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How Does Your Nonprofit Retain Termed-Out Board Members?

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Nonprofit board members whose terms have expired are typically recognized at annual meetings with gifts, plaques or certificates of service. In many cases, this is like saying, “Here’s your hat–there’s the door.” Rarely does the organization have a plan for continuing to connect with these folks, many of whom represent significant assets – i.e. talent and expertise – that can be meaningful to the organization for years. For the very best among them, there is no guarantee that replacements will have the same or superior skills and talents.

Here are some new and established ways to keep them engaged or to reengage those who have drifted away from the organization.

Advisory Board – Include them in an advisory board to the CEO and/or Board Chair. For prestige purposes, it is important that the board be clearly designated as a sounding board to the CEO and/or Board chair when both are appropriate. This group should include selected former board members plus others from the community or industry. Agendas should not be packed with detailed power point presentations, leaving only brief time periods for open discussion. My experiences with these boards are that they should meet three or four times a year. A reasonably large one, 15-20 people, is required; understand that on the average, not all will be able to attend.

Form an “Alumni Group” – Major consulting and business organizations (e.g., McKinsey and P&G) actively support a networking group of former employees who also may meet on an occasional basis. The organizations have newsletters which report on former employee professional changes and successes, and provide current membership rosters that offer tremendous networking opportunities. It also gives the group an opportunity to reconnect on their own with old friends/colleagues and to become updated on their families and activities. Obviously the costs and efforts for maintaining the activity are modest.

Nonprofits could improve on this model by also offering occasional short conferences, 1.5 days maximum, for former board members related to the mission of the nonprofit. They can be conducted locally or at some off-site retreat, so spouses or significant others can be included. The conferences can be operated on a self-sustaining basis if developed at a moderate cost that is divided among participants. Agendas will need to be carefully planned with a small group of potential attendees.

Continued Direct Contact – The nonprofit CEO needs to have informal contact with each current board member three or four times a year to update board members to new potential strategies and ongoing challenges faced by the organizations, a minimum of 45 informal personal or phone contacts a year to help solidify his/h relationship with the board.
Current board members may assist the CEO by performing the same function to keep former board members engaged through some informal contacts each year. To be certain that all responsible for making these contacts are on the same page with current information, some reorientation on current organizational policies and strategies will need to be developed.

Establishing Effective Nonprofit Board Committees – What to Do.

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Establishing Effective Nonprofit Board Committees – What to Do.

Following are ways that many nonprofit boards have established effective board committees using mygovernance model as described in the third edition of Policy vs. Paper Clips. ( https://goo.gl/QEL8x3)

• In the planning effort, focus board personnel and financial resources only on those topics that are germane to the organization at a particular time. For example, financial planning, long-range planning or short-rangeplanning. However the board needs to be open to generative planning if new opportunities present themselves or are developed via board leadership.

• Reduce the number of board standing committees to no more than five, even less if possible

• Use subcommittees, also known as ad hoc committees or task forces, to review a range of board levelt topics, as needed, such as personnel policies, OSHA requirements and long-term space needs.

• Generally the CEO should attend all major committee meeting. He or she may or may not serve on subcommittees, depending on the information and guidance needed by the group.

• Staff input is critical. Professional staffs make major contributions to board policy decisions. It needs to be remembered that nonprofit staff in most organizations are more closely related to the board than they are in for-profit situations. The nonprofit staff are only a few organizational levels below the board.

• The CEO needs to foster an atmosphere in which staff members feel free to express opinions to board members and administrative staff. Such an atmosphere benefits the organization and isn’t just social activity.

• When confronted with a particular difficult issue, an excellent means of communications is the board/staff workshop. The professional interaction between board and staff should enhance the quality of decision-making. There are also secondary benefits, as a workshop enhances professional communications between board and staff and engages board members in meaningful hands-on projects. In addition, the board can assess the capabilities of promotable staff. Many boards have been content to analyze proposals endlessly (i.e., engage in analysis-paralysis). Others to avoid conflict, have tended to rubber-stamp proposals made by vocal or overly aggressive board members or the CEO. Neither of these types of boards truly participates in the challenging act of establishing policy and direction for their nonprofit groups.

