A Match Made in Cyberspace

Internet service connects charities with board members

Nancy Biberman had been chasing three men for eight months and not one of them would give her the time of day. She had heard it all — “I’m out of the country,” “I’ll get back to you,” “I just don’t have the time” — and she was tiring of the excuses.

Who knew that finding a few good board members would turn out to be such a headache?

“I felt like a teenager chasing after boys again,” says Ms. Biberman, head of the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization that provides programs for needy adults and children in the Bronx, N.Y. “Frankly, I found the whole process demeaning and demoralizing.”

So, like many other people today, Ms. Biberman decided she would try searching for her perfect match on the Internet. She discovered BoardnetUSA, a Web site that helps facilitate introductions between interested trustee candidates and nonprofit boards looking for new members. “Community partners” — nonprofit-management support organizations and regional umbrella groups — pay fees to give the charities they serve free use of the service, while employers do likewise to give their workers who are interested in volunteering for boards free access to the online matchmaker.

In January, Ms. Biberman filled out a profile on BoardnetUSA, stating her group’s mission, detailing the skills and talents she sought from new trustees, and noting her expectations for time and financial contributions. Within two weeks, she received 15 e-mailed replies from interested candidates. By March, she had sworn in five new board members.

“This was a very expeditious, efficient way of doing what I had slogged through for eight months, and we got some amazingly good matches,” says Ms. Biberman. “The fact that we can use technology to help candidates and boards find each other this way is a wonderful thing.”

BoardnetUSA is the brainchild of Brooke Mahoney, founding executive director of the Volunteer Consulting Group, a nonprofit organization that helps connect charities and potential trustees in the New York area. The group’s greater mission, however, is to help strengthen the management capability of nonprofit boards nationwide.

The Need for Trustees

Three decades of experience and several research studies have proved to Ms. Mahoney that the ability to find new trustees is a problem that reaches across the country, but her Web-based solution was years in the making.

Beginning in 1991, her group conducted a nationwide survey, with money from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Rauch Foundation, in New Jersey, and the Atlantic Philanthropies, to investigate what it perceived as a trustee shortage.

The findings laid the groundwork for what eventually became BoardnetUSA, Ms. Mahoney says. In 1993, her group, which had been helping nonprofit organizations find board members since the 1970s, decided to try to help would-be trustees find charities as well, and set up an expanded matchmaking service in the New York area, using its staff members as intermediaries. With the growing popularity of the Internet later in the decade, Ms. Mahoney says, it became possible to make the service national and more cost-efficient.

BoardnetUSA went online in early 1999, after about three and a half years of preparation. The project cost $2-million to create, and its start-up and continued operation was paid for with contributions from a number of sources, including American Express, Fidelity Investments, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Verizon. The service, which was made available first in the New York region, has only started to pick up momentum in other cities during the last eight months, Ms. Mahoney says.

3 Million Vacancies

Perhaps BoardnetUSA is growing more popular because the problem it seeks to solve persists. A study released in May by the Volunteer Consulting Group and the international management consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton confirmed that the entire nonprofit field continues to experience a shortage of trustees. About three million board seats remain unfilled each year, the study found, with 1.8 million becoming open due to normal turnover or term limits, and the rest being “standing openings,” or slots that remain perennially vacant.

The situation is fueled by the growing number of charities registered with the Internal Revenue Service — from 322,000 in 1982 to 850,000 in 2001 — all of which are required by the IRS to maintain a formal board of directors.

However, there are more than three million potential board candidates that nonprofit boards are consistently failing to reach, according to the Volunteer Consulting Group study. This pool, which the study defines as mostly up-and-coming corporate managers and nonmanagerial specialists (such as mechanics or information-technology workers), are young (under 40), skilled, and energetic, and could make ideal trustees if they were motivated to get involved.

Most have never been encouraged by their employers to consider board service, and those who are motivated to join a board can find no outlet for their services. Or, says Ms. Mahoney, they haven’t been courted by charity leaders who continuously select their trustees from their own limited circles of acquaintance.

Samantha Moore found her first board appointment through BoardnetUSA in January, and says that lack of access to such opportunities is what kept her out of the boardroom for so long. Even though she works with nonprofit groups in her job as a program officer for the Stella and Charles Guttman Foundation, in New York, she says it was considered “bad form” to ask about sitting on their boards, and didn’t know how else to convey her interest.

Persistent Perceptions

Younger people’s perception of what board members are or should be is also a deterrent, says Ms. Mahoney.

“Many people under age 40, when asked about their interest in board membership, respond with, ‘Don’t you have to be old, white, male, and rich?’” That perception persists because it contains some truth: Fully 82 percent of all board members are older than 40, with an average age of 50, and 57 percent are men, according to the survey by the Volunteer Consulting Group and Booz Allen Hamilton. Minorities constitute just 14 percent of all trustees, compared with 27 percent of the U.S. population, the study said.

Ms. Moore says she has seen that perception dissuade her friends from volunteering for board work.

“Many younger people think they are ineligible because they don’t have lots of money or contacts,” the 34-year-old says. “But what we do have is lots of energy, skill with technology, and often more time to give than busy CEO’s. I don’t think nonprofit boards always see that.”

