Boards can do a lot of things.

But some of the ways they can support the nonprofit aren’t always intuitive. One of those areas is communication! Your board can help you with your marketing and communications.

Here are three ways you can use your board to leverage your marketing and communications work:

1) Beginner: ask your board to like and share your posts on social media.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the easiest to overlook. This might be a basic tactic but it’s still effective. Ask your board members to engage with your nonprofit’s page on Facebook and other social media platforms.

The more they engage, the more they help to spread the word, and they also “teach” the algorithms that you have content people find popular. So ask them to retweet on Twitter, share on Facebook, and like and comment on posts everywhere.

Part of a board member’s duty is to be an advocate and an ambassador for the nonprofit. This falls into that.

2) Intermediate: mine your board for “stories”

It’s easy to forget, but your board members weren’t born fully formed as board members. 😉

Even those who have been on for years came to the organization just like any other donor. How? What made them get interested or involved? Why did they give? Why did they want to join the board?

Your board members are community volunteers! They are people who are giving their time, talent, and treasure (hopefully). Their stories might inspire others.

Consider taking time to interview your board members and use the stories you get in your fundraising communications and inspiring emails about the work your nonprofit does.

Sometimes donors can inspire people to join them as donors.

And look for commonalities too. If you discover that many of your board members first learned about your nonprofit from the same source or were inspired by the same particular thing, you might investigate that more fully. It’s possible that you hadn’t realized how important it was to introducing new folks to your nonprofit.

3) Expert: Use your board to talk to people who don’t already know and like you

One of the hardest parts of marketing and communications is the challenge of stepping outside of your bubble.

If you work at a small community theater, for example, you likely want to reach new audiences. People who haven’t engaged with you before. But if you look at your email list, it is—by default—filled with patrons, donors, and volunteers. What do other people think of you, though? And do they even think of you? What could you do to appeal to them?

Sometimes board members can help here.

Let’s say this same small theater in our example wants to bring in more parents of young kids for their education program and for family theater. But their membership is (mostly) comprised of retired folks. The nonprofit could ask their board members to identify people in their network who fit the bill—people the nonprofit doesn’t have a relationship with, but who a board member does. They could all be invited to a wine and cheese night at a board member’s house for an informal conversation about childcare, how they look for summer camps, and what the barriers are for them to consider bringing their children to a show.

What a valuable opportunity to understand the motivations and thinking of people who wouldn’t normally be in your sphere! Large nonprofits and businesses pay for expensive focus groups to do this work. But using your board, you can get similar insight without a huge cost.