Increasing board engagement

A highly engaged board can be a huge advantage for your organization. Not only do engaged board members make it easier for you to accomplish your goals, they can also become your nonprofit’s biggest advocates and best supporters. But board engagement doesn’t just happen on its own—its something you have to invest in and nurture. If you’re looking to increase board engagement for your nonprofit, there are a few key strategies to try.

Make time for onboarding

Developing a highly engaged board starts from day one. Each board member needs to have a solid understanding of how you expect them to engage. That includes everything from where they can find the information they need to how much they should participate in conversations during (or in between) meetings. Think of onboarding as laying the foundation for each board member—the process sets the tone for the level of engagement you expect to see moving forward.

Build personal relationships

While your board functions as a single entity, it’s important to cultivate individual relationships with each board member. Take the time to learn why each board member is there. What about the nonprofit’s mission resonates with them? Are there certain areas of your work they’re particularly passionate about? The more you understand what motivates each individual, the better able you’ll be to delegate work that speaks to their particular strengths and interests.

Keep lines of communication open

If you’re only talking to your board during quarterly meetings, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to keep your board members engaged. Establishing a culture of collaboration requires you to stay in routine contact with your board. Sharing asynchronous updates in between meetings is a great first step, but you also want to make sure your board members have a clear way to share feedback and ideas (a board portal can be really beneficial here). You’ll find the more you talk openly about your priorities, recent wins, and current roadblocks, the more top-of-mind you’ll be for your board members.

Ask your board for help

In addition to keeping your board up to date, you should get in the practice of routinely asking your board for help. Don’t wait for them to volunteer or just expect to know how they can be useful to you—you need to delegate tasks or directly ask for help when you need it. Think about how you could put your board members’ skills to work for you and then leverage that to help your nonprofit succeed.

Invest in morale

Don’t underestimate the importance of good morale—or the impact of bad morale. Over time, bad morale can be extremely detrimental to engagement. Take some time to reflect on how the experience feels for your board members. Is there ongoing conflict or contention among members? Is the role consistently overwhelming? Are your expectations for your board unclear? Issues like these breed low morale, so try to address them as soon as possible. On top of that, take time to invest in morale-boosting activities (even just a casual dinner) to give your board members a chance to bond and have fun.

Acknowledge contributions

Praise can be a powerful motivator. If a board member has recently helped you, make sure you thank them for their effort and give them a shout out where others can see. This not only gives everyone else a chance to add on to the acknowledgement, but also creates positive pressure for other board members to contribute more too.

Make your meetings more valuable

Boring, low-value meetings can be seriously demotivating. And over time, consistently frustrating meetings can erode engagement. The best way to avoid this is to steer away from one-way information downloads and instead use meeting time to dig into high-impact strategic discussions. This sets the tone that each board member’s contributions are valuable and reinforces the idea that any time they show up they should be fully engaged, present, and ready to participate.

Literally make it easier to engage

Most board members are incredibly busy and juggling endless email threads, texts, and Slack messages can make it hard to get work done efficiently. Think about how you can streamline your workflows and reduce friction throughout the process of working with your board (this is another thing board portals are great at). If you make it easier to get work done, your board is almost definitely going to accomplish more.

Align your board behind your mission

Keeping your nonprofit’s mission top-of-mind is a great way to keep your board motivated and engaged. It’s human nature to get bogged down in the tedious day-to-day tasks, so take a step back and refocus on the big picture. Remember that the work you’re doing is contributing to something meaningful and even small steps in the right direction are worth celebrating!

Routinely evaluate board performance

Even if you follow all of the best practices, your board’s performance can still waver from time to time. To keep tabs on this, make performance evaluations a routine practice. Performance evaluations not only give you a predictable opportunity to check in on how things are going, but also create a known opportunity to share feedback with your board and address any issues with low engagement before they snowball.

Get feedback from your board

If you’ve tried a few strategies and you’re still struggling to engage your board, don’t shy away from asking them about it. Your board may be able to shed light on issues you’re unaware of or make suggestions for how you might work together more effectively. If you don’t want to have these conversations in person, try sending a survey to collect feedback. This gives everyone a chance to raise concerns and crowdsource solutions without discussing it in front of the entire group.

If you’re not sure what to ask, here are a few suggestions: