Episode 197: Selecting Board Members - The Correct Ones in the Correct Timeframe
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
It's such a privilege for me to have you take a few minutes of your day to join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall. I'm going to jump into the conversation about boards, but I'm going to look at this a little bit differently today and talk about how we select and try to attract our board members. In particular, when is the right time? Who are the right people? What is the process behind this?
I think all too often, we look at our bylaws, or our boards look at their bylaws, and say, "Well, we have a minimum of X and a maximum of Y." And we're having these people leave, so let's go find some people. And they find people, and there's really never the full outright conversation about who, why, and when we should be talking to people. That's really what we want to try to address today.
This all stems from some work I'm doing with a client that's been really fascinating when we get into the details of some of the things we'll talk about today in terms of process. But it's really more about why we want our board members to be certain people in certain ways in terms of how we use them for our advantage.
We have to start with the responsibilities of boards. There's kind of this old school, new school mythology that I like to talk about—old school, new school. The old school was really based upon what I think of as coming in, having a mission moment, looking at the finances, listening to an executive report or administrative report, then maybe having one or two pieces of business, and then we have lunch and we leave.
What we know, if you're in this profession, is that we have to change that. So, the conversation around responsibilities starts with the bigger picture of what I did in podcast number 59, which is the "Big Three Responsibilities." I'm not going to go into a lot of detail there, but it's thinking big. It's about strategy. Go back and listen to that podcast on the big three basics of what we're looking for in terms of the large responsibilities.
Also, in podcast 68, I talked about good governance at a very high level—things around policies and how you operate inside the board and things of that nature. Those two are supportive of what I'm talking about today. The reason why we want the right board members is that their primary role needs to always be: how do they connect us with the community?
I am someone who believes—having spent three years in law school—I have a firm belief in good governance and fiduciary responsibilities. I absolutely think they are quintessential, and much of the time when not done correctly, they can cause problems. But I also would advocate that they can be done in a way that is a lot more streamlined. We have a smaller group worrying about the details and bringing them before the larger board in consent or normal processes.
We need and want great, good, and strong fiduciary responsibilities—from approving the 990, to having an ultimate responsibility for a nonprofit board to oversee an executive, to having the review process, job description, and expectations laid out in the right way. We certainly have some basic policies required from a good fiduciary board, like those mentioned in our 990s: conflict of interest, whistleblower, travel policy, document retention, and things of that nature.
But our primary role that we need from boards is connections. That's been the fascinating thing in working with this client. Their board meetings have become stagnant, uninteresting, and less attended because they're being asked to do less and less. These are important people who frankly have other things to do if they don't think their time is being used efficiently.
This is all to say that in this process, the way in which we choose board members and the process we go through is critical. The first realization is that the advisory council helps us understand that when we look at our biggest and most likely prospects down the road, a plurality of them come from our board volunteers. You throw in your executive team, and if you're in healthcare, grateful patients, physicians, or, if you're in higher ed or other places, faculty or staff members—you kind of get the full picture. Then there's obviously the self-identified prospects, which you get by definition.
The point is, if the best possible next prospects come from board engagement and connection, then why isn't that the thing we're talking about as the primary role? Carrying a portfolio of three to five people that they are partnering with staff on to build relationships, making sure that they're hosting little tiny salons in their house every year or every other year to introduce the organization they hopefully believe in to their friends in the community, or having a set number of referrals they're responsible for. Obviously, some basics like making a gift are included.
This is why this is important. If you're not doing this strategically, if you're just allowing the board—or if you're on the board, allowing yourself—to choose people as part of a process without taking it strategically, you'll end up with a board that probably isn't engaged, doesn't represent the community, and doesn't connect you to the community in the way the organization needs.
Another important element in this discussion is the matrix of different attributes that board members represent. These include their talents, roles in the community, and who they are as people. I am not opposed to that chart; I told the client that I think it's an important tool to ensure we have a wide variety of different kinds of board members. In a small organization, this may be even more important because staff size may be limited, and roles like a lawyer or accountant might fill functions that larger organizations have staff for.
But, at the end of the day, those are secondary issues—not forgotten, but secondary. The primary role is connections, introductions to staff, representing the organization in the community, and building deeper, more meaningful relationships. Therefore, we must concentrate more on who they are and who they're connected to.
This brings us to the tactics, which we'll get to in a moment. But first, I'd like to talk about the importance of size. I have advocated for many years, decades now, for larger boards. The issue always seems to be management versus purpose—the bigger the board, the harder it is to manage, which is a fair comment. But if the purpose of the board is introductions, then why don't we have much larger boards that better represent the community in which you exist?
If you can define your community—however you want to define it, and we'll talk about that in a minute in the tactics—you probably are defining it too narrowly. I find it interesting that the management of the board seems to always trump the role. Is there a balance? Of course. But I've been a part of building a board of over 100 people that was introducing two to three key members of new opportunities and members of the community to gift officers.
Think about it: if you have a board of 100 people and each introduces two to three new prospects, that's 300 new people in your pipeline every year. Is there management required? Yes. Did they have to work through that? Yes. But they put the primary emphasis on the role they wanted and built the board to meet that expectation.