The times are currently changing very rapidly due to the introduction of AI. Nonprofit Boards are being held much more personally accountable for their actions by the community and by legal statute. For example, if a volunteer board chair assumes the ED/CEO title or becomes president/CEO, he or she may face increased exposure to liability for not meeting his or her duties to be beinging very current on financials, compliance regulations, organizational limitations, etc.

A Special Relationship: Nurturing the CEO-Board Chair Bond

By Eugene Fram             

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Here are suggestions to assure the best possible partnership between the board chair and CEO.

Keeping boards focused on strategic issues is a major challenge for nonprofit leaders.  This leadership crisis is intensified by the fact that board chairs tend to have short terms (according to BoardSource, 83% stay in office only one or two years). Thus, nonprofit CEOs  and board chairs need to bond quickly. For the good of the organization, they must come together swiftly and create a partnership that works. Here are golden rules for the CEO and board chair to follow:

1. Be sure the CEO and board chair share strategic issues with each other—negative as well as positive ones. A failure by either the chair or CEO to share information, such as a potential cash flow issue, can be disastrous for the nonprofit.

2. It’s critical for the CEO to conduct orientation sessions with a new chair, explaining the challenges facing the nonprofit, and reviewing the fundamentals of the mission. The CEO can help the chair keep the board focused on strategic issues, whether they’re programmatic or financial.  With many nonprofits electing a new president each year, the CEO needs to prioritize these tasks.

3. Make sure staff know who has the final say. Some employees mistakenly view the board chair as the ultimate authority, even when the organizational table lists the CEO as holding that position. As a result, they may try an end run around the CEO, asking the board to overturn the CEO’s decision about salaries, promotions, or programs, for example. Both the CEO and board chair must emphasize the fact that the CEO is the final authority. If they make this message clear enough, they can probably keep staff from attempting any end runs. If an end run still occurs, the board chair must refer the issue to the CEO for resolution, except if the CEO is being charged with malfeasance.

4. The CEO should arrange for individual board members to meet with management staff on occasion so that the board can gather information about how the organization is operated and obtain an understanding of the promotional abilities of managers. The Sarbanes-Oxley act (a federal statute relating to public corporation boards) recommends this process for for-profit boards, and it’s also a good one for nonprofit board members.

5. Give staff members opportunities to participate in strategic planning and to support board committees. The board chair and CEO should work together to arrange such board-staff interactions, including joint celebrations of organizational success.

6. The CEO and board chair need to agree on the use of ad hoc board committees or task forces and their relationship to standing committees. For example, should the HR/personnel committee be a standing one or only an ad hoc one to address major personnel policies? In the 21st century, a board should only have maximum of five standing committees, many can only have three.  If task forces are used to provide provide options for occasional policy issues, for example pension plan changes, there may be little need for a standing board HR/personnel committee.

7. The board chair and CEO should be the active leaders in fundraising efforts, with the CEO as administrative leader. The board chair and other board members must provide the CEO entrée to funding sources. They often need to accompany the CEO on fundraising visits. The CEO should keep the board chair informed of all entrepreneurial development activities being explored.

8. The board has only one major employment decision to make – to recruit and hire the CEO. It’s usually a long and exhausting process. But once it’s completed, the employment of all other staff personnel is the responsibility of the CEO and the CEO’s management team. For senior positions, most CEOs ask their chairs and/or other board members to meet with candidates, but the ultimate responsibility remains with the CEO.  The board also has a responsibility to overview staffing to make certain that adequate bench-strength in in place for succession placements,  at the CEO and the senior management

9. When hiring a CEO, or soon after employment, the board chair and CEO must face a stark reality—the need for emergency leadership should the CEO become temporarily incapacitated. These plans can either be established informally by the chair-CEO partnership or more formally via board resolution. The following are possible interim CEOs: a senior manager in the organization, a semi-retired experienced CEO living near headquarters, a consultant living in a neighboring city. CEO succession planning is an important issue for the partnership should the CEO decides to leave or retire.

