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More on Boards: Two Excellent Resources

© Wayne E. Groner

There are many excellent resources on working with board members of nonprofit organizations. The audiences for the resources include new board members, experienced board members, difficult board members, and staff who work with board members.

Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the nonprofit’s chief executive officer to see that board members understand their responsibilities and roles. The CEO sets the pace by managing agendas, budgets, flow of information, contents of reports, working relationships among board members and staff, and by personal example of annual giving. If board members don’t know what they should do, then the CEO must educate them, either individually or by group.

The two resources covered below approach board member education from different perspectives. The first emphasizes what the CEO can and must do within the framework of the traditional nonprofit board model. The second emphasizes what board members can and must do using new thinking for religious organization boards.

The 2002 Board Member Manual is in its twentieth year. Its purpose is to help the CEO keep board members focused on their jobs. Practical strategies, forms, and checklists are designed to minimize conflicts, assist the board in raising funds, and keep meetings on track. Materials include a statement of personal commitment for board members, board member job description, a test to help separate management issues (what the staff does) and policy issues (what the board does), parliamentary procedures chart, motion card, committee analysis form, planning questionnaire, recruitment guidelines, and skills development activities.

One chapter is devoted to the board’s responsibility for raising money, including an ideas checklist and strategies for building donor relations.

Board Member Manual is published by Aspen Publishers, Inc. It is 70 pages in paperback, spiral bound, and retails for $82. It may be purchased direct from the publisher, 800-638-8437, at $38 each for five to nine copies, and $35 each for ten or more copies.

The second resource, Building Effective Boards for Religious Organizations, is declared to be a handbook for trustees, presidents, and church leaders. Its purpose, say editors Thomas P. Holland and David C. Hester, is to “enable the practice of better, more faithful governance so that religious organizations may more successfully be bearers of God’s love, as they intend to be.”

Ten authors bring their perspectives on this purpose. Topics include a scriptural model to replace the generally accepted management model for boards, basic duties and responsibilities of boards, brief history of religious governance, the interconnection of congregation mission and governance, development of effective boards, distribution of power and authority on a board, boards in a social and institutional context, board challenges when organizations merge, strategic planning, and the role of boards in reading the current and future health of the organization. The book includes twenty-four figures, tables, and exhibits.

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