I had another client in healthcare with a wide geographic area and multiple hospitals. Seven or eight years ago, we went through a discernment process where I struggled to explain to the executive leaders—not the philanthropy leaders—that they would need a larger board. I told them that as they grew, they'd want philanthropic connections in the communities where they had hospitals. Eventually, they came around, and now their bylaws allow for 41 or 43 board members. Yes, there's more management, but those board members are pushing into those communities and opening doors, which has produced money. Isn't that the end goal?
All of this is to say that strategic conversations about size, priorities, job descriptions, and the knowledge of the board's true role must precede any process. Before we begin the process of selecting board members, we must have these conversations and put everything on the table.
There were some board members who disagreed. I said, "Here's the data." I'm always interested in other people's opinions and data—what they find. What do they have? If they don't like it, that's an opinion, but it isn't data. What may happen is that some board members may move off to make room for those who want to be more engaged.
So what is the process that you might consider, the tactical for the next eight minutes or so, maybe seven, on what you can do to better select your board from a timing and an action perspective? So let me tell you a couple things that we did to help the board better understand who they were. The first thing we did was, or that I did, was I put together a map. And on the map, just, you know, screen grabbed it from whatever it was, Google Maps, I plotted all of the board members, current board members, home addresses. And to say that they had one part of town covered is an understatement. Man, they had it covered. Well, when you show that to someone, they kind of look at it and go, well, we don't represent a large part of the community. We'll get to how to define community in a moment. And the answer was they weren't. Sometimes visualization helps. We are here in terms of a geographic area. We represent and serve these people, these different sections of our community.
So let's talk about defining the size of the community. In this client's case, they have connections, immense amount of donors from places that are too, as much as 250 miles away. But yet the board represented an incredibly small part of the large community where the flagship was. I mean, within 10 minutes of the flagship, you know, if any representation in these other parts of the community, well, how are you supposed to engage those places where you have engaged, you know, the organization works in those places, gets people to be engaged in those places, whether it's healthcare, education, food service, or food insecurity, whatever. If all you have is like the neighborhood represented, and that's basically kind of what it was. We've mapped that out. And then I put a map up on the screen of all the different places that they have either connections or donors. And it was hundreds of miles wide and long. And they kind of looked and they began to understand, whoa, we are not connecting to the places where we have opportunity. And then I had a staff member talk about a couple of examples where in these more distant communities, they're moving into conversations, but they have no advocacy locally, because everybody's from basically one neighborhood. This is strategic thought.
So the first thing is I would map where your board members are from. And I'd also map, hot map, whatever you want to call it, where your donors are from. And then where you have service and begin to overlay them so that to see if there's a representation, visualizing that. Number two is then we asked them and gave them some definition, but just asked them to tell us where they had social connection. Where do they spend their free time? Where do they spend their business, professional time. So this got into, do you belong to a country club? Are you part of a wine tasting? Are you part of a young professionals organization? Do you work at certain companies? Do you have vacation homes in certain places? What is it that you do? Where'd you go to college? And we began with a chart and we laid all of this out. And again, we found some interesting things that we were able to show on the screen and you could see the eyebrows. They got two country clubs locked down. I mean, they are represented, but there were a lot of other places, particularly country clubs, and that's something that this community has people who do on a regular basis. Man, there were several that they had no connection to at all. None.
Then we got into the conversation of geography. And I started listing all the places where there were philanthropic opportunities to align with the map that showed where all the donors were from. And we started talking about these communities, no connection to them. And there's plenty of opportunity in those places. They weren't the first thought because some of them were a little bit smaller. But once there was the thought process and showing it on a map and showing it in a list, they began to realize, oh boy, we're not connected. We then talked about religion. And they have one specific religious doctrine, one religious faith covered. I mean, not a problem. They can get to anybody in those particular religious organizations or the greater religion in the community in that particular area. But they were missing critical other religious connections. Then we laid out their corporate. And we started listing larger corporations in the geographic area in which this organization serves where there's no connection. And then we had a staff member tell the story that a board member from a very large corporation rolled off the board last year. They were used to getting because this was an executive $25,000 a year. They sent the same submission in the board member that rolled off for this year. They got $2,500 because they didn't have a connection.
So all of this is to say that we need to do a better job of helping our board see who they are and see our community in the right way and what those connections are. And it was fascinating to watch because all of a sudden their creative thoughts about, well, I know people in that particular area of town or that area of the community or that particular social group. Like, well, you haven't talked about it yet.
The third piece of this is what I called first choice. Well, let's use a corporation. We talked about the one that that will loss the gift. Finding someone from that corporation would be actually fairly easy. Is that the person we actually want? First choice to me is always about when we talk about board selection. Let's put three names on the board of the people we actually want. And then let's go get those. And if we can't get those, then we wait for the next year to see if we can get them again. Just being having people on the board who are part of a particular community doesn't mean you, the people you actually want. In a corporation, are they high enough up to influence decisions in a country club? Are they well connected in the in a religious community? Are they an elder or a leader or some kind of connector that's been there for a long time? I guarantee you can find people to represent certain sections of your community. The question is, are they the people you actually want? And sometimes that's a hard conversation because you start very privately having a discussion. We want A, B, and C. Somebody says, well, I know G over here. G is in who we want. Can they influence the decisions about how this organization, our nonprofit is engaged in the community? Can they leverage conversations that would open doors potentially for dollars? If G can't, then you got to find a way to get A, B and C, which may mean it's a multi-year process. So first choice, third thing to consider.
