Tag: solicitation

September 16, 2011 DonorDreams Board development, Fundraising

Boards Gone Wild

A week or so ago I saw a very bizarre tweet from my local newspaper float through my Twitter feed. The tweet included a link to an article about Elgin Symphony Orchestra’s board of directors and what I’d characterize as a “board revolt”. Suddenly, I felt like one of those people standing in a grocery store check-out line staring at “The Inquirer” and unable to resist taking that ‘rag’ off the newsstand to see if aliens really did help Oprah lose 100-pounds. Have I piqued your curiosity yet? to read the article from Dave Gathman of The Courier News.

It certainly seems like there is a lot going on beneath the surface, but this is what it looks like to this outside observer:

Key board volunteers who are also former board presidents and major donors are pissed off about a multitude of things and resigned out of frustration.
There is obviously conflict over rising deficits and debt.
There seems to be disagreement over the strategic direction of the organization.
There appears to be many fingers getting pointed in many directions and the resource development/fundraising department is in someone’s crosshairs.
I smell personality conflicts all around the table, especially between the CEO and certain board volunteers.
Is it just me or is the current board president kind of stirring the pot when he tells the newspaper that donations and ticket sales have picked up since these people resigned? Perhaps, there was even a schism among volunteers on the board of directors.

WOW!!! This is the stuff that Hollywood movies are made of. OK . . . maybe I’m getting carried away, but it is at least what after-school, made-for-television movies are made of. Right?

I find myself fixated on a number of thoughts and questions such as: What should the CEO do in this situation? How does this board move forward? What do you say to your donors when your dirty laundry spills over into the local newspaper? Who is getting fired?

However, the thing that weighs most on my mind is: “Who are these people who claim to be board volunteers?” I’ve worked with between 50 – 75 different boards across a 13 state region over the last 5-years, and this isn’t a familiar sight to me. More oftentimes than not, I found boards who would rather sustain pain from medieval torture devices rather than engage in discussion and dialog that “might” possibly lead to disagreement.

So, I’d like to thank the Elgin Symphony Orchestra for renewing my faith in board governance. While the outcome might not have been desirable, I believe once again that there are passionate, mission-focused volunteers who serve on non-profit boards.

As for where to go from here, I can’t stop thinking about Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Here are just a few things I might be thinking about if I were in the CEO’s hot seat:

Organize a ton of donor focus groups to engage supporters in how they think the organization’s issues could be addressed
Develop a donor survey to secure similar input from smaller donors
Commission a resource development audit to dissect revenue streams and look critically at all resource development systems
Start down a strategic planning road and make sure the planning model you choose is very “organic”and engages ALL stakeholder groups
Target other influential community leaders who you’ve always wanted on your board but couldn’t (or didn’t), go talk to them about your planned response, and ask them to get involved

Regardless of the path chosen, they better do something soon or their non-profit board room might start to look something like this Saturday Night Live sketch.

What would you do if you were the CEO? Board president? Was your faith in boards “renewed” as it was in my case? Have you ever been faced with a similar situation? If so, how was your example handled? Please use the comment box to weigh-in with your thoughts. We can all learn from each other.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

September 15, 2011 DonorDreams Fundraising

I feel manipulated!

I wake up on Sunday mornings, brew a pot of coffee and tune into my favorite Sunday morning news shows like The Chris Matthews Show and Meet the Press. However, this last Sunday morning I woke up to a parade of coverage focusing exclusively on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. So, I sat on my couch all morning, sipping coffee and fought back the tears and horrible memories.

Like most Americans, I have vivid memories of those difficult days. I can tell you exactly where I was when the first news broke. I can give you a blow-by-blow accounting of my day. I couldn’t stop watching the news coverage in the weeks after Sept. 11th, and those videos of the planes crashing into the towers and people wandering around the New York streets with pictures of their fallen loved ones are just haunting. In fact, I am getting teary right now typing about it, and I have goosebumps on my arms. UGH!

So, as I watched television on Sunday morning, I found myself getting angry whenever a network would cut away from their coverage and some company’s commercial exploited 9-11 as an opportunity to sell their product. They masterfully pulled at my heart-strings and tapped into raw emotions all in the name of consumerism. Check out this Budweiser commercial to see what I mean.

