Board giving (cont'd)

My thought is that if you want a fair, just and equitable solution that's workable and focuses on the long-term good of the nonprofit organization, then you have to use a process that will produce that kind of result. That means we have to work harder and do our homework. There are at least six steps to such a procedure, and I'm going to give those to you in just a minute, but bear with me, there's another issue we have to deal with here.

Why is it that board members can come onto a nonprofit board with the belief that so little will be expected from them?

If you look at the way nonprofits are set up, it's contradictory to the way we recruit board members, isn't it? Nonprofit boards serve a wonderful social purpose. I heard a speech by Lawrence Lindsey, a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, many years ago in a speech in Kansas City to one of the first assemblies of the National Conference on Planned Giving. He said that if you give a charity a dollar, they'll most likely return about 6 dollars of service to the society. But if you give the government $6 in taxes, you're going to be lucky if you get a dollar of service in return. I assumed he knew whereof he spoke.

So charities are effective and efficient, right? They serve an important social purpose. What's the root of their effectiveness? What makes them work so efficiently? Volunteers. Especially volunteer boards. Our charities are run by volunteers who have philanthropic motivations, the love of humankind, at heart. They're self-policing. The United Way scandal a number of years ago was handled internally, by their board members who blew the whistle on the exorbitant salary of the national executive. They cleaned it up themselves.

So charity boards serve a distinct social purpose, right? Their volunteer governance keeps social services, arts, medical and educational social objectives being achieved effectively, efficiently. Who in their right mind would, then, assume, that the work of the individual board member on the individual nonprofit board would be easy, without responsibility? It just doesn't make sense.

But that's what happens in all too many nonprofits: board members are recruited on the flimsiest of excuses, never trained, never told what they have to do and how they have to do it, never told they have to give. But yet we expect the board to perform. We expect the board to do strategic planning that directs the nonprofit in ways that will assure its achievement of its goals and purposes. We expect the board to provide the financial resources necessary to carry out that strategic plan. We expect the board members to be community leaders who give at a leadership level. But when we recruit them, what do we tell them? "Oh, it won't take that much out of your schedule, it won't be hassle."

That's highly ccontradictory! Why does this happen? I think it happens only where there is not a well-though-out process for populating our boards. It happens when board members' desire for the relatively soft rewards of volunteer service are too easily satiated. That is, they get their rewards simply by being around the table with one another doing good things, but are not challenged to reap the much better rewards to be found in doing better things.

What I think should happen is this:

1. A board needs to have a job description that is written out, known in advance, repeatedly emphasized in board meetings. Put the board's job description and the outline of the strategic plan on a placemat at each board person's place. The job description should be one that includes all the board responsibilities, including meetings, committees, giving, advocacy in the community, leadership among volunteers, etc.

2. Board members should be brought onto the board with a process that includes: identifying many prospective members, recruiting only the best of those, fully disclosing to those prospective members all aspects of the board's life, installing them with public ceremony, training them in what they must do for the organization, evaluating their performance, re-training periodically in the various responsibilities, and, finally, at the end of the line, de-briefing them before they leave after their stated tenure is finished.

But very few nonprofits do this. The really successful ones do. But of the more than 5000 groups and organizations in southeast Michigan that have nonprofit status from the IRS, how many do you think engage in this kind of rigorous board recruitment process? Michigan has over 32,000 nonprofits, and we're growing at a rate of more than 3000 per year. From what I've seen in 20 years here, practicing actively among the charities for the past 10 years, my bet is that maybe 30 organizations have such a process in place.

No wonder we have a tough time getting board members to give!

But now we really MUST get to our Example #2.