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.
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.
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.
Frequently, I encounter nonprofit case stories surface related to inadequate oversight by nonprofit boards of directors. Some of the cases result in substantial dollar losses to the nonprofits. Following is my personal list of what reasonable board oversight means to attempt to help nonprofit boards of directors to avoid such losses.
At least half the board should be able to analyze the monthly or quarterly financial statements. Have voluntary information sessions available for those who do not have the skills.
Make certain that an external audit is conducted at least every two years, and the board is involved in the selection of the external auditor from a list of two or three suggested by board members and/or management. [i]
Be alert to the system used for developing new programs. Be wary when new programs are described such as “mindboggling.”
Be certain the organization has either a comprehensive assessment committee, finance committee, and/or audit committee. (Some states require nonprofits to have an audit committee once the organization has a certain annual revenue.)
Be alert to the development process for filing critical reports –Examples: 990s, employee tax withholdings and both state and federal tax reports.[ii]
Make certain the board has developed or is developing a current strategic plan.
Make certain that the organization has a knowledgeable CFO. No board member should have to worry about the safety of the organization’s assets.
Be especially alert when financial reports are frequently late or one or more directors perceive financial personnel are inadequately skilled.
If you don’t understand something, be ready to raise questions, even if the question appears to be innocuous
Nonprofit transparency is critical in the 21st century. “Trust But Verify.”
[i] For guidance in this process see: Eugene Fram & Bruce Oliver, (2010)“Want to Avoid Fraud? Look to Your Board,” Nonprofit World, pp.18-19.
Identify Nonprofit Staff Groups To Help Drive Organizational Change.
By Eugene Fram
Nonprofit executive directors Board Members tend to think of the staff professionals as individual contributors. These individuals are persons who mainly work on their own and increasingly also have to contribute as team players – for instance, counselors, health care professionals, curators and university faculty. However, many executive directors fail to recognize that these individual contributors can be grouped according to identifiable types, with differing work-value outlooks. Each group needs to be motivated differently to drive change in today’s fast moving social, political and technological environments. Nonprofit board members can use these groupings in their responsibilities for overseeing promotable staff members.
From years of observation of a variety of nonprofits the late Robert Pearse, a psychologist, and I have identified four major groups that have been labeled “Nostalgics,” “Maintainers,” “Producers’ and “Builders.” Executive directors and board directors who do not recognize the existence of such groups and the special needs to motivate and evaluate them differently may not achieve the forward motion or the performance goals that are required in the 21st century.
An identifiable group may dominate a department or it may have members in different departments. In many cases, a single group may include professionals with disparate personalities but whose work-value systems are similar.
Meet, for example, Sarah Thomas, a congenial department head who has spent the past decade in a nonprofit trade association, and Jack Engels, a brusque cost accountant in the association’s financial division. Sarah is well liked by the members of her department, while Jack is largely left alone in his work.
On the surface, Sarah and Jack appear to have little in common. Closer observation, however, shows that they are alike in one important aspect. Sarah’s department, which she has headed for the past six years, performs at a satisfactory level. Over the years, Sarah has tended to hire staff professionals who have work-values like her own. They are good – but not outstanding – performers. The group gets regular work done but rarely exhibits creative efforts or critical thinking. A recurring complaint from Sarah and her people is, “The department has too much to do.”
Jack Engels, the brusque accountant, also gets his work done, even though he shows little enthusiasm for his work. It is just a job, and he is averse to any change, except that mandated by accounting requirements.
Both Sarah and Jack are Maintainers, for both are comfortable with the status quo. If the executive director and/or board members were to allow the Maintainers standards to pervade the entire organization’s performance, it would likely stagnate and eventually decline.
Nostalgics are generally easy to recognize because they identify so strongly with the organization’s past history and culture. Many of them tend to be long tenured professionals whose performance has leveled off over time. They tend to take pride in being dedicated to the nonprofit but are uncomfortable with changes they perceive as breaking sharply with tradition.
The following strategies are helpful in working with Nostalgics: • Respond to their need to revere and emotionally relive the past. • Encourage the “willing worker” value system of group members. • Show how proposed changes will perpetuate past glory by contributing to organizational longevity and prominence. • Recognize that Nostalgics lack vision and prefer to avoid direct confrontation about the future direction of the organization.
Maintainers constitute the largest group in virtually all organizations, as illustrated by Jack and Sarah, they are average performers who typically have less tenure but also possess more currently useful skills than Nostalgics. They do only what is required by a job description or implied contract. Although they appreciate having a professional position, they have not internally accepted the self-directed performance behavior one typically associates with being a professional.
Several guidelines are helpful in working with Maintainers. • Be alert to the strong “legacy” value system at work in this professional group-all established processes can be successful in the future. • Depend on group members for low to average productivity but be aware that requests for increased productivity or increased self-management are likely to generate resentment and hostility. • Emphasize the pressures in the organization’s external environment that require professional performance improvement. Indicate how such improvements are important to long-term job security. • Set modest but attainable performance improvement goals on an annual basis. (Note: If a complete turnaround is essential, for the organizational survival, this slow improvement will not be adequate.) • Expect some continuing hostility whenever Maintainers feel new standards put pressure on them for sustained higher performance and commitment.
Producers are a varied collection of highly individual “type-A” workaholics who are motivated by their own goals. They tend to work on their own, but can be useful as team leaders if required for time limited projects. Because work output is the core of their existence, they see few differences between their personal and professional lives, sometimes leading to an unhealthy work-life balance. This can be a larger challenge if work forces are increasingly working from home. Producers will support changes initiated by the executive director that they perceive will enable them to produce more efficiently as individuals.
