Fundraising All Wrong

Hard to believe, but most nonprofit boards get fundraising all wrong.  Nonprofit board members think their job is to attend meetings and second motions. It’s not. A board member’s real job is to imagine what the organization could do with unlimited resources, then find the people willing to fund that vision. Stone Payton, a board member of Wildlife Action of Georgia, (https://www.wildlifeactiongeorgia.org/) proves this by treating fundraising as an extension of genuine enthusiasm rather than a separate, dreaded chore.

Margaret and David sat down with Stone Payton to talk about board leadership. We expected a tidy conversation about governance. Instead, we got a masterclass in what happens when someone forgets they’re “supposed” to be uncomfortable asking for money.

Stone runs Business Radio X’s Cherokee studio and sits on the board of Wildlife Action of Georgia, a volunteer-run nonprofit on Lake Allatoona dedicated to conservation, education, and community outreach. He also captains the SS Freedom (https://ssfreedom.org/), a pontoon boat retrofitted to take people with mobility challenges (veterans, elderly folks, kids with disabilities) out onto the water. He talks about all of it with the kind of energy most people reserve for their favorite hobby. Which, it turns out, is exactly the problem most boards never solve.

Because here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud: enthusiasm and fundraising confidence are NOT the same skill. Stone has one in abundance. The other, he admitted, he hasn’t quite cracked. That gap, and how to close it, is what we talked about

Ask most people, and they’ll describe a meeting. Minutes. Motions. A little polite disagreement about budget line items. That’s the mechanics of a board, not its mission.

The real job of a board member is to develop and advance the organization. That’s it. That’s the whole assignment. And advancing an organization starts with a question most boards never let themselves ask: what would we do if money weren’t the constraint?

Not “what can we afford.” Not “what did we do last year.” What do we actually want?

Stone’s organization already does this instinctively, even without realizing it’s a strategy. Volunteers run their own “ministries.”  Activities like the Easter egg hunt, the homeschool program, and the Halloween Haunted Village.  They do it because they were given ownership, not just a task list. That’s the first ingredient. You cannot ask people to fund a vision no one on the board has bothered to imagine out loud.

Margaret told a story about a board she once sat on. She’s spent decades raising money professionally.  She’s the person who can ask a stranger for $25,000 without flinching. And yet that organization had her spend three hours shrink-wrapping gift baskets for a fundraising dinner instead of putting her in front of a single donor.

Let that sink in. A skilled fundraiser, benched to wrap crackers in cellophane.

This happens constantly. Boards default to bake sales and raffle baskets because they feel safe. Nobody has to make an ask. Nobody risks a “no.” But safe rarely raises real money, and it definitely doesn’t match your board members to the skills they already have.

If you run a nonprofit, here’s a decision criterion worth adopting: match the fundraising task to the person’s natural strength, not to tradition. Choose the direct-ask approach if your board member already has warm relationships and genuine conviction about the mission. Choose the event-and-basket approach only if you have nothing better.

This is where the conversation got good.

Stone can talk at length about a kid named Kyle, who uses an electric wheelchair and wanted to go fishing. That single request from one teenager is the reason the SS Freedom exists at all. Stone remembers the fishing license he bought him. He remembers the captain’s hat. That’s not marketing copy.  That’s a person who’s actually there.

But when I asked him to picture himself as the organization’s chief fundraiser, he laughed it off. “Not my superpower,” he said. Funny thing, though.  He’s spent his career in professional services sales. He already knows how to have the exact conversation fundraising requires. He just hadn’t connected the two.

So Margaret and I gave him the script, right there on the show: “Would you like to help us build a wheelchair access ramp for the boat? It’s going to run about $25,000. Would you like to be part of that?”

That’s it. That’s the whole technique. Name the vision. Name the number. Ask the question.

Nonprofits get this backward constantly. They ask, “What can we scrape together?” and then shrink the vision to match. Flip it. Decide what you want first, price it out second, and let the number guide who you approach.  Not the other way around.

Every family whose loved one has ridden the SS Freedom is a potential donor. Every guest Stone has interviewed on Business Radio X who loves the outdoors is a potential donor. Colleges figured this out generations ago.  They don’t just fundraise from former students.  They fundraise from parents and grandparents who share the institution’s beliefs. Your nonprofit almost certainly has its own version of that network. Find it before you look anywhere else.

The SS Freedom wasn’t born from a strategic plan. It came from a man who liked boats, a retiree willing to sell one at a fair price and hold the trailer over winter, and a teenager who wanted to fish. Somewhere between those three ordinary facts, a program formed that now serves veterans, people with Alzheimer’s, and families driving in from Alabama to get on the water.

That’s the pattern worth naming: mission-aligned volunteers, given real ownership, will build things no strategic plan could have predicted. Wildlife Action of Georgia doesn’t pay a single salary. Everyone from the caretaker managing the property to the guys hauling seed for food plots shows up because the work means something to them personally.

Stone put it simply: the words and actions on that 27-acre property line up with the words and actions he tries to live by everywhere else. Serve first. Serve early. Serve often. When a board member’s personal values and the organization’s mission actually overlap, fundraising stops feeling like a separate, uncomfortable ask. It starts feeling like an invitation to a party you already want people to attend.

By the end of our conversation, I put Stone on the spot and asked him to make a real appeal, live, on the show. He didn’t hesitate. He talked about expanding the SS Freedom program, buying more seed for the conservation land they manage with the Army Corps of Engineers, and training more volunteer captains to meet rising demand.

That’s what happens when you stop treating fundraising like a separate skill you either have or don’t, and start treating it like an extension of a story you already love telling.

If you serve on a nonprofit board, we encourage you to try Stone’s homework: name one thing your organization would build with no budget constraint, put a real number on it, and ask one person you already know if they’d like to be part of it. That’s the whole job. Everything else is just follow-through.

If you’re interested in Wildlife Action of GA and the SS Freedom, contact Stone@SSFreedom.org  or https://bookme.name/cherokeebrx/lite/stonephone.