Charities Find Ways to Give Board Members Bigger Roles in Policy

When the Rev. Barry Chance sits on a charity board, he likes to do much more than just keep the seat warm.

“I like it when I get a call from a chief executive asking my advice or asking me to have lunch with someone who wants to know more about the organization,” he says. “And I like it when the leader clearly communicates our goals and shows me how I can help us get there.”

The staff leaders of Evergreen Presbyterian Ministries, in Haughton, La., and Friendship Ministries, in Grand Rapids, Mich., have done exactly that to keep him engaged as their board member.

“Those luncheons in the community often lead to donations and volunteers,” says Sue Buchholtz, Evergreen’s chief executive. Friendship Ministries often involves Rev. Chase in everyday decisions outside the board’s normal realm. He liked that Nella Uitvlugt, the group’s executive director, recently asked him to evaluate a proposal by an author who wanted Friendship to publish a book on ministering to people with disabilities.

“Typically we think of board members as fundraisers, but it’s increasingly important to have board members who can offer sound and honest advice,” Ms. Uitvlugt says.

Part of keeping him engaged is giving him the opportunity to meet the people the charities serve. “Maybe it’s my generation,” says Rev. Chance, 32. “When we’re hands-on, seeing things for ourselves, we tend to trust more. We can see that the organization is efficient and worth supporting.”

The relationship between nonprofit executives and their board members is evolving: Newer, younger board members tend to value direct participation and palpable, meaningful results that justify their commitment to an organization. Charities that recognize what trustees want from their board service will build stronger relationships with them—and be better equipped to weather current economic storms, say experts.

Challenging the Board

Today’s board members want to be involved as the big decisions take shape, according to Doug Eadie, an Oldsmar, Fla., consultant who coaches boards and chief executives.

“People want to make an impact with their volunteer work. Otherwise they don’t want to waste their time,” he says. “High-achieving people tend to be on boards, and they really do need to achieve something.”

And if board members are not getting that level of meaningful participation, they may take it out on the charity’s top staff by nitpicking and giving bad performance reviews, according to Mr. Eadie.

It may seem counterintuitive that busy people want to be more deeply involved, but they do, he says. They want to spend less time in formal board meetings and more time hammering out the details.

At the Resource Exchange, a group in Colorado Springs that serves people with developmental disabilities, David Ervin, the charity’s executive director, routinely challenges his board to help the organization serve its clients better.

For example, trustees huddled with the charity’s staff members to hatch a plan to open a full-fledged health clinic for its clients, many of whom have a difficult time accessing health care. The clinic was a new and potentially risky program for the organization.

“It made some of our board members nervous, but others were downright giddy,” says Mr. Ervin. Had it been planned entirely by staff, he suggests, the board may not have approved it.

The board members got personally involved in the research and analysis over two years. The project tapped their full range of expertise and brought them closer, Mr. Ervin says. When the charity’s Developmental Disabilities Health Center opened last year, he notes, every board member attended the event.

“They got to see the impact of their work—it’s not the same as acting on an agenda item,” he says. “It reaffirmed for many what they were there for.”

Today, 280 patients are enrolled in the center, according to Mr. Ervin. “It was frankly a blast, and the energy continues as we think about what to do next,” he adds.

His board’s relative youth, he says, contributed to trustees’ willingness to “go for it”: Forty percent of them are under 50. Young professionals are used to change and risk, he says.

Another key to the project’s success, Mr. Ervin believes, was helping board members see beyond their charity’s needs. It is critical, he says, to keep trustees briefed on what’s happening in the community and in other nonprofits so they feel like part of something bigger and can think strategically.

Meaningful Meetings

To nurture a good relationship with board members, meetings need to be designed for meaningful participation, says Carol Ackerson, chief financial and operations officer for the Girl Scouts’ Arizona Cactus-Pine Council, in Phoenix.

Ms. Ackerson’s organization has re-engineered board meetings to provide more interaction for members. Routine items, such as minutes of the previous meeting, are bundled together and dispatched quickly, and committee reports are held to a minimum, allowing time for deeper conversations on the more challenging topics, she says.

For example, until recently the Girl Scouts was not doing a good job of recruiting members from the growing number of Hispanic girls in Phoenix. But focused board meetings, with help from the staff, resulted in the formation of a circle of Hispanic advisers and then the addition of more Hispanic board members, resulting in more Hispanic Girl Scouts.

As has been the case for many charities in recent years, finances have proved a continuing challenge for the board and its organization.

The 2008 stock-market crash led to a $1.5-million deficit that year as a result of the charity’s investment losses. But because staff and board members were working closely and talking openly about money issues, they avoided deep cuts in services in 2009.

“During good times, the relationship between a board and staff is important, but during tough times, it’s critical,” says Ms. Ackerson.

Recent board meetings have dealt in detail with a $15-million fundraising drive to renovate a Scout camp, creating a leadership center for girls and women. The charity wouldn’t be in a position today to consider a major campaign, Ms. Ackerson says, if staff and board members hadn’t developed a good relationship and made time to talk frankly and regularly—before and after the recession—about financial issues.

Constructive Tension

When Virginia Jacko became chief executive of the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in 2005, the group’s board members argued frequently, she says. Had she gotten caught up in the squabbling, she thinks things would have become worse.

Instead, she redirected the trustees’ focus. With the help of a board consultant, she created strong committees, where most of the work of the board now gets done. Most reports are given by committee chairs, not the charity’s staff members, which puts board members in the spotlight—and deepens their commitment.

The changes helped slash the length of formal board meetings from three hours to 90 minutes. Assembling a quorum of trustees, once a consistent problem, is no longer difficult, says Ms. Jacko.

The changes have helped fundraising, too: The operating budget has climbed from $2-million to $6-million, and the group successfully engineered a merger with a sister organization.

“None of that would have happened with a quarreling board,” says Ms. Jacko.

There’s a difference between lively discussion and squabbling, notes Marta Miranda, chief executive of the Center for Women and Families, in Louisville, Ky. “It’s my job to raise hard issues with the board, and it’s important for them to ask penetrating questions,” Ms. Miranda says. “We don’t always agree, but once a decision is made, it’s time to move forward together.”

Differing Perspectives

Trustees and staff members approach issues in different ways, so a healthy tension is normal and even desirable, Ms. Ackerson says.

The board brings a community-based perspective to the discussion. Part of the board members’ job is to point out when staff members are treating important issues too routinely.

For instance, notes Ms. Ackerson, since the recession, many charity staffs are overworked. “They may start taking shortcuts,” she says, adding that it’s the board’s job to make sure those shortcuts don’t compromise the organization’s work.

As younger people increasingly join charity boards, they are posing more questions because they approach board work differently than previous generations, says Jack Levine, founder of the 4Generations Institute in Tallahassee, Fla., which consults on multigenerational management and volunteerism. Often because of their hands-on involvement, he says, they are introducing new concerns. That inquisitiveness, he says, needs to be embraced to nurture a good relationship between them and the charity.

“Their streams of questions bother some of my boomer peers, who can see the younger members as being disrespectful or unappreciative of what was done in the past,” says Mr. Levine, who is 62. “But they are probably asking questions that need to be asked, and they are bringing energies and experience that can help the organization be much more relevant.”