What Makes A Great Nonprofit Board Member? Some Unique Suggestions!!!By: Eugene Fram Free Digital Photo
Viewers may question my taking time to develop this post when a Google search, using the above title, shows about 302 million listings recorded in 0.63 of second! The answer is that I located a board article with a few interesting insights, relating to for-profit boards, that also can be useful to the selection of nonprofit directors. * Following are some of the unusual ideas.
The Nonprofit Dream Team: a Board/CEO Partnership that Works!
By: Eugene H. Fram Free Digital Image
Rebalancing and maintaining important relationships in a nonprofit organization can be important to its success. Do various players fully understand and accept their specific roles? Is there mutual trust between players? Are communications open and civil?
I encountered an association CEO who complained that his board wants to judge him without establishing mutually agreeable goals, outcomes or impacts. He felt what is needed is a partnership arrangement where the board does not judge the CEO and organization based on political or personal biases but overviews performance in terms of mutually accepted achievements. This, he contended, forms a substantial partnership between board and CEO and staff. If the board thinks it can judge management without these measures he stated, it generates a personal political type of evaluation unrelated to performance. As an example he pointed to an unfortunately common nonprofit situation where a CEO is given an excellent review and fired six months later because there has been a change in the internal board dynamics.
Are Your Board and Staff Ready For Change?
By: Eugene Fram Free Digital Image
“Ideally, change takes place only when is “a critical mass of board and staff want … it. A significant … portion of leadership must realize that the status quo won’t do” * Based on my experiences, this ideal is rarely achieved because:
NONPROFITS NEED A BRAND THAT RESONATES!
By: Eugene Fram Free Digital Photo
How do people see your organization? Is your nonprofit clearly perceived, and the unique nature of its work, fully understood in the community or industry?
Nonprofit board members occasionally talk about the organizational brand image but rarely take tangible steps to define it. Yet the creation of a strong brand is a major factor in generating public respect, support and significant funding sources. Potential donors need to believe implicitly in the impact of the nonprofit on its clients. They also need to understand the realities implied in the brand image that fail to match the realities of the organization’s operations. For example, some family services agencies (actually multi-human service groups), have long struggled with a brand perception that they offer only family reproduction services.
Following are some guidelines that may help improve a current image or further clarify the mission which fuels the dedicated efforts of boards, staff and volunteers:
Questions For Nonprofit Board Meetings—And Why They Are Needed
My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions. – Peter Drucker
By: Eugene Fram Free Digital Image
Knowing the right questions to ask at a nonprofit board meeting is a critical part of a board member’s responsibility. Following is a list that, as a nonprofit director, I want to keep handy at meetings. * I also will suggest why I think each is important in the nonprofit environment. Compliance and overviewing management alone do not guarantee success.
All of these questions need to be reviewed annually, but in my experiences they rarely surface in board discussions.
*https://mahlab.co/blog/associations-are-you-asking-your-members-the-right-questions/
Can Small Experiments Test Nonprofit Strategic Validity?
By: Eugene Fram Free digital image
When given a series of potential mission changes, modifications or opportunities, most nonprofit boards take the following steps: (1) Discuss alternatives (2) Develop working plans, board/staff presentations and funding proposals (3) All three usually are packaged into a three or five year strategic plan for implementation. Typically the process can take about six months to “get all stakeholders on board.” When something new is suggested, the conservative board and nonprofit management immediately respond, “Great idea, let’s consider it in the new strategic plan.” Results: It can take three to five years to implement the idea, assuming the plan actually gets off the shelf, not an unusual occurrence for nonprofit organizations!
Another alternative being implemented by some nonprofit is to use a rapid experimentation approach called Lean. “First developed for use in the for-profit world,(especially startup ventures) … the method focuses on new ideas for products/services through iterative experiments. Lean practitioners build simple prototypes ‘called minimum viable products/services (MVPs),’ …move quickly to get feedback on these items from constituents/stakeholders.” * As long as they have some positive iterations they continue to full product development.
Example: The small software division of a larger firm suggested a program that it felt certain would have great marketability because of it perceived uniqueness.