Unfortunately, the beer company wasn’t the only ones doing it. Stephen Colbert did a nice job nailing a number of these culprits. Click here to check-out his comedic report.

You might be asking right about now: “What does this have anything to do with non-profit organizations, fundraising or donors?”

As I processed my thoughts and feelings in the wake of Sunday’s emotional coverage, I came to two very strong conclusions.

This kind of marketing is manipulative, feels really yucky and makes me not want to buy those products.
Non-profit organizations sometimes do the same kind of thing.

What?!?! Huh?!?! Where did THAT come from?

Come on! You know what I mean:

Please sir . . . won’t you please make a contribution? Without YOUR support we will have to close our doors and throw those kids out onto the street.
Please ma’am . . . for just the cost of that “Triple Venti Skinny Cinnamon Dulce Latte” you can feed a village of starving people for a day.”
Please make a donation today to remember the 9-11 victims, which will allow our organization to invest in a “get out the vote” effort. (This really was a fundraising pitch. Don’t believe me? Click here!)

I know, I know . . . appealing to people’s emotions is very effective and is considered a best practice for all good fundraising and marketing campaigns. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am NOT saying that we need to strip the emotion out of our messaging, but I am saying that we need to be very careful about not crossing that line and using FEAR to motivate donors.

Knowing where that emotional line is can be difficult and different when deal with individual donors. For example, my partner detests the fundraising commercials for the ASPCA, and he swears that he will never give to that charity because he feels manipulated by them.

So, how can you and your agency know where that line is? While it is a tough question that probably doesn’t have a good answer, you better figure it out if you’re committed to a donor-centered fundraising paradigm.

The one suggestion I can offer is . . . get your donors engaged in the process. Before sending out an emotional mail appeal (or for that matter any piece aimed at cultivation, solicitation or stewardship), what would be so wrong will convening a donor focus group to review the package and provide feedback?

What are your thoughts? What does your organization do to minimize the possibility of tripping over your donors’ emotional-point-of-no-return? What is the most manipulative thing you’ve ever seen a non-profit organization do? Please use the comment box below to share your thoughts because we can all learn from each other.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

September 14, 2011 DonorDreams Fundraising

Fundraising lessons from Team Obama

Since starting this blog back in May, I have twice posted articles about Team Obama because I firmly believe that non-profit organizations can learn a lot from what our political fundraising cousins are doing on the other side of town. Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t just mean that through careful observation non-profits will be able to steal all of their strategies and best practices. I also mean that we can learn from their mistakes.

For example, let’s look at what happened in my household just yesterday . . .

My phone rings. I answer it, and the person at the other end identifies herself as a someone working for an independent fundraising firm who is raising money “on behalf of” the Obama campaign.

Lesson #1: Think twice about farming out your fundraising to external firms. Keep it internal and recruit volunteers from your board of directors and the community to help solicit prospects and donors. There was nothing this woman could’ve done to prove to me over the telephone that she was actually representing the Obama campaign and not some kind of scam. Volunteers have more credibility than any staff person or hired gun.

Without getting into lots of boring political talk, let me just say that I explained to this solicitor that my partner and I won’t be making a direct contribution to Team Obama’s 2012 re-election efforts. Instead, we’ve decided to shift all of our political contributions to a national political action committee (PAC). I told her to go talk to them if she wants our money.

Lesson #2: My partner and I have changed our giving strategy because we feel powerless and unable to hold national politicians accountable to the things they promised (non-profit translation: the talking points from the campaign’s 2008 “case for support” that inspired us to give in the first place because we wanted to invest in that “impact agenda”). So, here is the lesson for non-profits . . . don’t make promises you cannot keep. Not only will it disenfranchise donors, but they might very well shift their charitable giving to third party funders like United Way in an attempt to attach more accountability to their contribution.

After explaining my position to the telephone solicitor three different ways, she started arguing with me. In the middle of her diatribe, she blurted out her solicitation: “Would you consider making a $5,000 contribution today?” I politely said no. She continued with her rant, and then blurted out “Would you consider making a $2,500 contribution today?” I politely said no and referenced all the reasons I gave 5 minutes earlier. Believe it or not, she continued onward and asked if I could just make an exception and contribute $250. Finally agitated, I firmly said that I wouldn’t even consider $25 and that she needs to go talk to the PAC I referenced earlier. I also asked her to update her donor database records so that I can stop getting these phone calls, emails and direct mail appeals.

