Building Better Charity Boards

In search of savvy trustees? Volunteer Consulting Group matches civic-minded people with groups that need their help

Kenneth A. Hamilton, an executive vice-president at Barclays Bank here, knew he wanted to join a non-profit board, but he had no idea how to find a group on his own.

Mr. Hamilton, who oversees technology for the company’s North American banks, says he missed the hands-on work he was forced to give up by becoming a manager, and he hoped that a non-profit post would give him the chance to do that kind of work again. A colleague introduced him to the Volunteer Consulting Group, a non-profit organization that is making a name for itself as a yenta of sorts for prospective trustees and the groups that need them. They found him the perfect match: the Nassau County Chapter of the American Red Cross, which wanted someone to help upgrade its technological capabilities.

“I didn’t know where to start,” Mr. Hamilton says. “I had no knowledge of this before. As a matter of fact, I had no knowledge of what the Red Cross was doing in Nassau County.”

Since last January, the consulting group’s Board Marketplace Program has been working to encourage more people to consider taking up trusteeship-and then linking them with non-profits.

The effort is largely the result of a $650,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The money helped the group come up with ways that it could share its expertise in recruiting board members.

“We began to understand that communities could process leadership better if there was some sort of a formal facilitator around,” says Brooke W. Mahoney, the group’s executive director.

Choosing Members Based on Skills

It is her view — and increasingly that of foundation and charity officials — that non-profits would be much more effective if they chose board members with skills their organizations need. Too many groups, they say, don’t consider what types of people would be most valuable to them.

Recent controversies over the management of groups like United Way of America and Covenant House have heightened concern about how carefully trustees have been watching over their organizations. In both of those cases, strong chief executives were accused of financial misdealings that went unnoticed by board members.

Evelyn Benjamin, director of public affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation, says board members are now expected to be more rigorous in scrutinizing their organizations. “It means you’re going to have to spend a lot of time and use your instincts once you step on one of these boards,” she says. “It isn’t just a place to put your name and pick up a nice retainer and fly around the country every so often and meet with your buddies.”

Concern about the quality of board members prompted the Luce Foundation to give the consulting group $80,000 for its board program.

The best board members are often people who never thought of themselves as trustees and who would never have been considered for the post by non-profit leaders, Ms. Mahoney says. Something, she asserts, needs to be done to connect such people with charities.

“The challenges that face all of our board rooms are very multifaceted and require a breadth of brains and talent in order to bring the best experience and the best knowledge toward their resolution,” she says. “We have to have in our board rooms that breadth of knowledge and experience that our communities have if we’re going to have what we need.”

But identifying well-qualified board members is often difficult. “It’s not easy to find people,” says Todd Haimes, producing director of Broadway’s non-profit Roundabout Theatre Company. “You know that they’re out there. You know there are people who are going to be interested in your organization and care about what you do, but it’s very hard to isolate those people and find out which of them might be interested in joining a board of directors.”

One big reason so many boards have trouble getting talented trustees is that they tend to ignore members of minority groups, particularly blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, Asians, and Pacific Islanders, contends Ms. Mahoney.

Through the Board Marketplace Program, the Volunteer Consulting Group hopes to make people across the country more aware of the role they can play as non-profit trustees. On the flip side, it plans to give non-profit leaders a more sophisticated understanding of how to attract the right board members and get the most out of them.

“We are hoping to redefine what directorship and what trusteeship mean, and who’s there, and how they get there, and what their job description is,” says Ms. Mahoney, who has led the consulting group since it was created in 1969 by the Harvard Business School Club of New York. The group, which has devoted much of its attention to helping non-profits strengthen their boards, is now independent.

Some examples of the matches it has made:

• A man who works in finance was placed on the board of a non-profit recycling center that has been having cash-flow problems.
• A marketer of new financial products was given a place on the board of a theater group that was badly in need of new sources of money.
• A direct-mail specialist at a major advertising agency was paired with a charity whose board needed help designing a new solicitation.
• A woman who wanted a chance to use her French as a trustee will be placed with a Haitian social-service organization.

The Volunteer Consulting Group is testing the concept of the Board Marketplace Program in the New York metropolitan area, including parts of Connecticut and New Jersey. In addition to Ms. Mahoney, Rhoda Barr, VCG’s director of client services; David M. LaGreca, the group’s program director; and Pamela N. Stark, its deputy director, serve as the staff for the project.

With a second grant from Kellogg for $98,900 and additional money raised locally, feasibility studies for more test sites have been or are being conducted by community foundations, United Ways, local charities, board members, and business leaders in Atlanta, Cleveland, Palm Beach County, Fla., Santa Clara County, Cal., and Traverse City, Mich. The Volunteer Consulting Group is advising and helping to coordinate those projects.

Many Other Efforts

The Kellogg money is also underwriting an invitation-only conference next spring for people who have been involved with the project. And the grant is supporting research on the types of board recruitment and placement programs that already exist.

Ms. Stark began that research last summer with a mailing of 5,234 postcards asking non-profits whether they were doing anything to link potential trustees with boards in their communities. Almost 65 per cent of the 883 respondents said they were doing something.

Some United Ways and non-profit leadership programs have data banks with names of potential board members, and some technical-assistance groups and universities provide training for trustees and other types of help. No group seems to have as comprehensive a service as the Board Marketplace Program, she says.

But VCG has no intention of operating a national matchmaking service, preferring to limit its own board-placement program to the three-state New York City area. “We can share structure, we can share experience, we can share learning, we can share consulting practices,” says Ms. Stark. “We cannot go into another community and place people on boards, and we have no desire to do that. Mc- with golden arches is not our goal.”