10. The CEO can be helpful to the board chair in recruiting new board members by suggesting possible volunteer candidates or other contacts who have demonstrated an interest in the organization’s mission, vision, and values. Board candidates will want to meet with the CEO as part of the interview process. As a result, the two partners must agree on how to present the organization to board candidates.

11. The chair and CEO need to lead in establishing meeting agendas. The two partners must work together to assure there’s sufficient meeting time to discuss and resolve strategic issue While many nonprofits call their top executive the “executive director,” the term CEO or president/CEO is a more leader-focused.

12. For the current environment, board members should be ready and willing to be ready to involved in a heightened level of board activity.   If not, the board chair and board member should determine what constraints the member needs to be in place for his/h activity.

Can Virtual Meetings be Humanized?

Here are some suggestions:

More But Shorter Meetings:  Instead of monthly board meetings, schedule meetings every two months.. With the social intensity in the environment, some boards are being required to meet more frequently.  In advance of the meetings, ask the Nonprofit CEO to send a list of announcement types items, hopefully limited to one page.  (Have it understood that the one page may not meet the requirements of her/h high school English teacher!)

Onboarding New Board Members: A friend joined a nonprofit.  As a result of all virtual board and committee meetings she feels adrift of human connection. She might even not recognize some of her new colleagues if she passed them on the street.  This problem can be alleviated to some extent by arranging for the new member to have brief individual virtual meetings with other board members and senior managers.  It’s a hopefully a quick fix to a problem.

Strategic Planning. It was evident in the pre-corvid period that strategic planning needs to have a longer focus than the traditional three to five-year plan in order to achieve organizational sustainability. There are enough evidences of post-covid changes to continue strategic planning with small committees.  This involves more frequent, but shorter, virtual meetings for the planning committee and updates to the board.

Building Trust:  Having trust among board colleagues is critical to having a fully functioning board.  Talking directly to them, listening carefully and even watching body language or  face colorings.   Some people, for example, when agitated develop a flushed face.  None of this appears when meetings are virtual!  There are several actions Board Chairs and/or CEOs can take to help members to be better acquainted, hoping to lead to trusting relationships.

·      Good & Welfare Periods:  At the beginning or end of the virtual meeting ask members to share personal or professional events—promotions, marriages, children or grandchildren, etc.

·      Outside Presentation: At a virtual meeting, arrange for a local or national authority to  briefly talk about a mission related topic

·      Invite the board members’/managements’ spouses or significant others to also be involved. 

·      Other Interests: Invite board members/management persons to discuss unusual skills they have or other groups to which they belong that promotes the public interest.

·       Board Education:  Where possible continue board education via a virtual approach.  If staff persons participate, be certain presentations are rehearsed and that time restrictions are carefully followed.

Focusing on any of these four areas  in a time-compressed nonprofit environment can be difficult. In my opinion, nonprofit boards should review them to determine if they can help alleviate the obvious deficits inherent with virtual meetings.        

Board Member Networking Pays Off for Nonprofits

By Eugene Fram    

Over decades of nonprofit board membership and consulting, I have rarely observed volunteer board members effectively networking with their peers to develop best board practices. Also rarely do I see them accompany management to regional or national conferences related to the nonprofit’s mission. These types of exposures are necessary to have groups of board members capable of making generative suggestions.

For board members who are willing and able to network, I suggest the following: 

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Once Again!! A Nonprofit Board’s Most Important Job!

By: Eugene Fram

Many people believe as I do that a nonprofit board’s job is to find the best possible person to act as CEO of the organization, then stand back and let that person manage. If your board is in agreement, here are guidelines for action:

