Building a Strong Board Is a Continual Process, Authors Assert

The Board Building Cycle: Nine Steps to Finding, Recruiting, and Engaging Nonprofit Board Members
by Sandra R. Hughes, Berit M. Lakey, and Marla J. Bobowick

One of the keys to building a strong, effective board is to treat trustee recruitment, orientation, education, and evaluation as year-round activities instead of isolated events, assert the authors of this guidebook.

“Ideally, the board should have a continuous pool of candidates at differing stages of cultivation,” the authors write, “so that when an opening occurs, or when it is time to expand the board size, the process is ready to deliver.”

The authors recommend that boards replace their nominating committees — whose responsibilities are usually limited to replacing departing board members — with what they call “governance committees,” which would oversee recruitment of new members, trustee education, and board-assessment activities.

An accompanying diskette contains worksheets that board members can use to determine the diversity of trustees’ skills and backgrounds, evaluate board performance, and collect information on prospective board members, as well as a sample agreement spelling out board members’ responsibilities. The documents are available as both Microsoft Word and generic-text files.

Ms. Hughes is chief knowledge officer and senior governance consultant for the National Center for Nonprofit Boards, and Ms. Lakey and Ms. Bobowick both serve as governance consultants at the center.

Publisher: National Center for Nonprofit Boards, Publications Department, P.O. Box 92294, Washington, D.C. 20090-2294; (202) 452-6262 or (800) 883-6262; fax (202) 452-6299; ncnb@ncnb.org; http://www.ncnb.org; 49 pages; $27 for members, $36 for nonmembers; I.S.B.N. 1-58686-002-x.