3-Year Test Program

The test program here is currently operating on an estimated three-year, $780,000 budget that is being paid for by a small group of foundations and corporations. That money — some of which has yet to be raised — is intended to support the program through August 31, 1994.

But the group hopes to make its New York pilot program a permanent fixture on the philanthropic scene here and plans to start charging fees so that the program will eventually be able to support itself.

At least until the test period is over, however, anyone interested in serving on a non-profit board can get free help from the Tri-State Board Marketplace Program.

The placement process begins with an eight-page questionnaire asking individuals interested in trusteeship to describe their work experiences, skills, and the kinds of organizations that interest them.

After the questionnaire is completed — and it is detailed enough to turn away all but the most committed people — a VCG staff member meets with the client to better define his or her interests.

That meeting is followed by a two-hour seminar that gives prospective trustees information they may need to help ease the transition onto a board and deals with concerns they may have. They are briefed on the differences between for-profits and non-profits and what they should say when they are interviewed for a board seat. They are also asked to consider whether they would be willing to make a financial contribution to a group that requires all its board members to give a certain amount.

A prospective director, says Mr. LaGreca, may have to consider: “Are you willing to be the first banker on a board of all dancers?” Someone who lives on the Upper East Side, he adds, may be asked: “Will you go 30 blocks north into East Harlem if there is an organization that needs you?”

After the seminar, the consulting group starts looking for the perfect match for each participant — a process that involves long hours of brainstorming among staff members and with the non-profit colleagues they have amassed.

After a placement is made, the new trustees are encouraged to keep in touch with VCG and to turn to its staff when they need advice and support. To keep them thinking about how they can improve their contribution as trustees, the group is considering holding continuing-education events for them.

Plans to Use Computers

By early summer, much of the matchmaking process will be done on computer. People looking to join boards will be able to key in their skills, expertise, and the types of groups they are interested in, and non-profit officials will be able to describe their needs. In a matter of seconds, the computer will spit out a list of names.

The consulting group currently has a data base of 106 potential trustees and 126 non-profits in need of new directors. Data on an additional 275 non-profits is currently being processed.

Of the people VCG works with, 84 per cent have never served on a board. Most are mid-level and senior corporate executives.

So far, the group has helped link 34 people with 32 boards. Twenty-seven prospective trustees are in the final stages of the placement process; 41 more are just beginning.

The Board Marketplace Program gets high marks from the organizations that have sought out its services. It is especially helpful, they say, in screening out candidates who would not be appropriate and in teaching people how to be effective board members.

Janice H. McGuire, executive director of the Hudson Guild, a social-service organization that works in the Chelsea neighborhood here, says the Board Marketplace Program has made finding trustees much less awkward. “Very often,” she says, “even the person coming on really doesn’t understand what it is you do or they’re too afraid to get too involved because they think they are getting immersed in something before they understand it.”

Ms. McGuire adds: “The whole orientation process-helping people understand what it means to be a board member, all the basics-they’re basically doing for us.”

The Hudson Guild, she says, was having a hard time finding people who could add new skills and ethnic diversity to its board; VCG came through with a list of well-qualified candidates.

To bring prospective trustees into the program and to get more non-profits to participate, VCG has established a system of what it calls “bridges.” The “bridges in” try to encourage individuals to become board members and refer the interested ones to VCG, and the “bridges out” help VCG staff members locate groups that would make a good fit with the trustee candidate. Altogether, more than 100 corporate executives, educators, and foundation and charity officials are involved in this aspect of the program.

“We are piggybacking on people’s trust to get over the ‘you only know who you know’ and ‘you only work with people you work with’ ” syndrome, says Mr. LaGreca.

Reaching Minority Trustees

Bridget-Anne Hampden, a black vice-president at Chemical Bank, helps the organization get in touch with potential minority-group trustees. As president of the Urban Bankers Coalition, a group of minority financial-services professionals here, Ms. Hampden frequently meets people who could provide boards with badly needed skills-as well as with greater ethnic and racial diversity.

She has referred four people to VCG so far, two of whom have been placed on boards. None of those people, she says, would have been likely to seek out a trusteeship if it weren’t for her intervention. “People are so caught up with the everyday pressures of their job responsibilities that they don’t necessarily see how they can do it,” she says. “Also, I’m not sure that, on the other hand, the opportunities are communicated as well as they should be.”

Once non-profits have persuaded people that trusteeship is valuable, rewarding work, it is important to treat it as such, VCG officials warn. Non-profit leaders do a bad job explaining what is expected of board members, perhaps because they have never given much thought to it, says Mr. LaGreca. “Non-profits are notoriously bad at answering that question,” he says. “You are supposed to be the perfect board member at birth or something.”

Says Ms. Barr: “If you regard [board members] as an asset, then you see that they get orientation, they get training, they get the information they need. You understand that it’s an investment.”

Ms. Mahoney says she is confident that efforts like hers will help make the public more aware of the important role played by boards.

“You are taught that you are going to be a mommy or daddy,” she says. “You’re probably taught that you are going to be in a church or synagogue and you probably are taught that you are going to do something civicly. You are going to be on a clean-your-neighborhood committee or something like that.

“So it’s not that we don’t teach all of these things, but what we don’t teach, oddly enough, is that you can be a director, a trustee.”

With the Board Marketplace Program, she hopes, people will not only become more interested in trusteeship but they will also find the right match and fall head over heels for it. “There’s this vision we have,” she says, “that there’s going to be some magical, modified way that people can fall in love.”