Fourth is timeline. I put together a timeline for them of what I think might be the best way to look at this year over year over year and they were kind of surprised because my timeline started 14 months before the actually board member becoming a member of the board officially. Started 14 months before the end of the fiscal year, before the one that a new board member might come on because you're picking your chair of your committee, nominating committee executive committee, governance committee, whoever's involved with leading this effort. You want a committee around them that can help manufacture the process and engagement. It's early in the year, January and February, we're reviewing job description, putting up first choice names, looking at our misconceptions, where are our holes? Which leaves you time by the time you get to April and May to have an opportunity because you may have people on your first choice list that you don't know that well. Somebody has to make a connection. Maybe they need a tour of the facility. Maybe they need time to think about it. Maybe they, if you just show up and you're trying to get them on, let's say, for the January first, beginning of the fiscal year calendar year and you show up in November, late of November, the chances of bringing somebody on who has influence, who has connection, who has a life professionally and personally is really narrow. You should have given them a chance to figure out why this could be important to them, why they could make a difference. All of these things start months before. And I think one of the great errors is we don't start this early enough. This is a full year process that begins in January and February with basic things like reviewing the bylaws, looking at who we're losing, making sure we have representation, identifying the holes, putting names up on a board, creating our first choice list and then figuring out how we can connect to them and giving time for staff and the board to bring people in to know more about the organization over the summer and early fall before you get to the final conversation and the one-on-one interviews that should take place.
The fifth piece of this is a sense of accountability. Part of great board engagement is creating accountability for board members to understand what they're supposed to do through the job description, those primary roles, making introductions, referrals, make a gift, carry a portfolio, but also creating a dashboard that can allow them to understand that during board meetings we're going to show this. And it's a dashboard of their work, their responsibility. I'm not talking about it individually, Randall, you've done nothing, so we're going to embarrass you. Add it all together and make it cumulative. You have those one-on-one conversations in private. But a dashboard pretty simply, and I just broke it apart in three major categories, giving are all the board members giving, has everybody made a gift? Creating connections, kind of three things to think about. Have they made the right number of personal introductions or referrals? If it's one or two or three per board member, just take it times, have them with the responsibilities, time is the number of board members. Have they hosted small private receptions? One every year, one every other year? Have they attended two events and brought appropriate guests? You can dashboard that, just track it, put it up in the board meeting. Governance is the third piece. Or do we have attendance in board meetings? Meaning are people not missing? Are they a member of an, are they an active member? I should say, have a committee? Have they completed their year-end board self-evaluation? Have they completed the board overall evaluation? Really basic things, but if you start putting this up cumulatively, what it will do is create a sense of accountability amongst the board. That gives you power to make sure you're attracting people.
The one thing I've realized about great board members, the people you want, those first choices that I was speaking about is they don't want their time wasted and they want to make a difference. If you're not doing these kind of things, great job description, you've got a great orientation, and by the way, I did a special podcast on orientations, podcast number 13 all the way back, near the beginning of this run of weekly podcasts for the Round with Randall. Go back and listen to that about what that looks like and feels like. If there's not an accountability, if there's not a sense of collaboration, they will walk away because they have better things to do to make a difference. This isn't just to make the organization better. It's to actually live up to what great board members expect in their service. And that's what mapping and visualization looks like. That's what connecting in terms of the different social geographic areas, social groups, networking that they should be representing and creating a wide diverse population in there. Having the right timeline that it's long enough, don't forget your first choices. You want the right people, just not someone to fill a seat. And lastly, accountability. And I gave you some examples of what that might look like in very simple terms. All of this is how you get into the choices you make, the organizational choices, the board level choices of what a board can and should be through the right time with the right people. Don't forget, check out the blogs at Hallett Philanthropy dot com. Two a week, get an RSS feed right to you. And if you'd like to reach out to me, it's podcasting@Hallettphilanthropy.com. More and more, we're going to need the community to be supportive of non-profits, fill the holes somewhere between free enterprise, capitalism, and the government. There's a hole. And this is what non-profits do to make the community a better place.
What you do every day, whether you're a board member, a leader, a gift officer, someone on the staff, who volunteer, whoever, a donor, you are making a difference. And this brings me to my favorite saying, you listen to the podcast, you're probably tired of hearing it, but it's worth repeating. Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened, what we do every day, whoever you are and whoever you work with and partner within the organization, you are people who make things happen for the people and the things in our community that are wondering what happened. And we need more people like you, either on staff or more importantly like today, on our boards that are willing to stick their neck out, stick lean in and get something done to make whatever your mission's work is. The value it brings to the community, to make a difference in people's lives. That is worthwhile. And so, I say thank you for being someone who makes things happen. I'll look forward to seeing you next time right back here on the next edition of Around With Randall.
And don't forget, make it a great day.