“Boards are like parents: they need to support, encourage, and inspire greatness in their ‘child’ if the organization is to survive and thrive.” (Lysakowski, 2004)
In reviewing the study from Association of Fundraising Professional (AFP), Linda Lysakowski lays out the elements that create an effective nonprofit board. This report is an easy reference for any person, who is interested in nonprofit development, on how to create and develop a board that will have the maximum impact for your organization. The main sections of the AFP report are 1) Board demographics/performance, 2) Identifying and recruiting board members, 3) Involving the board in fundraising, and 4) building a better board. I am interested particularly in this report because of my involvement as Director of External Affairs and how can we as CalRep, maximize the benefit /resources of our board? First, we must understand what make a board effective in order to get the most out of our nonprofit boards.
Board Demographics and Performance: This section of the report talks about the importance of creating a board that reflect the community and how nonprofits skip essential steps when they are first establishing boards or adding new members. Some important questions a board must ask themselves are:
• Is the board’s ethnic mix representative of community it serves?
• Gender diversity?
• Age diversity?
• Geographic diversity?
• Other groups that might have an affinity to the board?
The advantages of having diversity on the board is the value of different perspectives, funding sources might pass on boards that do not adequately reflect the community and depending on the organization’s mission, people with differing religious/political view or disabilities might be of importance to an organization mission. There is also an informative template named, “sample board member profile”(Lysakowski,