As an initial part of a Lean process, the software developers were required to present it personally to a small group of potential customers. As a result of the interviews, both marketing and development executives dropped it.
How Can Nonprofit Boards Utilize Lean Experimentation?
These lean experiments can be conducted at minimum costs and with small samples that initially may not be statistically significant. (For example, in the software case cited above, there were only four customers in the sample, but they were significant ones.)
Not being able to afford the time and money to develop excellent metrics, nonprofit boards, especially in assessing ambiguous and qualitative impacts, need to initially glean what they can from the use of imperfect metrics. (http://bit.ly/OvF4ri). The metrics can be anecdotal, subjective, interpretive or qualitative. For most nonprofits, it is a great leap forward from doing nothing or taking years to implement action. Also losing time invested in offering a client centered opportunity? The most critical requirement is that the directors and management agree that the process is reasonable and that outcomes from each experimental iteration constitute fair and trustworthy information.
A Current Example
There seems to be a growing body of knowledge of how to apply the art of lean in the nonprofit environment. * The use of lean to assess the proper venues to select social media by which to communicate with donors and other stakeholders is an example. All agree that the use of various social media venues is difficult to assess for both for-profits and nonprofits.
Here, as an example, is what might be done to obtain some directions on using social venues to reach millennials. Charitable nonprofits are seeking ways to communicate with this group as potential volunteers and future donors. Instead of a board waiting to take action on a broad social media strategy before taking some action on social media, it might start with some small-scale, low cost experiments. The information it obtains from one or two MPVs would be useful in backing into a comprehensive social media strategy when a new strategic plan is needed. But an early MPV also might provide some information for immediate action.
Summary: Like any management process lean is not a panacea for either the business or nonprofit sectors. It has its advantages and disadvantages and will not replace more rigorous process, when required–longitudinal studies and strategic planning. However, its experimental design feature can help drive the nonprofit decision process to be more effective and efficient. That alone can help to recruit more able directors, who because of time-compressed lifestyles, now are impatient with the traditional pace of nonprofit decision-making.
* For a robust report on the use of lean in the nonprofit sector see: (http://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_promise_of_lean_experimentation)
Must Nonprofits Develop Employee Benefits That Substitute For Annual Raises?
By: Eugene Fram Free Digital Image
An analysis in the Washington Post reports that a tsunami-style change has been taking place in the manner in which United States employees are being paid—benefits are being offered in place of annual salary increases. (http://wapo.st/1MwoIBZ) Driving the change are the needs of a substantial portion of millennials who appreciate immediate gratifications in terms of bonuses and perks, such as extra time off and tuition reimbursement. Employers like the arrangement because they can immediately reward their best performers without increasing compensation costs. Example: One sales employee spent weeks reviewing dull paperwork, was very diligent in the process and was given three extra days of paid leave. She said, “I think everybody would like to make more, but what I liked about it was the flexibility.”
Measuring Nonprofits’ Impacts: A Necessary Process for the 21st Century
By Eugene Fram Free Digital Image
Unfortunately, outcomes and impact are often unrelated, which is why a program that seems to produce better outcomes may create no impact at all. Worse, sometimes they point in opposite directions, as can happen when a program works with harder-to- service populations resulting in seemingly worse conditions, but (has) higher value-added impact. … Rigorous evaluations can measure impact (to a level of statistical accuracy), but they are usually costly (a non starter for many nonprofit), difficult and slow. * But how do the medium and small size nonprofits measure actual results in the outside world such as enhanced quality of life, elevated artistic sensitivity and community commitment? (more…)
Based on my experiences, following are ways that effective nonprofit boards have established board committees. (more…)
Time Compressed Non Profit Board members – Recruit & Retain Them!
By: Eugene Fram Free Digital Image
Every nonprofit board has had the experience of having board positions open and being unable to fill them with highly qualified people. The usual response from qualified candidates is that they are too busy to be accept a board position. However, the real reasons, if speaking privately, are that they perceive the nonprofit decision process to be too slow, board agendas loaded with minutiae, presentations that take up more time than they should, unfocused discussion, etc. (more…)
Nonprofit Management 