Developing high-impact volunteer boards: Skills, strategies & tools for leaders

Tighter budgets and uncertain futures are among the challenges mission-driven organizations are facing today. Every nonprofit organization must ensure their boards are up to the tasks required to continue serving the mission, with board members who are well-prepared, skilled and effective. But how do you get there from here?

Our recent webinar, Developing high-impact boards, covered the skills, strategies and tools necessary for board recruitment, engagement and ongoing development. The webinar, led by Dottie Schindlinger, Diligent Institute Executive Director, featured a panel of three experts from varied nonprofit backgrounds.

Watch the full 45-minute discussion here and read on for some of the highlights. 

Ensure board members understand their roles

Cheretta Clerkley, who is Executive Director for the Association for Positive Behavior Support, noted, “You may have an idea for where you want this particular board member to serve. But when you start talking with them, it may not be aligned. We've really been intentional with doing quarterly check-ins to make sure that they are feeling like they have the tools and resources they need to do the jobs effectively. One exercise that we did was to just go through all of the roles. Like, what does it mean to be the president of the board? And then what does it mean to be a general member of the board? And where can you best leverage your expertise and experience? And also helping them to understand the delineation between the executive director's role and the president's role.”

Mary Figueredo, Senior Executive Assistant to the General Secretary at Wespath Benefits and Investments, added, “You want board members who have the willingness to be there, passion about what they do and who are thoughtful and engaged. You also want people who ask a lot of questions and are critical thinkers. That's where we have found our most dynamic board.”

Board alignment is a must for any successful organization, and you can achieve it with a thoughtful plan for board development. Ensure that the boards receive training at the beginning of and during their entire period of service. Materials related to board roles and responsibilities can be made readily available in your board management software, as a one-stop shop for anything a board member needs to know, when they need it.

Look for self-motivated people who are willing to do the work

Barbara Paxton, Director at Boardstrong, said, “The most important aspect of a high-impact board is that it is self-motivational. It doesn't rely on the executive director to make sure that it does its job. It works in partnership with the executive director, but the board chair is effective in setting meetings. People are responsible to each other for what they do. Committees have their act together and meet without being pushed to do so by the staff. They actually participate in committee meetings and board meetings. They're actively engaged in thinking about strategy for the organization.”

Cheretta Clerkley agreed, saying, “We also have to take into effect the external climate. And we need people who are willing to do the work. We need individuals who can see the long view but also answer the call to short-term solutions, particularly with external factors often impacting nonprofits first in terms of funding and programming. A high-impact board is staying abreast of what's happening and is willing to provide solutions to partner with the executive director or their chief leader.”

Board members for mission-driven organizations are almost exclusively busy people, often balancing careers, families, personal interests and more in the same 24-hour days everyone has. When they have time to work, enable them to use it. Allow efficient board members to work on their own schedules by making sure board books, development and training resources and other material are accessible, and the board can use shared tools for easy communications.

Match board skills with strategic plan

Barbara Paxton points out, “I think so many organizations sort of throw up their hands and say, well, we need board members. ‘Who knows people,’ right? When you can identify the skills that you need, it is much easier to find those people. You know what you're looking for. So, I think that's really important.”

Cheretta Clerkley shared her experience: “One of the first things that I did as an exercise for the board was a skills inventory. We found we had a very homogenous board. Everybody was the same and had pretty much the same skill set. We lacked individuals who had knowledge around finance, who had knowledge around legal or strategic planning. We recognized that if we aligned our strategic plan to what and who was on the board, there were a lot of gaps explaining why we weren't achieving success. Taking that inventory of how many years people had been on the board and what particular role that they had served in really was eye-opening for us as a whole board.”

Nonprofit administrators have two challenges when it comes to understanding board skills: effectively documenting skills among existing board members and building an inventory of needed skills based on current gaps in the board’s makeup. Conduct regular surveys of board members to see what skills they have — some might surprise you — and build a board skills inventory into your strategic plan work every year.

Use the right tools

Board development can be supported with the right tools — tools that can be implemented efficiently through board management software:

As Cheretta Clerkley shares, “When I came on board with this association, we were using Google Docs to manage all of the board stuff. And that was very challenging as a new person coming on board. Also, the board just had a very difficult time kind of managing it because (file access would be unpredictable), so it became tedious for staff to manage. BoardEffect has been a game-changer for us because it has really allowed us to have transparency across anybody who's been on the board currently or in the past. Every month I upload the finances, they get notified. So, it allows them to come back and to do things on their time. All of the meetings are scheduled in that way.”

Mary Figueredo adds, “We’ve been using BoardEffect since 2008. Before that, we were using paper. And we were sending enormous binders through UPS to our board members when we had a change. I mean, it was horrible. Moving to that electronic format was a blessing on so many levels and saved so many trees and so much angst. It's a place where we can house all of our information and archive things and keep a history of what happened before. When the new board or new member comes in, we can point to those things and they can review that, and it's always there. We know where it is.”

BoardEffect has been thoughtfully designed to provide the features your board and staff need to manage a mission-driven organization effectively.

Find out more about board development by watching the full webinar. BoardEffect offers other resources such as a volunteer board development guide and a board development cheat sheet.

Request a demo to see how we can help your board.