Greater involvement by nonprofit groups in advocacy and lobbying work will require support from organizations’ boards of directors, according to nonprofit leaders in a new report.

Participants in a “roundtable” held by the Johns Hopkins Listening Post Project “broadly agreed that they often saw board reluctance to get involved in advocacy,” the report said.

“Board members may be reluctant to engage in advocacy efforts because of perceived conflicts of interest, a misunderstanding of the laws and regulations governing advocacy involvement of nonprofits, political pressures and inclinations, or a desire not to alienate funders,” said the report.

Peter Goldberg, chief executive of the Alliance for Children and Families, in Milwaukee, and chair of the Listening Post Steering Committee, told participants that the composition of boards has dramatically changed in the past 15 years.

“There is much more business involvement in order to go after private and corporate funding, and now it’s causing some potentially serious dilemmas on the advocacy front,” Mr. Goldberg said, “because the agencies may want to take advocacy positions with respect to the role of government and government funding that can oftentimes be at variance with the generally held positions of the business community that their board members represent.”

To respond to this situation, charities must educate boards about the link between advocacy and the organizations’ “mission success,” the report said. “As one participant put it, ‘There is just such a disconnect … because the board is part of the organization, and for that organization to rise, they have to have board and staff and client and community all moving in the same direction,’” said the report.

Because of their position and stature, board members can be a vital resource for gaining access to policy makers and developing relationships with them, the report noted.

However, because only a small percentage of nonprofit groups actually engage board members in advocacy efforts, “it may not be enough to educate board members on the synergy between mission, service delivery, and advocacy,” the report said, and “the culture of the board must be made to embrace the function as well.”

Mary Hollie, chief executive of Lawrence Hall Youth Services, in Chicago, told participants that one way to do this might be to include more public-policy specialists and people with experience in legislation or advocacy on the board, the report said.

The roundtable was the second to be held to follow up on a survey taken by the Listening Post Project in 2007 that, the report said, “found that, while nonprofits are widely engaged in efforts to influence public policies affecting them and those they serve, they are often constrained in their advocacy efforts by a lack of adequate resources, including tight budgets and limited staff time and expertise.”

This second roundtable focused on identifying a variety of ways nonprofits can “utilize existing resources to better engage in advocacy efforts.”

The Listening Post Project is a joint effort of the Center for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies in cooperation with other organizations.