By the way, this YouTube video does a nice job capturing what that phone conversation looked like. Check it out if you need a good chuckle today. 🙂 However, I think I just cast myself into the role of the “goat” in that video. Oh well!

Lesson #3: When a donor says “NO” there are two things you need to train your volunteer solicitors to do: 1) don’t argue with them and enter into a auction-like bidding war for their contribution and 2) shut-up, listen, take good mental notes, pass the info back along to staff, and enter the conversation into the donor database as a contact record. Hopefully, staff have developed good systems to address these kind of disenfranchised donors with intense cultivation and stewardship efforts before re-soliciting them in the future.

I used to think that United Way’s best days were behind them, but taking a step back and looking at my household’s new political giving strategy has me re-thinking this position. I suspect that if non-profits don’t start investing in measuring program outcomes and implementing an impact agenda, we might be looking at a time of re-birth for United Way.

What are your thoughts about third-party fundraisers and fund distributors like United Way? Am I way off base in my thinking? What about your thoughts on the three lessons I’ve highlighted? How do you train your volunteer solicitors to deal with donors like me? What systems do you have in place to secure donor conversations and react to a failed solicitation?

Please use the comment box below to weigh-in with your thoughts because we can all learn from each other.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

September 13, 2011 DonorDreams Fundraising

Monitor your organization’s heart rate

Last week after my Fitness Boot Camp session, I ran out to Target and bought my first heart rate monitor, which comes in the form of a strap that you fashion around your chest and a wrist watch. I made this purchase because according to my personal trainer I need to intensify my workouts and keep my heart rate in a particular target zone. This, of course, got me wondering. “Do they make heart rate monitors for non-profit organizations?”

While you might think this is a silly question, I urge you to stop and think about it for just one moment:

Shouldn’t board volunteers have a tool to monitor the health of their organization?
Wouldn’t the annual campaign leadership team appreciate something to track the collective progress of volunteer solicitors?
Couldn’t board and staff benefit from a tool that monitors implementation of any number of activities ranging from strategic planning to the health of the agency’s comprehensive resource development program?

I think that there is enormous benefits in developing such a tool, and the good news is that they do exist. While you cannot go online to amazon.com and purchase a heart rate monitor for your non-profit organization, you can roll up your sleeves and create a DASHBOARD or SCORECARD that will do the same thing.

When consulting with Boys & Girls Clubs in Indiana on annual campaign implementation last year, I worked with a number of those organizations on developing a simple dashboard using Excel to track campaign progress. Typically, there were six to eight graphical indicators on the front page of their dashboard. Each indicator measured one aspect of their campaign that they thought was important enough to track. Here are a few examples of what they tracked:

Board solicitation phase – actual vs. goal
Community face-to-face solicitation phase – actual vs. goal
Targeted mail solicitation phase – actual vs. goal
New donor acquisition – actual vs. goal
Donor renewal – actual vs. goal
LYBUNT renewal – actual vs. goal
Individual volunteer solicitor progress – number of pledge cards assigned vs. number of worked & returned cards

Indicator and monitoring tools like dashboards and scorecards allow non-profits to create a sense of accountability and urgency, which are two elements of volunteer engagement that many non-profits find difficult to generate. Additionally, it provides staff and volunteers with a management tool that helps create the necessary performance to avoid failures.

Finally, the good news is that these tools can be used for almost any project/activity. Here are a few links I’ve dug up that might help you develop your own organizational heart rate monitors:

“Dashboards: Track Your Organizational Progress” (Source: Karl Hedstrom of NTEN)
“A Nonprofit Dashboard and Signal Light for Boards” (Source: Jeanne Bell & Jan Masaoka of Blue Avocado)
“Using a Balanced Scorecard in a Nonprofit Organization” (Source: Joel Zimmerman of Creative Direct Response)
“Balanced Scorecard Basics” (Source: Balanced Scorecard Institute)

How does your organization monitor its overall health? Annual campaign? Special events or projects? What have you tracked using your monitoring tools? Please use the comment box to share because we can all learn from each other.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

September 9, 2011 DonorDreams Fundraising

Spotlight: Examples of Really Good Donor Recognition Societies

Thanks to my friend, Susan Rudd, in Bloomington, Indiana I ended up focusing the last 3-days on donor recognition societies. Please don’t misunderstand me . . . I am not complaining. I very much love annual campaigns and individual giving vehicles, and donor recognition societies are a very important tool for any resource development professional focused on individuals (which should be ALL of us because 75% of charitable giving comes directly from individuals).

