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HomeThe Board Recruitment Brochure
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RETURN TO ARCHIVE Question:
Does your
organization have a Board Recruitment brochure?
While the Community Benefit sector uses brochures for all sorts of things, it is the rare organization that uses a brochure for board recruitment. But what better way to share pertinent information with prospective board members?
Finding Good Board Members Is Not
Magic
Even this many years after we initially published our Board
Recruitment manual, we are surprised at how many organizations have no process
for recruiting board members. Many boards still believe the "good" board
members would never choose to sit on their board - that "good" board members
want to be on all the other boards in town, not theirs.
Most of those boards are not victims of being too small or too un-sexy. They are victims of two conditions:
- They believe their own doom and gloom story, and
- They have no ongoing process for proactively recruiting board members.
These are the same boards who often end up taking anyone with warm blood and a pulse, and then lamenting how horrible their board meetings are!
To break that cycle, all it takes is reversing those two conditions. First, know that because your organization does incredible work, there are indeed "good" people who will want to serve. And second, develop a proactive process for finding those people and recruiting them to your board.
As you develop that proactive recruitment process, you will find that one of the handiest items you can have is a Board Recruitment Brochure.
The following is excerpted from the workbook, Board Recruitment and Orientation: A Step-by-Step, Common Sense Guide, by Hildy Gottlieb. Most prospective board members know little about the organization they are being invited to govern. The intent of the introductory brochure, therefore, is to give them a good sense of what they are getting themselves into. The brochure will answer three questions.
This could be a list of programs and what they do, as well as the impact those programs have in the community. It could be a list of major funding sources. It could be the organization's goals for the next 5 years. Whatever is important for that person to know, to be able to make an informed decision about whether or not he/she wants to help guide that work, that is what should be included.
The Benefits In addition to that obvious benefit, there is a side benefit to having a Board Recruitment brochure: your prospects will be impressed. That brochure will let them know that you take the role of Board Member seriously, and that you will expect them to do the same. Sometimes it is not just what you say in the brochure that counts - sometimes the critical point is simply that you have put such forethought into your Board Recruitment process that you have a brochure at all. For more information about Board Recruitment and Orientation: A Step-by-Step, Common Sense Guide, Click Here |
