Excerpts Series: Board Evaluation
NOTE: In today’s excerpt series from our training, Board Evaluation, we refer to other Board Trainings we offer, including Board Basics. If you’d like to take a look at Board Basics training, click here. OR hang tight — we’ll be sharing an excerpt from Board Basics soon.
Board Evaluation
If you’ve been involved in nonprofit work for any length of time, you recognize that people come on to the Board of an organization for a variety of reasons. This is important to highlight in this context as we start evaluating our own Boards. We need to understand that sometimes people have a different motivation to join a Board rather than becoming quality, effective Board members. We offer an entire training session that teaches onboarding and how to do that well.
However, for this session of Board Evaluation, we need to recognize that sometimes Board members have a different agenda. This is key as we begin the conversation today about measuring the effectiveness of our Boards. Some Board members did not join the Board to necessarily be impactful to the organization. We need to talk about this and call it out upfront as we begin to talk about conducting an effective Board Evaluation.
Understanding a Board’s role and responsibility is critical if we’re going to have a successful Board as well as a successful organization. We know, just from the work that we do with nonprofits, that “we” nonprofits don't always do a great job in training our Boards. We don’t always recognize that people come in with different levels of experience. Often we don’t take the time to educate them well. We need to do a better job in these areas.
Looking at the roles and responsibilities of Board members we, as nonprofits, need to take ownership. We are the ones to have a conversation with them. It is our responsibility to educate them and remind them about their roles and responsibilities as well as our expectations of them.
This should happen during the onboarding process, but if we’re coming in at this juncture trying to evaluate our Boards that are already in place, taking ownership is going to help us have effective Boards moving forward.
“Nonprofit — train your Board well.”
We need to make sure that we’re arming Board members with what they need to be successful because Boards are responsible for the long-term success of the nonprofit. They’re not just a sidebar committee — they are responsible for ensuring the long-term viability of the nonprofit that they’re governing. This is a critical point to understand when we talk about evaluating the governing Board.
In order for any organization to know how they’re doing, they have to conduct self assessments. It is a Board’s responsibility to assess how the organization’s doing overall — not only how the Board is doing, but — how is the leadership doing? How is the CEO or Executive Director doing? The Board is responsible for assessing the organization programmatically — how is the organization making an impact? Boards need to be constantly looking at and evaluating all kinds of elements of the organization, which includes how they are doing as a Board.
These are important fundamentals to think about in terms of this topic of Board Evaluation.
Check out the testimonial above from one of our on-site Board Evaluation Trainings.
Did you know we do on-site training? We do!
Contact our office to find out more: Call 866.925.0237 or Email: info@communitydevelopmentprofessionals.com
