July 7, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Jeanne Bell, chief executive officer of CompassPoint, a San Francisco organization that helps other nonprofits improve their management, realized during the bad economy that the conventional approach taken by boards, including her own, was all wrong.
Like the top fund raiser at Georgia Tech—I wrote about him yesterday—Ms. Bell is breaking the rules, and her solution may point the way for how nonprofits can overcome the financial challenges they are likely to face in the years ahead.
Most boards focus almost exclusively on financial accountability and oversight, she notes, and generally leave decisions about the organization’s programs to the executive director and other staff members.
The problem with that approach, Ms. Bell says, is that such financial oversight involves mostly looking backward, not forward.
Instead, she says, board members need to help their organizations figure out how to prepare for the future—and that means examining programs.
In uncertain times, it’s more important than ever to ensure that the organization’s programs and services are designed in a way that they will attract donations, fees, or other types of revenue, she says.
Ms. Bell says that she is working to help her own board examine the revenue potential of the organization’s programs. Because of the bad economy, many nonprofits could no longer afford Compasspoint’s services, so it suffered a big loss in income last year.
To reinforce the notion that leading CompassPoint involves more than financial oversight, the board’s finance committee added the word “sustainability” to its title and focus. More important, it recruited business leaders to serve on that committee, which had previously been made up solely of accountants.
“We are trying to change the culture by pushing the envelope and looking at stuff like our use of space and whether we should have staff members or contractors,” Ms. Bell says.
But bringing about such a fundamental change to the way the board operates “has not been easy,” Ms. Bell concedes. “We are right in the middle of it.”
Tomorrow I’ll share another approach of how a leader is going against conventional wisdom to cope with the bad economy.
