Questions to Ask to Achieve an Engaged and Effective Board
A board that governs well is an asset. The board should regularly ask these questions to assure it is engaging all board members to fulfill their duties effectively.
- Do your board members ask themselves at least annually what skills and resources they bring to the table and how effectively they are being utilized?
- How are board members showing to the public their passion and commitment to the organization? Are those efforts sufficient and/or convincing?
- Do you ensure that each member's opinions are known and that each member has a sufficient understanding of the issue at hand and its importance to the organization?
Click here for additional questions you should ask as an annual check up on your board's effectiveness. Email us with your ideas for other ways to gauge board effectiveness!
Need more? Read how we can work with you or present a workshop to hone these ideas.
Unfamiliar terms? See our glossary.
Excerpts from Linking Mission to Money
The primary task of a nonprofit organization is to be a reliable provider of a service that fulfills a useful need in your community. Sustainability of mission is a critical concept for a board to master if it is to lead effectively. Click here for an excerpt from Linking Mission to Money.
Articles of Interest
Concerning Board Governance
Careful handling of contracts avoid conflicts explores the debat over the propriety of nonprofits' doing business with their trustees and offers useful guidelines to ensure a nonprofit is always benefitting from the expertise and goodwill of its trustees and their companies.
Board development, governance stands as major issue with nonprofits describes new initiatives by grantmakers to invest in training and recruiting candidates for nonprofit boards, in part in response to discouraging data on the quality of board governance.
Checklist of best practices for effective boards provides 15 steps your board can take to be effective in assuring the organization can reliably serve a need in the community even in difficult economic times. The recommendations fall in three categories: defining the purpose of the board; focusing on the future, not on the past; and aligning fundraising with the priorities of the organization's mission.
Nonprofits make the best out of necessity reminds us of Peter Drucker's view that the best nonprofits are practicing what businesses only preach in three critical areas: planning based on mission, effective use of boards of directors, and motivation and productivity of knowledge workers.
Nonprofits must understand law to avoid political activity problems explains IRS rules for 501(c)(3) organizations regarding voter education and registration, candidate forums, and political activity by nonprofit executives and board members. Because of the complexity of the law, many nonprofits choose to remain silent during an election campaign. That's unnecessary, but it is vital the organization become familiar with the rules and the resourcs the IRS makes available.
Nonprofits must re-examine what their boards can, should do discusses how boards can spearhead development of an effective strategy using the ideas in Richard Chait's book Governance as Leadership, Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards.
Nonprofits under intense scrutiny reminiscent of Sarbanes Oxley notes the high cost imposed on nonprofits by the proliferation of new compliance reports and suggests better ways for corporate donors to help nonprofits to build the capacity to deal with society's most intractable problems.
Attracting the right board members essential to nonprofit's success identifies attributes that are critical for a board to be successful and it outlines the steps the nominating committee should take to maintain a board that is committed to the nonprofit's success.
Invite nonprofit staff to attend board meetings saves time, money explains how staff attendance at board meetings can facilitate good board-staff communication and boost staff morale. Guidelines are provided to make attendance positive and worthwhile.
Keeping members active, involved stimulates board discusses four keys to running an effective board meeting.
What a community needs most from its nonprofits discusses the dilemma of sustainability versus growth which pervades the nonprofit world. A nonprofit organization has to decide early on how to deal with its ambition to grow and its obligation toward sustainability.
What a nonprofit's board should do with a budget discusses the benefits of the strategic perspective that boards can bring to the budget.
Improving culture of board aids nonprofits in long run notes that good boards in the nonprofit sector require a proactive discipline that market forces tend to impose automatically on a business board.
Other Resources
Low-profit, limited liability corporations (L3C) is a new corporate form enacted by the Vermont Legislature in May 2008. This new form holds promise as a way to permit donor-advised funds and foundations to take equity stakes in socially-oriented for-profit companies through IRS-allowed Program Related Investments (PRI). See our new L3C resource page for resources on this innovative corporate form.
The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges has issued guidance on trustee conflicts of interest in response to "increased external scrutiny of governance by government agencies, such as the enactment of the revised Internal Revenue Service Form 990, which sets up new expectations regarding financial accountability." Their 12 principles can be accessed here.
Advancing Good Governance is a 2009 report sponsored by the W.K.Kellogg Foundation and the Evelyn and Walter Hass, Jr. Fund to "advance thinking and stimulate action among grantmakers to strengthen the governance of their grantees and nonprofits in their communities....[T]his report presents the case for investing in governance and shares a variety of ways to advance those efforts."
Feedback from board members on the value and effectiveness of your board meeting is beneficial. Here is a form used by Wayland Academy's board after every meeting.
Regular self-assessment of the effectiveness of your board is also essential to good governance. Look at this short board assessment prepared by McKinsey & Company or this longer assessment prepared by TACS, an Oregon 501(c)(3) serving nonprofits since 1978.
The applicability of Sarbanes-Oxley principles to nonprofit organizations is widely discussed in Congress and throughout the nonprofit sector. NACUBO, the professional association for CFO's in higher education, has annotated the Sarbanes-Oxley provisions with their views on how they may be applied to higher education. Click here for their ideas which you can consider applying to governance in your nonprofit.
Click here for Independent Sector's Checklist for Accountability, a quick way to assess whether your organization needs work on its fiduciary protections. Independent Sector has also compiled over 100 examples of standards, codes, and principles for nonprofits to use.
Strengthening Transparency, Governance, Acountability of Charitable Organizations is a report to Congress with recommendations to strengthen nonprofits' and foundations' operations, including board and executive compensation and the structure, size, composition, and independence of governing boards.
From time to time surveys are conducted regarding board governance.
An impressive inventory of ideas, book reviews, and questions board members should ask is at Board Options, Inc. This is a good site for others resources on board governance, as well as its Board of Directors Talent Bank.
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