September 27, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Holly Hall, an editor at The Chronicle, is contributing guest posts based on her reporting from the annual meeting of BoardSource, an organization that seeks to help trustees to do their jobs better. The conference took place last week in Atlanta.
Why do we need you?
That’s what anybody recruiting a board member should address before making a pitch. But nearly nobody does.
Most people neglect to say which skills matter and instead assure potential board members that the job won’t be much work. What they should say, says Susan Decker, a senior consultant at BoardSource, is exactly what talents and connections the charity wants to tap in a potential board member.
Ms. Decker offered that tip as part of a two-day course in Atlanta for trustees and staff leaders that covered nonprofit boards’ responsibilities and how to train new trustees.
While the course was not inexpensive—$895, or $795 for BoardSource members—participants were provided with numerous tips, several books, and a thick binder of sample policies and exercises for trustees. They also received reading materials on topics such as dealing with problematic trustees and the relationship between the board chair and chief executive.
Among the tips that Ms. Decker and others shared during the course.:
• Create a special orientation for board chairmen. Many charities provide an orientation for new trustees, but people who lead the board may not get everything they need from such programs. The skills and abilities those trustees need to be successful are markedly different from those of rank-and-file board members.
• Recruit board members with good skills in listening and building consensus. “Soft skills,” such as the ability to be diplomatic while asking hard questions, are just as important when recruiting board members as other skills such as legal expertise and desirable qualities such as ethnic diversity. But charities and board nominating committees often ignore soft skills.
• Create “dashboards” for nonprofit board members that show key pieces of data at a glance. Board members, worried about their responsibility to provide fiscal oversight, often spend enormous amounts of time on minute details of financial reports when they could instead undertake more productive activities to lead the organization.
To avoid this tendency, charity leaders should create a “dashboard” of key, easy-to-understand financial information that can be quickly shared at every meeting.
While every organization is different, a financial dashboard could include the current and prior-year figures for the following: cash balances in checking, savings, and other accounts; endowed funds, if any; current revenue compared with projections; expenses; and operating reserves.
