BoardNet USA offers a free service to facilitate matching people with an interest in serving on nonprofit boards with organizations that are recruiting board members. With a free registration, people can look for boards they might have an interest in joining and organizations can look for board candidates.
-- http://www.boardnetusa.org
Susan J. Ellis of Energize. Inc (see http://www.energizeinc.com) offered these suggestions in March of 2004:
Any organization, in order to recruit the best board members, must:
- Have a well-articulated vision/plan for what type of board it hopes to
attract, the ideal make-up of the members (demographics, skills, etc.),
balance between people with clout and/or money and those with a
constituency or access to other resources -- based on what is needed to
accomplish the current goals of the organization.
[As we know, too many groups see board recruitment as "filling seats"
rather than "fulfilling needs." So the more they understand how to do #1
here, the better -- regardless of setting. This includes things like
assessing current board members and identifying unfilled slots on one of
those board "grids."]
- Clearly define what the responsibilities of a board member are (job
description), so that prospects can be approached with consistent
information.
- Brainstorm where to look for the best candidates.
- Develop a welcoming invitation process to honestly prepare prospective
volunteers (so that they say yes understanding the full scope of what they
are agreeing to do).
- Orient new board members and provide continuing education.
The items that need to be tailored to various special issues
include:
- When brainstorming where possible recruits can be found, the list of
places will naturally be very different for each sort of board. In fact,
this is the heart of successful recruitment of any volunteer for
anything: getting to the best spot to find people most likely to fit the
qualifications you want and the demographics you seek.
Once you know where you are going to recruit, then it's possible to design
an approach that matches the source -- personal contact, speech giving,
flyers, etc.
- The manner in which you invite people, welcome them, and orient them
may also need to adapt to who the volunteers are--business executives,
seniors at the senior center, anarchists, whatever! But this means
language, format, tone. Being honest and serious about the work are, for
example, two necessities that do not change with the setting.
- Formal, governance boards will indeed require different training
content and materials than, say, parent-led organizations. But every group
needs to consider what, exactly, a new member needs to know and how best to
convey that information.
So I recommend discussing what makes for solid volunteer recruitment
regardless of the situation. Then let the audience ask questions about
their unique needs. You can always break the group into buzz groups and
assign each a different type of volunteer to "find" and "approach." That
will show the difference between the core skills and the flexible ones.
At the Free Management Library there's material on:
- How to select board members for your organization
- Ideas for recruiting new board members
- Sample board recruitment grid
- Sample board application form
- Guidelines for recruiting new members
- Guidelines for orienting new members
See http://www.mapnp.org/library/boards/boards.htm#anchor585925
Posted 1/19/00 -- CM; new material 3/25/04; BoardNetUSA added 6/1/06 -- PB
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