March 21, 2002 | Read Time: 1 minute
Board Recruitment & Orientation: A Step-by-Step, Common Sense Guide
by Hildy Gottlieb
Nonprofit board members often complain that meetings are boring and too long, that their board micromanages, and that one person usually dominates discussion in board meetings, writes Hildy Gottlieb, co-founder of Help 4 NonProfits and Tribes, a consulting company in Tucson. A strong recruitment and orientation program, she says, can help alleviate these recurring problems and is key to creating a more functional and effective board.
Board Recruitment & Orientation: A Step-by-Step, Common Sense Guide shows boards how to recruit and train new members by breaking the process down into five steps: establishing qualifications, creating written descriptions of the duties of a board member, identifying prospective trustees, creating an application and screening applicants, and preparing the new board member to govern.
The book includes worksheets, tips, and information in a basic, straightforward format. In a chapter on defining what characteristics board members must have, Ms. Gottlieb suggests that nonprofit managers ask themselves: “If our organization was 100 percent funded and money were no option, what would we look for in a board member?” Following chapters suggest how to develop criteria on what would be “nice” in a board, as well as what wouldn’t be acceptable “in a million years.”
Publisher: Renaissance Press, P.O. Box 13121, Tucson, Ariz. 85732; 125 pages; $17.95; I.S.B.N. 0-9714482-4-8.