As I wrote Wednesday and Thursday’s blog posts, I realized that I was focusing too much on institutions of higher education as examples of good donor recognition societies. So, I promised yesterday that I would end the week with some diverse examples from other non-profit sectors. Here are a few that I found that are worth your time reading about and mimicking:

The United Way’s Tocqueville Society — This donor recognition society is for donors giving $10,000 or more to the annual campaign. It is a very traditional approach, and local United Way chapters do a variety of different things to create a sense of engagement for donors belonging to this society. Most non-profit organizations who run annual campaigns have some version of this donor recognition society (e.g. Boys & Girls Clubs’ Jeremiah Milbank Society, etc)

The Boy Scouts of America rolled out a tiered donor recognition society for their Major Gifts program. Local councils are tasked with creating courtesies (aka membership benefits) for people donating to each of these societies. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that special patches and pins are part of Scouting’s benefits program for these societies.

James E. West Fellowship — This donor recognition society is focused solely on gifts to the endowment
Second Century Society — This society is more comprehensive and encourages large “major gifts” to operating, capital and/or endowment funds. It is flexible and covers outright gifts all the way through deferred ones.

The Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago developed a tiered donor recognition society named the Columbia Society for its annual campaign donors. The first tier of the society starts at $1,000 and the highest level is for $50,000 donors. Benefits/courtesies vary for each tier but include typical stewardship-based activities such as newsletters, events, etc.

Human Rights Campaign (HRC) developed a similar tiered donor recognition society they called the Federal Club. As with the aforementioned Columbia Society, membership benefits include tickets to events, a special newsletter, and routine e-blasts with return on investment information on HRC’s lobbying efforts and community organizing.

One of the grand-daddies of all donor recognition societies is Rotary International’s Paul Harris Fellowship program. I’ve never seen any non-profit organization so focused on a donor recognition society as I have this one. As with all national programs, the local affiliates are responsible for making membership in this society feel special. However, Rotary International does a great job with recognizing its local affiliates for their work in securing repeat gifts and new donors. We can all learn a lot from Rotary’s work in this area.

Well, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but I think it is a good start. Does your agency have any fun and effective donor recognition societies that you can share with us? Do you know of any donor recognition societies that integrate stewardship opportunities into their society as benefits/courtesies? Please use the comment box below to weigh-in because we can all learn from each other.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

September 8, 2011 DonorDreams Donor-centered fundraising, Fundraising

Donor recognition societies: The response

Well, no one responded to poor Susan Rudd’s questions about donor recognition societies from yesterday’s blog post. All I can assume is that the workload coming back from the long Labor Day weekend must have been intense. Never fear . . . I responded to Susan and provided a few nuggets of advice.

However, for those of you who read yesterday’s blog and thought: “Bah! Our donors don’t want recognition. In fact, they’re always telling us not to go through the trouble.” Let me assure you that what donors say and what they mean are very different things. In my experience, many of those donors who protest when it comes to recognition and stewardship are really saying: “Don’t engage me because my plans for giving to your agency are short-term.”

As I said yesterday, I’ve found that donor recognition societies are oftentimes misunderstood for “name-only,” donor giving levels that are listed in an annual report, newsletter or website. Unlike giving levels, donor recognition societies are ALIVE and a place for your donors to engage with your organization’s mission as well as with other donors of like-mind.

One great example is what the University of Michigan’s alumni association is doing with its members (and when I say members you should read it either as “donor” or “prospective donor”). Every summer the alumni association offers its members the opportunity to sign-up for 11 different sessions of summer camp. They call this program “Camp Michigania“.

I just spent last week vacationing with a number of retirees in Michigan on the shores of Saginaw Bay. One evening they couldn’t stop talking about their camp experiences. While they participated in typical camp activities (e.g. swimming, arts & crafts, etc), they mostly loved the “Faculty Forums” where they could hear U of M staff talk about various topics pertaining to their professional research.

