A Directory Aids Michigan’s Charities in Diversifying Their Boards – but a Lack of Visibility Hampers Its Effectiveness

BRAINSTORMS

By Rebecca Gardyn

About six years ago, Margaret Talburtt and Mary Kramer realized that they were both concerned about the same trend: While American women were increasingly moving into powerful jobs, relatively few of them were also moving into boardrooms of the nation’s large nonprofit organizations and publicly traded corporations.

Ms. Talburtt, head of the Michigan Women’s Foundation, in Livona, and Ms. Kramer, editor of Crain’s Detroit Business, decided that together they were going to try to do something about the dearth of female trustees. Their solution: Creating the Michigan Women’s Directory, a database of female professionals, primarily in the southeast Michigan area, with interest in for-profit and nonprofit board service. The database is managed by a third partner, Kathleen Sinclair, who leads Executive Recruiters International, a headhunting company in Detroit. Since its inception, Ms. Sinclair has used the directory to help match 15 women to nonprofit boards and 14 to corporate boards — although, the list’s creators say, a lack of visibility has hampered attempts to make the most of the resource.

Women in Michigan do serve as trustees, says Ms. Talburtt, but their involvement has been concentrated largely on the boards of grass-roots organizations and small community groups. But the boards of larger charities, such as those of symphonies and museums, were still short of female trustees in 1997. (The current situation nationally reflects that of Michigan: BoardSource, in Washington, reports that 43 percent of nonprofit trustees are women, and that they tend to serve on the boards of smaller organizations, and those whose mission is human-services, health, arts and culture, and the environment.)

One of the biggest reasons for the relative absence of female trustees in Michigan and elsewhere is that the male trustees and executives simply do not rub elbows with many qualified women, says Ms. Kramer, who has been at Crain’s since 1989. She says that beginning in the early 1990s, she began receiving an increasing number of calls from local, usually male, executives at both large foundations and publicly traded companies asking for help in finding qualified women for various positions, especially board slots.

“Traditionally, tapping people for these kinds of boards is done through networking, but these guys did not know many women,” she says. “The idea of creating a directory of very highly qualified women with track records in a variety of areas seemed like a perfect way to help these guys see that such women do exist.”

‘Influential Women’

As the directory was being developed, Ms. Kramer had also begun to identify nominees for a special issue of Crain’s to be titled “Detroit’s 100 Most Influential Women.” She quickly realized that the women she was seeking to honor in the magazine and the women who should be included in the Michigan Women’s Directory were one and the same, so she combined the two efforts.

To find candidates, letters asking for nominations were sent to chief executive officers of publicly traded companies in the Detroit area. Female executives in a range of industries were also sent letters encouraging them to nominate themselves or others who might make good trustees. Nominees then filled out an extensive application, listing their skills, interests, and board-service experience.

Candidates were also asked to identify key industry leaders as references, which Ms. Kramer believes was necessary for the directory to be successful. “Because many executives aren’t used to offering board seats to people they don’t know personally, references are key,” she says. “If someone looking to fill a board seat sees that the CEO of so-and-so bank is a reference, it provides a level of comfort. He can then call and confidentially find out if this woman is a good fit.”

After a few months, 300 nominations poured in, and while only a third of them made the cut for Crain’s “Most Influential,” all were entered into the Michigan Women’s Directory for free (although those who have subsequently asked to be included in the roster, or have been recruited for it, have paid $50 to be listed). The special issue of Crain’s hit newsstands in April 1997 and plugged the new directory, and it wasn’t long before Ms. Sinclair began receiving calls from interested businesses and charities, which each paid a sliding-scale fee to use the service. By the end of the year, she had placed eight women on corporate boards and 10 on nonprofit boards.

Diminishing Returns

Laura Stern was one of those first nonprofit trustees. She had heard about the directory through Ms. Kramer, whom she had worked with briefly at Crain’s. At the time, Ms. Stern was working in fund raising for Detroit Public Television and had never served as a board member. “It always seemed to me that you really had to know someone already on a board to get in,” she says. “So this was a great opportunity to get involved without having to go out and actively solicit my interest.”

Within a few months of being listed in the directory, she received two board appointments, one for a for-profit printing company and the other for the western regional board for the Karmanos Cancer Institute, a nonprofit research center in Detroit. She served on both boards until 1999. Today, as executive director of the University Cancer Foundation, which raises funds for the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, Ms. Stern says that she will consider using the directory to help find qualified candidates for her own board of directors.

Even some of the women in the database, however, are not fully aware of its availability as a resource — Ms. Stern, for instance, claimed she did not know the directory still existed until she was interviewed for this article. The directory’s lack of visibility in the wake of its splashy debut has resulted in diminishing returns over time. In the past five years, only six additional corporate and five nonprofit board appointments have been made with the directory’s help. “The first year it was a big deal because it was the first time anything like this had been done, and the fact that it was in Crain’s got companies and nonprofits to start looking at their boards and saying, ‘Maybe we should do something here,’” says Ms. Sinclair. “But since it has been out of the media spotlight, it has been somewhat forgotten about.” Crain’s did run another “100 Most Influential Women” special issue in 2002, which added an additional 100 names to the directory (the total now hovers around 500), but it still did not spark the same kind of attention as the first time around.

Spreading the Word

The biggest problem faced by the Michigan Women’s Directory today is, in a word, marketing, Ms. Talburtt acknowleges. There is very little money to support any type of advertising campaign. The database’s creation was paid for with $12,000 from individual donors and grants from the Whirlpool Foundation, in Benton Harbor, Mich., and the McKinley Foundation, in Ann Arbor, but no additional money has been allotted to the project. The only funding now comes from the relatively few businesses and charities that have used the service and paid the search fee, which ranges from $15,000 for for-profit entities with $50-million or more in assets to $2,500 for the smallest nonprofit groups — although, Ms. Sinclair says, the fee is negotiable, and a portion of the proceeds is donated to Michigan Women’s Foundation grantees. As a result, there is little money for marketing the directory, other than for a one-page brochure that is occasionally distributed at conferences and other events.

But even if there were a larger marketing budget available, traditional advertising may not be the right way to go about spreading the word. “Marketing a resource like this needs to be very carefully done,” says Terry Barclay, president of the Women’s Economic Club, a business network for women in Detroit that became a partner in the Michigan Women’s Directory last year. Traditionally, she says, board recruitment is done via word-of-mouth. “If you take a more conventional marketing approach,” she says, “you might make people aware of the resource, but you also run the risk of demonstrating your outsider status.”

The economic club, with its 1,400 members representing a cross section of local professional women, is a prime place to spread the word. The group has recently started to play host to educational seminars for women who are interested in board service, and has touted the directory as a resource. Ms. Kramer is also hoping to set up an advisory committee comprising top male business leaders, who could then help promote the directory informally among their peers.

Yet despite its current obscurity, those who have managed to find the Michigan Women’s Directory have nothing but good things to say about it. Francine Parker, chief operating officer of Health Alliance Plan of Michigan, a large nonprofit health-maintenance organization in Detroit, used the directory in December to recruit Catherine Roberts, head of the Research Federal Credit Union, Warren, Mich., for her board of directors. “It was a real time saver for me,” says Ms. Parker. “The list of local, professional, capable, accomplished women was quite comprehensive, and I felt secure knowing that the women listed in the directory were prescreened and qualified.”

Ms. Roberts, who attended her first board meeting in February, says it is a shame that more people aren’t aware of this resource. “I would bet there are many very qualified women in Michigan who don’t know about the directory or how they can benefit from the opportunities of board leadership,” she says. “I’m also sure that there are corporations and nonprofits out there right now looking to add diversity to their boards who are unaware that there is a gold mine of talent just sitting here waiting for them.”

Has your organization had difficulty finding female trustees? Tell us your strategies for recruiting them in the Volunteerism online forum.