Finding Partners

One of the first hurdles the Volunteer Consulting Group encountered in creating BoardnetUSA was figuring out how to reach potential trustees. The group had already determined that many young, underutilized leaders were sitting in office cubicles within major corporations, so that’s where it began. Ms. Mahoney and her staff approached companies, asking not only for $25,000 to $50,000 per year in philanthropic support, but more important, for access to their employees.

In June 2001, Deloitte Consulting, in New York, became one of BoardnetUSA’s first corporate supporters. To gauge initial interest, the Volunteer Consulting Group set up an informational meeting with the company’s directors and partners.

Of the 100 in attendance, 43 registered with the site, with 36 of those individuals eventually filling out personal profiles detailing their interests in board service. Since then, the company has opened access to the BoardnetUSA database to its lower-ranking employees, via Deloitte’s internal Web site.

So far, four members of Deloitte have been placed on boards through BoardnetUSA introductions, says Faith Glazier, a partner at Deloitte, and she believes it is only a matter of time before more get involved. “Before we made our presentation about BoardnetUSA a year ago, most people never even thought about board service. Now more employees are saying it’s something they are interested in,” she says. “That raised level of awareness is starting to spread to our firms in other cities as well.”

Deloitte sees benefits for itself in encouraging its employees to join nonprofit boards, Ms. Glazier says. It not only provides the firm’s “rising stars” with good leadership training for their own professional development, but it also helps the company’s bottom line, she says: “Networking outside the office is always good for business.”

Getting Charities Involved

For BoardnetUSA to work, charities must also participate in the service. To sell them on the idea, the Volunteer Consulting Group enlisted community partners in six cities: Ann Arbor, Mich., Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, and San Francisco. Each partner pays $6,000 a year for access to BoardnetUSA. In turn, they educate and promote the service to the nonprofit organizations and leadership groups in their area, and provide them with free access to the database.

Florence Green, executive director of the California Association of Nonprofits, in Los Angeles, says her organization signed up as a community partner in March after its latest membership survey found that identifying trustees was one of the most critical issues facing its members.

“People want to do quick and dirty volunteerism, where they can get in and out in a day, and we certainly need that, but getting people to give you two to six years of their life is much harder,” Ms. Green says. After a month, more than 100 nonprofit groups affiliated with Ms. Green’s organization and 45 individuals who wanted to become trustees had registered to use BoardnetUSA’s services, although she does not know whether any board placements have actually materialized yet. Still, she says, “it has definitely hit a nerve.”

Meanwhile, in Sacramento, charities have started taking advantage of the service.

Rob Ford, the board-development committee chairman for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sacramento, had been looking for ways to attract trustees with a more diverse mix of skills.

“The board had become this clump of people that knew each other very well,” says Mr. Ford, who, like many of his fellow board members, works in the insurance industry. “Fund raising was becoming a problem because we all had the same friends and professional contacts.” Since February, Mr. Ford has recruited three board members through BoardnetUSA — an accountant, a lawyer, and a public-relations consultant.

Technology Hurdles

Although she has seen several BoardnetUSA success stories like Mr. Ford’s, some charities are still hesitant to use the service, says Yolanda Torrecillas, program coordinator of the BoardLink program at the Nonprofit Resource Center, in Sacramento. BoardLink, which helps match trustees with charities, is BoardnetUSA’s community partner in that city.

“Some grass-roots organizations are less Web savvy than others,” she says. “To them, it can seem very labor intensive to fill out an in-depth survey online, even though it is really very easy.”

It seems that this may be a problem in other markets as well. So far, while 3,700 nonprofit organizations are registered on BoardnetUSA in the seven participating cities, just 709 of those have gone so far as to fill out their profiles and begin actively recruiting through the site.

“I think it is just lack of knowledge and familiarity,” says Ms. Torrecillas. “They just need to take the mystery out of it. Go online and check it out.”

The Volunteer Consulting Group has not kept track of how many board members have been successfully placed through the facilitation of BoardnetUSA nationally, but Ms. Mahoney says she is working on creating such a reporting system. She does know that in New York, there have been 12 matches made over the past year. Ms. Torrecillas reports 15 matches in the Sacramento area since October.

High Expectations

The numbers may not be high, but they are growing. Jodi Abbinanti, marketing and corporate relations director at the Volunteer Consulting Group, has no doubt that as word of mouth about the success stories spreads, the wariness will fade.

“Traditionally, courting a board has been sort of a behind-closed-doors process. Now that we’ve put it out there, people are a little nervous about trying something new,” she says. “But as more of them realize how easily this system allows them to network outside their traditional circle and find new prospects, they will come around.”

Ms. Biberman of the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, insists that the traditional means for cultivating board members just don’t mix with today’s world.

“Everyone is very busy,” she says. “It’s why so many people now use computer dating. They want to cut to the chase. Those folks have decided, ‘I’m looking for a mate,’ and have put themselves out there. At BoardnetUSA, it’s the same thing. These individuals have already decided, ‘I want to sit on a nonprofit board.’”

And that, she says, is the biggest hurdle to overcome. “There is so much else that is very complicated in finding a right match: ‘Are we right for each other?,’ ‘Do you have the skills and talents that we need?,’ ‘Does your time availability mesh with our demands?’ So, my goodness, let’s get over this commitment thing.”