Are Your Board Meetings Making the Best Use of Everyone’s Time?

At a recent Spokes workshop, The 5-Star Board Chair, presenter Alisa Chatinsky, CEO of NPO Success Inc., shared strategies for helping board chairs lead more effective, strategic meetings. Judging by the conversation in the room and feedback afterward, a couple of ideas really hit home with our nonprofit leaders.

Spend less time reporting and more time governing

One of the biggest takeaways? A board meeting shouldn’t be dominated by reports.

It’s easy for a meeting to become a series of updates: the Executive Director reports, committees report, financials are reviewed, and suddenly most of the meeting is gone.

Instead, consider what information board members truly need to hear during the meeting versus what they can review beforehand.

One strategy Alisa discussed is using a simple board dashboard to give members an at-a-glance look at the organization’s most important information and indicators. Rather than walking through lengthy reports, a dashboard can quickly orient the board to what is on track, what has changed and what may require attention.

That leaves valuable meeting time for what is difficult to accomplish over email or in a report: discussion, questions, problem-solving and strategic decision-making.

Give every meeting a purpose

Another idea that resonated with participants was creating an annual board meeting calendar.

Rather than building each agenda from scratch, map important governance and strategic topics across the year. One meeting might include a deeper look at finances, another board recruitment and succession, another programs and impact, and another progress on the strategic plan.

A calendar doesn’t mean those are the only topics the board can discuss that month. Instead, it helps ensure important conversations don’t continually get pushed aside by whatever feels most urgent.

It also helps board members see the bigger picture: What is our board responsible for accomplishing this year, and when will we make time to do it?

View a sample annual board meeting calendar.

A few more ways to make board meetings count

The National Council of Nonprofits offers additional recommendations for making meetings more strategic, outcome-oriented and productive. Among them:

• Send the agenda in advance so members arrive prepared for the conversations and decisions ahead.
• Assign timeframes to agenda items to keep the meeting moving and demonstrate respect for everyone’s time.
• Consider a consent agenda for routine, noncontroversial items requiring board approval, preserving more meeting time for substantive discussion.
• Park off-topic discussions for another time rather than allowing tangents to derail the agenda.
• Periodically ask how meetings are working. A quick board self-assessment or post-meeting survey can identify what’s working and what needs to change.
• Document decisions. Minutes provide an important legal record as well as institutional memory for the organization.

Before your next board meeting, ask:

What do we actually need our board to accomplish together during this meeting?

Then build the agenda around that answer.

Reports and updates are important, but they shouldn’t crowd out the conversations that require your board’s collective experience, perspective and leadership. A few changes to how information is shared and how the year is planned can create more room for your board to do the work it is uniquely positioned to do.

Ready to rethink your next board meeting?

Explore the National Council of Nonprofits’ Effective Board Meetings for Good Governance for additional tips and resources.