A few years ago, while I was Nonprofit Strategies Manager at the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, I recorded a four-minute video for the Foundation’s Nonprofit Toolkit on how to turn board members into your biggest advocates. The blog post that went with it is still up, and it still gets passed around.
I stand behind every word of it. But I’ve spent the years since sitting on the other side of the table, as a consultant inside organizations that are trying to get their boards to show up. And I’ve come to believe the advice was right and incomplete. It told you how to engage a board. It didn’t tell you what you were engaging them in.
That’s what this post is about.
What the Five Tips Assumed
The original post laid out five practices: engage board members in your mission, recruit from diverse backgrounds, use orientation to build advocates, prepare members to make fundraising asks, and stay connected to former members. All five are sound. All five also rest on an assumption I didn’t state out loud: that the board already has something real to advocate for, and knows it.
That assumption fails more often than we admit. I’ve watched organizations do everything on that list, run a thoughtful orientation, hand out a clean dashboard, rehearse the ask, and still end up with a board that nods through meetings and goes quiet when it’s time to open their networks.
The problem usually isn’t the people. It’s that the board has been asked to approve things rather than hold them. In my last post, I argued that stewardship is custody, not courtesy: a board doesn’t own the mission, it holds it in trust, and every governance decision either protects that trust or quietly erodes it. Board engagement is the same question, seen from the other side. People engage with what they’re actually responsible for. A board that has never been asked to protect anything has no reason to fight for anything.
The Five Tips, Revisited
Here’s how I’d sharpen each one now.
1. Engage them in the mission, then give them decisions about it. I said then that board members need to believe in your mission, and that joining a board is a public commitment to help it thrive. Still true. But belief without responsibility turns into cheerleading. Bring your board real tradeoffs: the grant that would fund a program but pull it off-mission, the partnership that comes with strings, the year you need to say no to an opportunity because the team can’t do it well. A board that has made a hard call together will defend it in public. A board that has only voted on consent agendas will defend nothing.
2. Recruit for different perspectives, and then let them change things. The original post said diversity, equity, and inclusion has to be embraced by staff before you bring on diverse board leadership. I’d keep that and add a harder truth: new members from outside your usual networks will notice what longtime members stopped seeing. That’s the point of recruiting them. If their questions get absorbed into “how we’ve always done it,” you haven’t diversified your board. You’ve just added names to it.
3. Use orientation to hand over custody, not just information. I recommended preparing a dashboard so updates are easy to read. I’d still build one, but a dashboard only shows what you choose to put on it. Show the board what you declined as well as what you won. Show the funding you walked away from, the opportunities you deferred, the pace you’re protecting so proposals stay competitive. That’s the information that tells a new member what the organization is actually guarding, and what they’re now responsible for guarding too.
4. Prepare them to ask by preparing them to explain. I’m still a firm believer that fundraising is a major responsibility of board service. What I’ve learned since is that the best askers aren’t the most polished. They’re the ones who can tell a donor why the organization made a hard choice. A board member who understands why you turned something down will describe your independence very differently than one who has only been handed talking points. Donors can hear the difference.
5. Keep former members close because they carry the memory. Former board members know your organization and can open doors, which is why I recommended staying in touch. They also hold something your current board may not: the memory of the decisions that shaped who you are. When the next hard call comes, the people who made the last one are often your best counsel.
Engagement Follows Custody
When boards disengage, we tend to treat it as a recruitment problem or a training problem. Find better people. Run a better retreat. Sometimes that’s the answer. More often, the board is reflecting back exactly what it’s been given: a role that asks for attendance and approval but never asks for judgment.
An engaged board isn’t one that shows up. It’s one that holds something, knows what it’s holding, and has been trusted to protect it. Give your board that, and the five tips start working on their own. The advocacy, the asks, the open networks, the former members who keep making introductions years later: all of it follows from a board that understands it is the steward of something worth keeping.
Your board will fight for what it’s responsible for. Make sure they know what that is.
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