#1 Step to Get Your Nonprofit Board Positioned for Success in 2025
Ready to get your nonprofit board back on track in 2025? Start here!
Maintaining an effective nonprofit board isn’t rocket science, but it does involve intention. And, although you might tell yourself “they’re technically my boss,” if you want to have a badass nonprofit and move your agency to the next level, YOU need to know what might be going “wrong” with your board so you can develop strategies to fix the board issues!
Sadly, If you're like most nonprofits, chances are your board functions in one of two ways:
The Disengaged Board (Aka - the rubber stampers)
A disengaged board of directors tends to appear to others (especially the executive directors and staff) as if they just don’t care. From an executive director’s perspective, you probably tell yourself things like…
“My board doesn’t want to help. They just don’t care.”
Chances are your board meetings pretty much suck. There’s no discussion or people aren’t even showing up. If you have a disengaged board, you can feel like you’re a one-man-show just keep the doors open at your agency! You might feel like your boards are just there to rubber stamp things.
It ends up really being 100% you - the executive director - maintaining operations and then reporting out at the board meetings which feel like a total and complete waste of time.
2. The Overly Engaged Board (Aka - the micro-managing, non-strategic board)
An overly engaged board or super eager might sound like a good thing. But trust me, if you've ever seen this, either as a staff member or executive director, it's absolutely frustrating and makes you spend more time pleasing and appeasing your board than doing your job.
Yes, your board members are giving lots of time and energy, but 99.9% of the time they are giving their time and energy to the wrong things!
These nonprofit boards of directors get sucked into the Enticing Complexity of Operations. (click here to learn more about the #1 nonprofit leadership mistake.) When you have this type of board, you might spend board meetings talking about T-shirt colors, staff issues and filling dozens of minutes telling stories of specific clients. With this type of board, you might see board members emailing back and forth with staff daily, setting up programming meetings for the organization, and giving the executive director a great deal of unsolicited advice.
These overly engaged boards spend so much time dicking around in staff work, that they fail to do their job! really not thinking about the future of the organization.
Yes, they're doing things but they're not really doing effective board work. That is strategic and forward thinking.
If neither of these board descriptions describe your board, congratu-freakin’-lations!
But, if one of these two options above perfectly describes your nonprofit board of directors, I need to make sure you REALLY UNDERSTAND SOMETHING!
Just because someone's appointed to a nonprofit board doesn't mean they intuitively know what a nonprofit board member is supposed to be doing!
That's why we created the NONPROFIT BOARD MEMBER JOB DESCRIPTION. You can download this job description for free in the link below.
When you're trying to get your board on the same page, you need to make sure that each board member understands what his or her role is and what your role is. This is the FIRST STEP to leading a nonprofit - where you can speak the same language to move your agency forward instead of spinning your wheels.
So if you're going to do one thing to move your nonprofit agency forward,
Download this board job description.
Add Board Member Job Description to the top of your agenda for the next board meeting.
Go over each item on the checklist out load during the board meeting.
Send to board member who were not present to read, sign and return to you by a deadline.
Now I want to warn you, this is JUST THE FIRST STEP!
It can't be the only thing you do. Ongoing board training for nonprofits is important and essential!