Do you know what else I heart this group chattering about as they reminisced about camp? They were talking about the scholarships funds they were starting (or thinking about starting) as well as the planned gifts they were contemplating.

I can honestly say that I haven’t seen a more engaged and excited group of donors and prospective donors. And the amazing thing to me was that there wasn’t a single resource development employee from the university in the room stirring those conversations.

The moral to this story is: stewardship and cultivation activities that “ENGAGE” donors is like the fountain of youth for all resource development programs. It brings things to life. It makes fundraising and solicitation so much easier. It can breathe life into your planned giving program.

While Camp Michigania isn’t a textbook example of a donor recognition society, I really like what the Indiana University Foundation has done in this area. Click here to see examples of their donor recognition societies. I suggest you pay special attention to how they use “courtesies” to engage their donors after the gift. What IU is essentially doing is infusing cultivation and stewardship opportunities into these recognition vehicles.

Please use the comment box below to share links to other good examples of donor recognition societies that you’ve found. Does your organization use donor recognition societies? If so, how do you use them? Do you infuse stewardship opportunities into these structures? What has worked well and what hasn’t?

Tomorrow I will try to share other good examples of donor recognition societies from outside the education sector.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

September 7, 2011 DonorDreams Fundraising

A reader’s question about Donor Recognition Societies

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Susan Rudd, Resource Development Assistant for the Boys & Girls Club of Bloomington, Indiana, about donor recognition societies. So, this is what I’ve decided to do . . . and I will need your help with this. In the space below, I will paste Susan’s email into the blog. I would like you to think about some of the questions she poses and then use the comment box to weigh-in with your best world-class coaching and advice. The more readers who participate, the merrier!

Before I share Susan’s email, let me just say that I am of the opinion that many social service non-profit agencies don’t do a very good job with donor recognition societies compared to other sectors of the non-profit community. I suppose I’m of this mindset because when I’ve seen social service agencies take a stab at creating donor recognition societies, they oftentimes seem to melt into “donor giving levels” (e.g. listed online and in the annual report) with very little else associated with it.

With that being said, here is a copy of Susan’s email:

Hey Erik,

I am really enjoying your blog, thanks for doing that, it’s a refreshing break for me to read it and recharge my resource development batteries.

Question for you, and maybe some fodder for you on your blog. We have had a few conversations with our annual campaign committee and Resource Development committee about developing donor recognition societies. At this year’s “Eat Thank Love” donor stewardship luncheon, we recognized nearly everyone there (and possibly everyone) in some way for what they contributed to the Club. However, we feel like we need a more formalized plan. Nevertheless, when we started talking about how to do this, we ran into walls of questions about how to create and acknowledge those people using a donor recognition society strategy. So here are a couple of questions we have:

* Do we create societies for all donors or just annual campaign donors?
* Should we include in-kind donors? How do you value those contributions?
* We started to look at names of levels (champion, gold, silver, etc) and special recognitions for long-term donors, etc. and got stuck there too. What types of names should we use? Where should we create breaks in the levels of giving for recognition purposes?
* Is there any protocol or best practice to follow when developing Donor Recognition Societies?

Any advice is valued, of course. Wisdom please…whenever, no rush. Thanks Erik.

Susan Rudd
Resource Development Assistant
Boys & Girls Clubs of Bloomington

So there you have it. Thanks to Susan for sending me this email and understanding that she isn’t in this alone because we can all learn from each other!

The challenge is now out there for you. How does your agency deal with Donor Recognition Societies? What is your best world-class coaching and advice for her?

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

September 5, 2011 DonorDreams Donor-centered fundraising, Fundraising

Stewardship opportunity on Labor Day

Labor Day can be a stewardship opportunity. In fact, non-profit organizations can turn most holidays into stewardship opportunities for their donors.

When I was a young executive director, I used to write a letter to the editor of our local newspaper on Labor Day thanking the community’s labor unions for all of their support. In that open letter to the public, I tried to remind people that those unions were part of our community’s fabric and did “good works” that oftentimes didn’t get any press. For example:

The local Service Employees International Union (SEIU) chapter provided all of the volunteers and muscle necessary to run our duck race fundraiser.
The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Home (IUPAT) once marshalled their apprentice program to paint our facility for free.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), the Laborers’ International Union, as well as other unions in town were all at one time or another outright donors to our annual campaign.