• Recruit Widely: Develop a rigorous vetting process. Well before the search begins, make certain that potential internal candidates have had an opportunity to demonstrate management acumen. If an internal candidate is somewhat less qualified than an external one, don’t let the decision be swayed by the fact that the internal candidate would be less costly to employ.
• Understanding The Partnership: The need for the CEO and Board to operate within a partnership framework is well documented and accepted. However, the CEO is both the senior staff manager and a de facto representative of the board-staff relationship. Normal communications to the staff must be through the CEO. The CEO can’t be an insecure manager by withholding negative information from the board.
• A Nonprofit Board Has An Overview Responsibility: Sometimes, this responsibility can devolve into micromanagement of the management and staff. If the overview, policy or strategy functions of the board are not being adequately executed, a lead director may need to be appointed to help focus on them.*
• In terms of organization and CEO measurement, the board must seek data and information on outcomes and impacts, not become overly involved with process details.
• Nobody Does His/Her Job Perfectly: The board needs to be highly tolerant of inconsequential CEO mistakes. However, if these mistakes persist over time, the board needs to assess reasons for their continuing. Major errors need immediate investigation, and the board members also must be honest with itself about their own culpability in its due diligence process.
• The CEO And Staff Must Be Evaluated Fairly: In a nonprofit situation, this must be done in partnership, not hierarchically. Everybody must understand the “rules of the game.” Outcomes and impacts need to be related to the mission of the organization.
• The Board and CEO Must Partner On Fundraising: An effective CEO must, in the 21st century, be the face of the organization to accomplish its mission. Nonprofit board members are part-time stewards. Consequently the CEO must accept a significant responsibility for fundraising.

These guidelines can be useful to nonprofit boards in self-evaluation projects. They can determine whether or not the board is facing the realities of standing back and letting the CEO manage. The CEO should have full operational authority, and the staff should function without an atmosphere of board micromanagement.

*International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law / vol. 14, nos. 1-2, April 2012 / p.57.

How Do Boards Develop Successful Business Practices In Nonprofit Organizations?

By: Eugene Fram    

Every nonprofit needs a business plan to implement marketing, financial, human resources, etc. activities. The goal of the nonprofit business plan is to maximize the achievement of the organization’s mission within existing resources.

Strong service and business practices should be the hallmarks of any nonprofit board that effectively focuses on four business factors: 

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What attributes does a nonprofit board member need to be a Change Agent?

By Eugene Fram

Be well acquainted with mission arena of the organization — This can range from current or previous employment in the arena or being a board member of an allied organization. The change agent must be able to “walk the talk.” Example: Ask the CEO of a counseling organization whether or not the treatment modalities used by the staff are current.

Must have a proactive style — Uninterrupted attendance at most board and committee meetings; asks questions that his/her board colleagues recognize as being perceptive ones; be well respected by peers internally and externally; responds well to the “give or get” policy of the organization and has a professionally cordial relationship with the CEO.

Needs to be patient and flexible — The frequent rotation of board personnel may mean that a process of convincing new board members that the change is in the best interest of the nonprofit’s clients. Be ready to change when outside circumstances require a modification of the shape of the effort.

Has excellent people skills — He/she will need to understand the various reactions to the change(s) being driven. These can range from board colleagues to management personnel, staff and even external stakeholders like funders.

Will “stay on message” in comments related to the change — Will be required to present arguments in a concise and understandable manner. Will be seen as a strong, but not overbearing, champion for the change.

The time issue — Most nonprofit board members are volunteers with full-time occupations and family responsibilities that must take time precedents. Becoming a nonprofit board change agent often requires these additional time commitments:

• Chairing a major board committee for a substantial time period.
• Possibly taking personal responsibility for research/ background efforts.
• Specialized training efforts may be required for other board members.
• A continual process of updating colleagues and seeking allies to whom some of the work can be delegated.
• Constantly being alert to legacy minded people who may impede forward moment toward the change goal.

Not every nonprofit board change agent will have all the qualifications cited above and all the time necessary to devote to marketing the change. But from those who have succeeded, others need to know what is potentially involved.

* https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/champions-change-agents-advocates-dr-jack-jacoby/

How Nonprofit Boards Can Support Management & Staff and Refrain From Micromanaging!

How Nonprofit Boards Can Support Management & Staff and Refrain From Micromanaging!

By: Eugene Fram                   

The dilemma is common to nonprofit organizations. As start-ups, everyone aspires to do everything. Passion for the mission and determination to “get it right” imbue board members with the desire to do it all. But once the organization starts to mature, board roles shift to focus more broadly on policy and strategy issues. With the advent of qualified personnel to handle operations, there are many overview activities, sans micromanaging, available to board members. Following are some ways that boards can assist and demonstrate support for operations, CEOs and staffs without interfering.

