One of the many challenges facing non-profit agencies is building an active board that works as a partner. The first challenge is recruiting the right board members, and the second is creating clear roles and responsibilities for board and staff.
We welcome your thoughts, suggestions, and experiences to help us continue to build a resource for your colleagues. Please feel free to email me at: Alan@KriegerSolutions.com and we’ll share any suggestions we receive back with our non-profit network. If you’d like to be anonymous, let us know and we’ll do that.
Strategy
Being an active board member is a major commitment. It’s much more difficult to get someone to commit to joining a board of an organization with which they are not already somewhat engaged. Therefore, your first goal is to engage community members with an eye toward future board membership. Your goal is to build a pool of qualified prospects who want to support your organization. From this pool you can more easily recruit members of your board.
The first step in this process is creating small steps – ways people can engage with your organization without making a significant initial commitment of time or money. Some possibilities include:
- Volunteering for an event or a limited service
- Participating in an advocacy or public education campaign
- Providing advice in an area where they have expertise
- Making a small donation
After they have been engaged for a while, a next step would be to ask them to serve on a board committee. Most by-laws allow for non-board members to serve on committees as long as the committee is chaired by a board member. After a year on a committee, they may be ready to make the larger commitment of becoming a board member.
The advantage of this process is that you get to know the person fairly well before you invite them onto the board, and they get to know your agency well. When they do join, they’ll come on as a knowledgeable board member. You are looking for someone who follows through with their commitments, shares your vision and values, and brings a set of useful skills and/or a significant amount of time or money. Ideally, board members should bring time, treasure and talent to the agency they serve.
Our next post looks at where you find these prospects.
We welcome your thoughts, questions and comments, email me at: Alan@KriegerSolutions.com