Stanford Social Innovation Review

I have served on several regional and nationwide boards, but most of my experience has been with local ones. I think that there are some differences, but board recruiting and keeping your members engaged are pretty much the same at any level.

You will find strong board members in a couple of ways. The first way is to sift through people who are already passionate about your organization and have the appropriate skills. While you are in transition to being national, it will be very helpful to have some core members around whom you can build a national board. The second way is to identify people who have a passion about the issue your nonprofit addresses, and possess the skill set you need. You will want to use a number of methods for identifying these people—everything from asking your current stakeholders for suggestions, to looking at the websites of similar organizations to see who is on their boards, to looking at the leadership of the top firms in the sector you serve (for instance, we like to have several leaders from the technology sector on our public TV station’s board).

This talent scouting is something that you should do all of the time, keeping a file of prospective board members. Your partner in this work should be the nomination committee of the board. Coordinating the identifying and recruiting will probably be a staff function, but taking responsibility for recruiting a strong board as you transition is the board’s responsibility and one of the most important things they are doing as you grow. Get a weak board, and you’ll suffer for years before you can fix it. Get a strong one, and your organization is probably going to come out of the transition phase in great shape.

Before you recruit anyone, you should establish the criteria for the people you seek. We review our criteria annually as we seek our new slate of nominees, and alter it as the organization’s strategy and the environment in which we operate change. Four or five critical skills or abilities are probably enough. You measure each person under consideration, and develop a depth chart. Be aspirational in seeking people who have the potential to be board leaders; it is part of succession planning. I try to help our nomination committee recruit people who will be in the top third of effectiveness as board members. That way your board is always getting better. Once you have about twice as many potential board members as you need, start with cultivation efforts, whether that’s inviting the person to organizational events, sending materials, or using other ways to help them become more familiar with what you do. This can be a short period, like several months to a year or more. Then we have the person with the strongest relationship make the ask. Usually, as the CEO, I pair up with the board member or other person who is making the invitation. We invite them to our station to show them what we do. We also create a briefing book which has board member duties, strategic plan, expectations for financial support, annual report, by-laws, audited financials and board meeting dates. We talk about the interest of the potential board member in the work we do, trying to probe the passion level, learn about nonprofit board experience that our background checks haven’t turned up, and go over the briefing book materials, which they can review at their leisure. The person with the relationship makes the invitation.

I would suggest that you look at the books about board development and pick one that you like, share it with others in management of your organization, and with the leadership of your board. You may also want to seek out organizations that have gone from local or regional to national, and have some peer to peer conversations. You could also search on the internet for people who are writing about this issue.

My own experiences lead me to believe that it's important that you are phsyically together several times a year, and that you work hard as the national board takes shape to do some teambuilding work to get to know and trust each other. When you have that in place, you can work electronically. If you don’t do that, I’ve seen boards limp along without coming together as a group, and not much gets accomplished. The board leadership and the senior managers also need to be willing and budget for travel to connect with the board members where they live. I try to see our own board members quarterly in their communities, and that strengthens our relationships for the work we do on behalf of our organization. We have e-mails that go out with weekly updates about our work product—which is television programming and outreach—but I also drop them an e-mail about halfway between board meetings to let them know what is going on. When you start doing some of these things regularly, I think you’ll be comfortable with the board, and the nervousness will go away.