The executive director can try to motivate Producers’ effectiveness in the following ways:
Channel Producers’ vigorous efforts into organizational priorities by linking Producers’ special interests to the mission and goals of the nonprofit. • To the extent possible, provide Producers with the resources needed to be self-managing and productive. • Wherever possible, remove bureaucratic roadblocks to their productivity. • Agree annually on goals, and let Producers achieve them with a minimum of supervision and with appropriate rewards .
Builders, unlike Producers, are committed to furthering the goals of the organization, even at the expense of his or own personal goals. A senior nurse, who agrees to become an administrator, even though he or she prefers to care for patients, is an example of a Builder. Builders fall into two categories: vague visionaries and organized progressives. The former group’s attention span shifts rapidly from one detail of a proposed change to another. They lack sustained capacity for completing long-term performance improvement. The members of the latter group, organized progressives, are systematic thinkers who think quickly. Once they have a picture in mind, they can provide the executive director with knowledgeable and strong support.
An executive director can motivate the Builder group in the following ways: • Use the vague visionary Builders to help sell others when launching new performance programs. • Explain to organized progressives how their Builder values can contribute to a long-term systematic improvement plan. • Give organized progressives strategic follow-up assignments to ensure the new program will move forward. • Provide Builders with superior performance rewards..
If nonprofits are to continue to serve the nation in the current turbulent difficult time, executive directors and volunteer board members will need to provide strong support to their Builders and Producers and their work-value systems. In addition, they must also motivate the Nostalgic and Maintainer groups, using the suggestions cited above.
We hope this blog will spur board members, executive directors and president/CEOs to identify these four groups in their own organizations. Sources Eugene Fram & Robert Pearse (1991) “The High Performance Nonprofit: A Management Guide for Boards and Executives,” Families International, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Judith Gordon (1991), “Organizational Behavior: A Diagnostic Approach,” Allyn & Bacon, Boston, pp. 205-207, 742.
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:
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Are Nonprofit Boards Capable of Evaluating Themselves?
By: Eugene Fram
A 2025 survey of business boards by PWC (Accounting/Consulting Firm) yielded the following results;
More than half (55%%) of board members think someone on their board should be replaced.
Most board members (78%) do not believe their boards’ asssessment process provides a complete picture of overall board performance.
A majority (51%) say their boards are insufficiently invested in the investment process.
About half (45%) seek addiktional education or training on key topics.*
Given that many of these business boards have the financial power to employ legal counsel or consultants to conduct a rigorous impartial evaluation, what can a nonprofit board, with limited financial resources, do to make sure that the board and its members are being fairly evaluated to drive change?
Ask The Tough Questions: No matter what process is used in the evaluation, the board has to address some difficult common questions. These include:
To what extent are board members overly compliant with the wishes of the board chair or CEO? Having been a veteran nonprofit board member or a consultant with dozens of others, I find there is a tendency for nonprofit board members to “go along to get along.” As a result, the board tends to be compliant with the wishes of the board chair, the CEO or an influential director. Rigorous/civil dissent is not part of meeting discussions.
Leadership selection discussions are rarely a priority. Often, through lack of interest or the organization’s formal culture, the board has little contact with staff members below the senior management level and little interest in assessing where future management strength can be developed.
I have yet to encounter a nonprofit board that is willing to discuss its effectiveness in terms of overall strengths or weaknesses. Critical tough questions are: Are all members contributing at a minimum “get or give” level? Especially between meetings, how can board’s internal communications be improved? To what extent does the board become involved in micromanagement or perpetuate it long after the board has outgrown the startup stage? For example, I observed one mature board make a decision about the timing of fundraising events and then spend the next hour brainstorming the types of events that might be developed—clearly a management responsibility to investigate.
The strategic strength of the board. Nonprofit board member backgrounds should be aligned with the emerging needs of the nonprofit. Examples, if fund development is going to be a priority, a person with event planning experiences should be recruited. If the reserve fund return is not being maximized, a person with a financial background, not a CPA, is required.
The ineffective nonprofit director. It is the most vexing problem that boards face. This person’s behavior can range from one who monopolizes discussions to the person who attends meetings but never makes any financial or other types of contributions. Some boards claim that they can approach the problem by asking each director to assess the effectiveness of his/h colleagues, but in decades of nonprofit governance experiences, I have never encountered a board that has had this process in place.
Review Current Practices: If the board has never been self-evaluated, to do a proper self evaluation, these steps are important:
Develop a questionnaire to be completed by all board members. It should be carefully crafted to determine how the board as a group and each individual board member contributes to enhancing the organization’s mission.
The committee assigned to the project should seek the assistance of someone with professional evaluation competence to guide the work. Hopefully he/s will accept the assignment on a pro bono basis. This also can be an interesting project for a small group of graduate students, guided by a knowledgeable professor. Because of the confidential nature of the material, no more than three students should be involved.
Develop the processes for dissemination, confidentiality, collation of materials and organization of survey information. Again, engage a professional to assist with these efforts.
Traditionally, nonprofits use a simple questionnaire to evaluate the organization and the CEO. Their development processes vary widely, and their usefulness often can be questioned when not all board members take the time to thoughtfully respond to the survey or when it is developed by committee. However, board self-evaluation needs to be completed with professional assistance, and the results reported with diplomatic care to drive positive board change.
Nonprofit Management 