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6 Approaches to Innovation for Nonprofit Boards

6 Approaches to Innovation for Nonprofit Boards

By Eugene Fram                    

The Bridgespan Group, supported by The Rockefeller Foundation,  completed an exciting research study. The results identified “six elements common to nonprofits with a high capacity to innovate” * Following are some suggestion how to implement these elements.

  1.  Catalytic Leadership that empowers staff to solve problems that matter. This involves the board to lead with committed and generative leadership. **  Board members must be ready to ask tough questions. They must require management to respond to the classic question, “Who would miss the nonprofit if it were to disappear?” Board members should be able to suggest new ideas drawn from business and the public sector that can be adapted, assessed and tested by management and staff
  2. A curious culture, where staff looks beyond their day-to day obligation, questions assumptions, and constructively challenge each other’s thinking as well as the status quo. This, in my view is difficult to achieve, but boards should attempt to take every advantage to develop it. Boards that question the status quo are hard to find in all fields. They should, at the least, involve the staff in strategic planning efforts and pay close attention to its development. Staffs then are in an excellent position to challenge the status quo. One staff person in a human services agency, for example, challenged the status quo by observing the nonprofit did not have a “safety net” mission, but in reality had a “sustainability” mission. The agency was not only helping clients on a day-to-day basis but also was trying to assist them to achieve sustainable lifestyles.
  3. Diverse teams with different backgrounds, experiences, attitudes and capabilities—the feed-stock for growing an organization’s capacity to generate breakthrough ideas.

As the Bridgespan Group has noted, it is necessary to have board members, “who are diverse across their dimensions: demographics, cognitive and intellectual abilities and styles with professional skills and experiences. In my opinion, nonprofits have been successful in recruiting board members in all of these categories except two—cognitive and intellectual abilities. I have encountered nonprofit boards without a single director with strategic planning or visionary abilities. Board members’ full time occupations often do not require them to have these abilities. As a result, strategic planning was just a SWAT (strengths, weakness and threats) review without any real analytical depth. To rectify the situation, nonprofits need to add these abilities to their recruitment grids. Unfortunately, this makes the recruiting effort more difficult since the abilities don’t appear on many resumes. Candidates must be assessed from an in-depth interview process.

  1. Porous boundarieswiden the scope for innovations, by allowing fresh ideas to peculate up from staff at any level—as well as constituents and other outside voices—and seep through silos.

Because many nonprofits have small travel budgets, they may operate in “bubbles, ” consisting of themselves and similar neighboring organizations. In addition, they can acculturate board members to the “bubble” traditions and environments.   For example, they may ask a new board member, with strong financial abilities to help the CFO with accounting issues, instead of asking her/h to develop a strategic financial plan for the organization. Perhaps as national webinars become more available to nonprofit managements and their staffs, these information flows will help to change the innovation roadblocks. Then they can, “generate new ideas systematically, test ideas using articulated criteria, metrics methodologies and prioritize and scale the highest potential ideas.”

  1. Idea Pathways that provide structure and processes for identifying, testing and transforming promising concepts into needle-moving solutions. For example, the process of Lean Management can allow testing of new ideas quickly. Instead of waiting for a new strategic plan to establish a pathway for something new, a nonprofit can test it with a series of small-scale efforts to determine its viability. The idea can be dropped if positive results are not developed after a couple of tests.   If after successive tests with viable information results, the idea can be moved quickly to an implementation stage when the nonprofit has the necessary resources.
  2. The ready resources—funding, time, training and tools—vital to supporting innovation work. To fully take advantage of most of these six innovation guidelines, fundraising is critical. But each board and staff cannot do it alone. It must be a partnership between the board members and the CEO that recognizes fundraising for innovation is a necessary part of the nonprofit’s resourcing efforts.

*https://ssir.org/articles/entry/is_your_nonprofit_built_for_sustained_innovation

**https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC-967dbda2e