Board Responsibilities—Membership/Volunteers
Membership development/member satisfaction
Board Development
Recruiting Board members
Navigating Board Recruitment: A Complete Guide- MemberClicks
Fact Sheet: Best Practices in Board Recruitment - Community Foundations of Canda
A Guide to Sucessful Board Recruitment- Dalhousie University
Orienting, training, and mentoring Board members
Board Orientation- National Council of Nonprofits
15 Smart and Effective Ways to Onboard New Nonprofit Board Members - Forbes
Affiliate Examples
Current AEOE Board Orientation Manual - California
CAEE Board of Directors Manual - Colorado
Succession plans
A plan to ensure leadership succession is critical for your organization's success. Board officer succession planning can help identify leadership qualities, elect the best candidates for the positions, train the officers for their roles, and ensure timely rotation
Succession Planning for Nonprofits - Conservation Tools
Building Leaderful Organizations: Sucession Planinng for Nonprofits- Annie E. Casey Foundation
Recruiting and managing other volunteers
Community Tool Box- Center for Community Health and Development, University of Kansas
Constituent Relationship
Management (CRM) software (Tech Soup)
Meetings
"The way we gather matters." - Priya Parker
In her book The Art of Gathering, author Priya Parker sets out five rules for convening gatherings- be it a informal board check in to large scale conferences. As you think about designing your meetings keep these in mind!
1. Give Your Gathering a Purpose- Going with the flow and catering to everyone makes for a fine event but narrowing your gathering to a specific and unique purpose creates an opportunity to thrill. When you’re planning your next gathering for someone, think beyond the category.
Let the following questions guide you in identifying its purpose:
- What is the occasion?
- Who is this event for?
- What are their needs in this specific moment?
- Which need will this gathering address?
- What is the host’s need? Why are you the one planning it?
- What is your unique gift or superpower that you’re bringing around your knowledge of the guest of honor or group? And how might you tap into your guests’ (or co-hosts) unique skills or knowledge as well?
Gathering well begins with a specific, unique and disputable purpose. When should we gather? And why? We often confuse the category of a gathering (birthday, baby shower, wedding, dinner party, etc) with the reason we are coming together. When we don’t examine the deeper assumptions behind why we gather, we end up replicating the same old party formats- Priya Parker
2. Make Purpose Your Bouncer- After you have your specific purpose settled on, deciding who should be at the next gathering is your next order of business. According to Parker, "thoughtful, considered exclusions is vital to any gathering"
Consider these questions when considering an invite list:
- Who fits and helps fufil the purpose?
- Who threatens it?
- Who do I feel obliged to invite?
“When I talk about generous exclusion, I am speaking of ways of bounding a gathering that allows diversity in it to be heightened and sharpened, rather than diluted in a hodgepodge of people.” — Priya Parker
3. Design Your Invitation to Pursuade- an invitation is not simply a pretty carrier of logistics. It’s the carrier of a story. Storytelling helps to guide your guests and explain why you’re asking them to meet in this way. Done well, it’s an opening argument to persuade, even to entice. An invitation should prepare your guests for why you’re bringing people together, what you’re asking of them (which part of themselves to bring), what to expect and what role they might play in the occasion (should they choose to accept).
"Your gathering begins at the moment of discovery. For most guests, that moment of discovery begins with the invitation."- Priya Parker
4. Ditch Etiquette for Rules (And Create a More Playful World)- Looking to spice up your event? You can season your gatherings more deeply by creating a more playful world through temporary pop-up rules. Pop-up rules are not controlling or boring, but rather a rebellion against etiquette. Whereas etiquette allows for people to gather because they have been raised with the same silent codes and norms, pop-up rules allow people to gather because they are different — yet open to having the same experience.
5. Close With Intention- Ending your time together well is a crucial way to shape the feelings, ideas and memories you want your guests to take with them. Endings are a reminder of why you gathered in the first place, and give guests a chance to make sense of the time they spent together. Just as you don’t start your invitations or gatherings with logistics, you don’t want to end on them either. Closings are a moment of power. How you end your time together shapes your guests’ experience, sense of meaning and memory of the event.
More information, including worksheets, and suggestions for reflecting on each of these rules can be found in Parker's The New Rules for Gathering Guide Book
Setting agendas
In addition to the suggestions from Priya Parker above, here are some resources to use when designing and setting agendas for any meeting that your Affiliate may be hosting.
How to Design an Agenda for an Effective Meeting- Harvard Business Review
How and Why to Use a Meeting Agenda- MIT Human Resources
A Complete Guide to Board Medeting Agendas (with Templates!)- Boardable
Meeting facilitation
Just as setting an agenda helps guide the purpose and scope for a meeting, artful facilitation (or a lack there of) can make or break any gathering. Here are some resources to use when developing your facilitation skills.
The Basics of Designing & Facilitating Meetings- MIT Human Resources
A Short Guide for Facilitating Meetings- Seeds for Change
Special considerations for virtual or hybrid meetings
In our increasingly virtual and remote world many meetings are being run virtually, or in a hybrid format to allow the greatest amount of participation from members or external stakeholders. These advances in technology bring their own unique challenges to facilitation. Check out these resources to reflect and improve your facilitation practices for virtual and hybrid spaces.
Check out this Gathering Guide from Priya Parker for hosting Hybrid Gatherings
Techniques for Facilitating Virtual Meetings- NOAA
A Dozen Tips for Facilitating an Online Meeting - FacilitatePro
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to attain strategic goals. A good (or even great) strategic plan becomes the driving force behind your organization and guides its working over a several year period.
Resources for Developing A Strategic Plan
An Overview of Strategic Planning- Center for Community Health and Development, University of Kansas
Affiliate Examples
Here is a folder of several recently created (or updated) Affiliate Strategic Plans
Operational Plans- Coming Soon!
Action Plans- Coming Soon!
Business Plans- Coming Soon!