I chose Labor Day to write that letter to the editor, send letters of appreciation and make thank you phone calls because the stated purpose behind Labor Day is to celebrate “the economic and social contributions of workers”.

Many non-profit organizations struggle with stewarding their donors and instead become solicitation machines (which ironically burns out donors and creates a cycle of turnover). When I’ve talked to my non-profit friends and asked WHY, the most common answer I’ve heard is that time is a limited resource.

So, I encourage you to look at the myriad of holidays on your calendar and ask yourself this simple question: “How can this holiday be used to steward our agency’s donors?” I assure you that with a little effort, you will find the opportunities are limitless.

Does your non-profit organization have any fun and effective stewardship activities and best practices wrapped around holidays? If so, please use the comment box to share because we can all learn from each other.

Here is to your health! And oh yeah . . . Happy Labor Day!!!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC

August 30, 2011 DonorDreams Board development, volunteers

Board volunteers bark back: Part 1 of 3

Yesterday’s blog post titled “Hey board members: Sit – Lay Down – Roll Over” looked at board members who agree to “sit” on non-profit boards but don’t seem to understand they’ve been asked to “serve” on those boards. So, I developed an online survey and randomly emailed 32 board volunteers. In that survey I asked questions about their non-profit’s board development practices and their opinion on how to recruit more engaged board volunteers. I want to thank the 17 individuals who took a little time out of their day to respond to the questionnaire. I will share the results of my unscientific questionnaire with you today, tomorrow and Thursday.

My first question to board volunteers was: “Does the non-profit board on which you serve operate with a board-approved, written Board Development Plan?” Here were their responses: 14 said YES, 2 said NO, and 1 said I don’t know.

I don’t know about you, but my heart is uplifted to see so many “yes” responses because non-profit agencies will NEVER recruit engaged board members to “serve” on their boards without a written strategy in place. In my opinion, organizations need to have a written board development plan that spells out how to identify, prioritize, recruit, orient, recognize, and evaluate potential prospects and actual board volunteers. I am reminded of this old proverb, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.”

My second question to board volunteers was: “Does the non-profit board on which you serve evaluate board volunteers every year?” Here were their responses: 9 said YES and 8 said NO.

These responses tell me that many board development plans probably only focus on recruiting and very little else. Board development plans that don’t have an annual volunteer evaluation component are missing an opportunity in my opinion. I suspect the biggest reason many plans don’t call for annual evaluations is because people hate to be judged. I suggest metrics such as: board meeting attendance, committee meeting attendance, fundraising participation (cultivation, solicitation and stewardship), and volunteerism. The annual board volunteer evaluation doesn’t have to be judgmental . . . it can be designed as a way to: 1) look back and celebrate their contributions and 2) ask them how it is going and what needs to change in the upcoming year for their volunteerism to be meaningful and rewarding. I’ve personally found that volunteers who are disengaged typically use their annual evaluation meeting to quit or make the necessary adjustments to engage at a higher level.

My third question to board volunteers was: “If you answered YES to the previous question, please check all forms of evaluation that your organization uses to evaluate board members.” Here were their responses:

8 respondents said: Every board volunteer completes a self-evaluation once per year”
8 respondents said: “The Board Development Committee completes an evaluation on each board member once per year”
4 respondents said: “Every board member is asked to complete an evaluation focused on the entire board’s effectiveness”

Multiple board evaluation tools are effective. Self-evaluation allows volunteers to take a good hard look in the mirror at themselves, and peer evaluation provides an external point of view. When done in conjunction with each other, the evaluation process can be powerful. When only one form of evaluation is used, it is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the peanut butter.

Tomorrow I will share a number of respondents’ answers to this question: “How would you answer the question posed in the Facebook message from my non-profit friend? As a reminder, her question was “What can we do to help shift that mentality – to help professionals and individuals with the means to give that it is a SERVICE to the greater good, not just a spot to occupy around a conference room table?” Stay tuned because I assure you the answers are interesting!

If your organization uses an annual board volunteer evaluation process, what are your evaluation metrics? How do you conduct your year-end meetings? Who is involved? Do you think it is effective and why do you think that? Please use the comment box and weigh-in because we can all learn from each there.

Here is to your health!

Erik Anderson

Owner, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC