Linda Lysakowski: A Board Revolution, Or Just Improvement?
Linda Lysakowski’s book is “The Revolutionary Board.” Do you need to go that far? Or will a few tweaks suffice for your board? She shares her experience and advice around governance versus management; fundraising; CEO evaluation and support; board recruiting; the duties of loyalty, care and obedience; term limits; and, more.
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Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host, and I’m the pod father of your favorite hebdominal podcast. Kate and I are together. Her family is visiting me in Emerald Isle, North Carolina. Hi, Kate. Hello, Uncle Tony, how are you? Outstanding. We’re sharing a mic. We’re gonna, we’re, we’re gonna be, uh, grilling some scallops later on. But, but until then, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with idiopathic intracranial hypertension. If you pressured me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer Kate sitting next to me to give you the highlights. Hey, Uncle Tony, here’s what’s coming. A board revolution or just improvement. Linda Lysakowski’s book is The Revolutionary Board. Do you need to go that far, or will a few tweaks suffice for your board? She shares her experience and advice around governance versus management, fundraising, CEO evaluation and support, board recruiting, the duties of loyalty, care, and obedience, term limits, and more. On Tony’s take too. This book is coming fast. Here is a board revolution or just improvement. It’s a pleasure to welcome the author of or contributor to more than 3 dozen books. Linda Lisakowski’s books include The Revolutionary Board, a workbook to help you assess and improve your board of directors. She’s one of about 100 professionals worldwide to hold the advanced certified fundraising executive designation. In her 40 years in development, Linda has managed capital campaigns, helped dozens of nonprofits, and trained more than 100,000 professionals in Mexico, Canada, Egypt, Bermuda, and most of the 50 United States. She’s at Linda Lysakowski.com and you’ll find her on LinkedIn. Linda, welcome back to Nonprofit Radio. Thanks. It’s great to be back. Although I’m not as quite as dramatic as you do. I love that opening. Uh, I like, uh, I like high energy openings. Yes, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta let folks know this is, uh, this is gonna be a, a spirited conversation about, uh, the revolutionary board. So, let’s, uh, let’s start with the, the, the, the main title of the book, The Revolutionary Board. Do we really want a board revolution? Well, I’ll tell you, I struggled, and I mentioned that in the preface of the book. I really struggled with the title because I am such a pacifist. I don’t believe in war at all, and I thought, oh, I found this picture of Revolutionary War soldiers, but I found several pictures and I couldn’t possibly use one where somebody was being shot or bleeding. So I thought, well, this one, they’re just blowing a trumpet, and they look a little bit like they’re, yes, they’re leading a revolution. But I really struggled with that title and with the cover for the book, but Uh, sadly, I think a lot of times people do need a revolution on their board. They need to just kind of throw out the old and start from scratch. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that for your organization that you can prevent some of this, and that’s what I, why one of the reasons I wrote this book is, I’m telling you how to save a board that is a mess, but I’m hoping that your board. Doesn’t ever get to BMS. That’s, that’s what my primary goal is. Well, yeah, and, and the book opens with lots of assessments. Uh, there’s a lengthy assessment for board members themselves. Um, who, who should be, uh, who do you set this up for that on the staff that should be assessing? Is this a CEO? Role or C-suite generally? Well, some of it is, but there’s also, there’s, in fact, it’s a workbook. There are a lot of assessment forms, but some of them, I think it’s important for the board to assess themselves and to assess their own board meetings, like, did the board meeting go well? Did everybody have a chance to get heard that wanted to be heard, um, you know. Did we move through all the reports in a timely basis, and did we call on the right staff members, but not let the staff members run the board? I remember one of my clients where every time I went to a board meeting, the CEO led the whole board meeting and the board chair just sort of sat there and I thought, this board is not engaged at all. You know, the CEO just ran it his way and that was it. And that’s not good. So, I give people assessment forms that the board can do themselves, and some of them are for the executive director to say, you know, how are we recruiting boards? Do, do we just, uh, I, I can tell you loads of nightmare stories. I think some of them are in the book, but I’ve been around and at this for, for longer than I care to think about. In fact, I served on boards before I ever got into the nonprofit world as a staff person and then later as a consultant. But even serving on boards, I could see things weren’t done properly in most organizations, sadly. And, and the, the second part of your subtitle is improve your board of directors. So how do you, how do you explain for folks how the book helps go from assessment to improvement? Well, I’m telling people what to do with the assessments once they get it. If they find out that, um, their board members are just there by accident, that somebody. He said, you know, it’s time for new board members, and I, oh yeah, my brother-in-law will be in the board or my next-door neighbor, and there’s no thoughtful process. So I’m giving you enough assessment forms that you can look at how you recruit board members. Do you look for people that have talents and skills that you need on your board? Are they committed to your organization? And I always tell people the number one criteria I think to look for in a board member is passion for the organization. Do they really care about your organization? Because if they do have that passion, They’re going to want to be good board members. They’re even gonna wanna fundraise if they really have that passion, and that’s where I think a lot of organizations go wrong. They just take anybody that comes down the street. I, I’ll tell you another horror story that I think I quoted in the book, but this was one of my clients when I first started my business, and I was attending a board meeting and it was December. And the executive director said, oh well, you know, 3 of you, your board terms are ending this year, and here we have a little token gift for you, and thanks for all your service, but now we need to replace those 3 seats. Does anybody have any ideas? And as I said, I think I said, mentioned this incident in the book, and I said, the good news was nobody had any ideas because if they did, it was, first of all, it was December. And you never wait till December to start thinking about new board members are gonna start in January, and secondly, it should not have been. The executive director that brought this up, it should have been the board themselves who recognized that they had terms to fill, and it really needs to be a year-long process. It’s not, I, I wrote some articles one time, and I don’t know if I mentioned it in, in this book or not, but I wrote an article called Get Rid of your nominating Committee, and people said, well, what? We have to have a nominating committee. And I said, no, you don’t. You have a year-round governance committee. You don’t wait till the end of the year and say, oh, we have board chair seats to fill or, or board vacancies to fill. And who do, who can we think of, because then people just think of the first person that comes to the top of their mind, like their next door neighbor, their spouse, and I’ve, I’ve seen boards where two spouses sat on a board, and I thought that is kind of crazy. Why have both spouses on the board, you know, one, you kind of have the other one by virtue of default, so. Yeah, you want us to be more strategic about this, and, and I agree, it should be an ongoing process. You should have, you should have relationships with future board members that you may not invite on your board for a couple of years. But, you know, it’s, it’s the same, it’s a building a talent pipeline. I think, I think for, for a lot of the leadership positions or maybe all the, all the senior positions. In your nonprofit, you should have a similar talent pipeline. You should be talking to folks that could be, could be CFOs if your CFO leaves or chief marketing or communications development officers. You want, you just wanna have a talent pipeline generally for, for these, for these important positions, right? So I, I agree it’s ongoing pipeline with our donors, but we don’t think about a pipeline. human resource spots including the board, right, of course, we have prospects for, for giving. We should have prospects for, for at least for the board, but I, I think, I think senior positions too. You just, you wanna have a robust network of folks that you know and, and look, if you never even need to hire them, they’re just, they’re just maybe a, uh, uh, maybe they’re a resource for their counterpart who is your Who, who is in that spot as the CFO or the, the chief marketing CMO, um, you know, it could be a resource that way. You just, it’s, it’s just valuable to have relationships generally. Um, and I think building that pool, uh, to just kind of follow up on what you said, having that pipeline. You should have a pool all the time of people that you’re thinking about inviting onto the board, and sometimes you invite them on the board and they’re not ready. They maybe they’re sitting on a couple other boards and they just can’t make a commitment right now. But you keep those names and maybe you ask them to serve on a committee if they can’t serve on the board and then if, if they say, well, jeez, right now I just can’t do this, it’s a bad time in my career, in my life, whatever, but you save those names. You don’t just throw them away because maybe next year or 2 years from now they will be ready to serve on the board. Yeah, yeah, that’s that, that pipeline is really critical. Agreed. Absolutely. Um, you, you, you make the distinction between, um, government, governance and management. Would you flesh that out for our listeners, please? What, what do you see the distinctions there and, and which, what, what’s appropriate, what’s not? Yeah, I, I think that’s a really good point, and, and to kind of drive it home, I use, I don’t like to use examples because I, I use the example that if you come home from work one day and you find a giant pothole in front of your house, you don’t call the governor of your state and say, hey, come fix this, you know, he or she isn’t gonna come out in the, the pick and a shovel and try to fill your pothole. But their responsibility is to make sure that they have a good Department of Transportation, that someone can come out and fix it. We just were without water the other day and we were going crazy. I mean, we had, we had enough water that just drips, came out, but you couldn’t take a shower or anything else. But we didn’t call the governor and say, hey, come fix this problem for us. And that’s why I think sometimes people get confused between governance and management, and governances are the people that have the overall responsibility to make sure that the organization is managed well, but they don’t manage it. They’re, they should not be in your office all day or every day of the week, and I once had a board member who was literally was in my office every day. And it drove me crazy, and I, I wanted to, uh, talk to somebody about it, but he was the chair of the board, so I couldn’t go over his head, but I did go to his vice chair and say, you know, you gotta do something about this man, because he’s here every day and he’s Getting himself involved in things that board members should not get involved in, like, what color stationery do we want, or, you know, who are we gonna engage to hire our, to, to create our website or update our website. They can, board members can give you suggestions, but it’s not their job. To be managing the organization and vice versa. It’s also not the CEO’s job to govern the organization like that CEO that I said ran the whole board meeting every time. Say more about the governance. What you, you, you talked a lot about the, the management and that belongs in the C-suite. What about proper governance? Well, I think one thing that the governing board should be doing is making sure. They should participate in the strategic plan and making sure that your goals are realistic for the organization and making sure that it is adequately staffed. Sometimes, you know, board members think they should really be making day to day decisions and they shouldn’t be, and when they do that, they get so caught up in that that they don’t find it’s rewarding to serve on the board and so they lose interest right away. All right, so Thank you. Distinction between governance and, and management, um. Let’s talk some about the, uh, it’s kind of flowing from governance, you know, some basic board responsibilities, uh, oversight, fundraising, evaluating the CEO, and I, I have some others, but you’re welcome to go wherever you’d like to go, but I’d like to flesh out. These board responsibilities and also, you know, good practices within. Yeah. Uh, well, I think, you know, the CEO relationships are really important and, and it’s Well, I think it’s really incredibly important that the board and the CEO have a good relationship, that they work on the agenda together. What are we gonna talk about at this board meeting? What reports are we, do we have to be presented and what decisions have to be made? And a lot of times, part of the role of the board is sometimes making tough decisions like Gee, you know, it’s time maybe we get rid of this one program because it, it’s not being profitable to us, and we’re, we’re not the best at it. Maybe some, there’s other organizations that can run that program better, and so we’re not getting very many people involved in this program. And sometimes that’s hard for board members to make those decisions, but they’re the ones that really need to do that. The, the staff should come and say, here’s the, the picture, you know, this is how much money we’re bringing in, and this is how many people we’re serving, and Here’s our competition, but then the board says, well, you know, maybe it’s time to get rid of that program, or maybe we need to upgrade that program. Maybe we need to invest more money into that program to improve it. And those are things that rightly are board decisions to uh maybe eliminate a program. But staff has a big role in that. I mean, the staff are the ones who run the programs. The board members should not be in there saying, Well, I think we should have this desk over there and that person should be reporting to this person. That’s not the staff’s job. The only staff member that ever, that’s not the board’s, that’s, that’s, that’s not the board’s job, right? The only staff member that should ever report to the board is. The CEO, the chief development officer should report to the CEO, the chief marketing officers, or, or the chief financial officer. They don’t report to the board. Yes, they should have a good relationship with the board, and sometimes if there’s board members that have expertise, They should be consulted with, you know, what’s your advice on our budget? Maybe you can help us, you know, trim some of the fat in our budget or decide what equipment we should buy because you know a lot about technology. Those kind of things are good to give advice, but not to be making decisions that belong to the staff. Let’s talk more about that board chair CEO relationship. That should be, uh, it should be very collegial, right? They should, they should be talking often, once a week, or, you know, so, uh, uh, it’s please, a little more detail on how, how that’s an ideal relationship. Yeah, I, I think that you, the one point you said about meeting, I think once a week is great. The board chair and the CEO are the ones who set the agenda for the meeting, and they should be working together to do that. And you know, a lot of times board chairs have a lot of great advice to give CEOs, even though they’re not running the organization. The CEO is, but they’re the ones that the CEO can turn to and say, you know. I’m really having this problem with some of the personnel, and do you have any advice for me or, you know, what kind of relationship they have really makes or breaks the organization and at the meeting, the CEO gives the CEO report, but they shouldn’t be running the meeting. The board chair needs to be. Person who’s strong enough to run the meeting, keep things moving on time, and make sure that, you know, nobody’s disrupting the meeting when they shouldn’t be, you know, those kind of things belong to the board chair, but I think it’s really almost impossible to run a good organization if you don’t have a good relationship between the chair of the board and the CEO. Another important board relation, uh, board responsibility, you, you, you mentioned it quickly before. I wanna go a little deeper, is the, uh, evaluation of the CEO. Where, where does that belong? Is it a committee? How, how, how is that done? I think it can be a committee who does it usually if you have an executive committee, which is normally your board, uh, officer’s chair, vice chair, and the vice chair’s position is also, while I’m on that topic, really critical because in most cases they’re the person who’s gonna assume the role of the chair and if you don’t have some kind of a succession plan in place. All of a sudden your board chair’s term is over, and then what do you do? You’re starting from scratch and saying, well, gee, we can’t get anybody to be board chair. We asked for volunteers. No, you don’t ask for volunteers. You carefully plan who should be. A good chairperson and that person is then maybe the vice chair for a year or two, and then they move into that position. So, they’re learning from the chairperson and the, the other officers like the treasurer or the secretary, and sometimes you know the executive board people even put heads of committees, important committees, maybe the marketing committee or the development committee. But usually, it’s the officers of the board that do the evaluation. However, I, I love to tell horror stories. Here’s another horror story that, that I had from a client. Um, it was time to do the executive chair’s, uh, evaluation, and they had the executive committee do the evaluation and decide how much of a raise the CEO was gonna get that year. And they made a report at a meeting with other staff members, like people that reported to the CEO, and they told The they gave the CEO’s evaluation in front of all these people who reported to the CEO, and it was just horr including how much of a raise they were getting, and I thought, oh good heavens, you don’t do that in front of members. That’s a thing that’s done privately. You don’t even, you don’t even do it right. Well, and you’re, when you’re deliberating, when you’re deliberating, the CEO leaves the, leaves the meeting, or, or maybe it’s done in a committee between board meetings, but But uh, and then of course the, the evaluation of the CEO, you know, the, the, the conclusions that obviously includes the CEO, but yeah, no, to have people report or any, anybody, everybody ultimately reports to the CEO. So I have other staff there during the. CEO evaluation. No, no, that, that’s horrible. I, I’ll tell you, I have seen some real horror stories meetings. So sorry to give you all these negative stories, but that’s why it’s a revolutionary board because you’ve got to turn it around and And sometimes start from scratch and you know the British are coming, the British are coming, let’s get out here and do something about it. Well, so, so in the revolutionary board, our, our enemy is bad board practices, right? Absolutely. OK, so we do have an enemy in this revolution. Yeah, we do. All right. It’s time for Tony’s take 2. Thank you, Kate, as we share the mic, swing it back and forth between each other. Um, yeah, this book, uh, Planned Giving Accelerated, The Cut Through the Shit, no-nonsense practical step by step guide to launch long, to launch legacy-giving fundraising at your small to mid-size nonprofit in one week with bequests. The title may be longer than the book, Did You Need a Nap, is moving fast along. Uh, it’s gonna publish on September 15th. The final editing has been done, so that’s 2 rounds through, uh. Line editor, copy editor, line editor, copy editor, and then proofreading, the designer gave me the book cover designs. Designs because there’s more than one version. There’s a hardcover, which is full color, there’s a paperback, which is black and white, and there’s a Kindle version, and each of those has to have a different. Design, certainly different designed cover, but then the internal pages are, are different also, so you got, you got different designs going. So I’ve got those, just today, actually, the day we’re recording, I got those final designs. September 15th is, that’s, it’s more than just the goal. I mean, that’s, that’s the date. I’ve been promising this for, Uh, at least 6 months I’ve known September 15th, maybe, maybe even longer. Maybe, maybe September 15th has been the goal for a year. I don’t remember how long, but it’s a long time. So, September 15th, it’s, it’ll come together. We’re on, we’re, we’re actually ahead of schedule between the editors, the designer, the marketing team. We’re actually a couple of weeks ahead of schedule, so that’s very, very good, very good. So the book is coming fast. Uh, if you would like even more info on the book, you could go to Planned Giving accelerated.com, Plannedgiving accelerated.com. You could join the book waitlist there. That’s, that’s the only place you can do it. It’s not like you have a choice of where else to go. That’s the place to join the book waitlist. So 9:15, September 1515 September 2026. That’s the book launch date for planned giving accelerated. And that is Tony’s take 2. Kate sitting next to me. I just want to say I just saw the book covers like right now before we started recording and it it gave me a chuckle. It gave me a little giggle, but also your title always gives me a giggle too. But seeing the title on the cover gave me a very good chuckle. Excellent, excellent. We’ve got Bu butt loads more time. Here’s the rest of A Bored revolution or just Improvement with Linda Lisakowski. Uh, other board responsibilities, recruiting board members. Right, I think that’s incredible that people, it, it really is important that people Um Start thinking about people, not just when it’s time at the December or whenever the term is up, but they should be thinking all along about, gee, you know, I think so and so would be a good person to bring on this board. OK, well, give that name to the governance committee, and they’ll do some investigating. Maybe they’ll arrange a meeting with that person and discuss with them if they are interested in being on the board and if they’re willing to take the responsibilities. And the other thing that’s really critical. is having job descriptions for all your board members, because you don’t have anything to recruit with if you don’t know what you want that person to do. You would never hire a staff member like this. Oh, I met Sally and she was really a neat person, so I asked her to join our staff, and she’s starting on Monday, and she comes in Monday and says, oh, OK, what do you want me to do? You don’t ever hire staff like that, at least I hope you don’t. But that’s unfortunately how a lot of board members are engaged. They’re recruited, they don’t have a job description, they don’t know what their responsibilities are, and then 6 months later, you say, boy, they’re a lousy board member. They’re not doing what I expected them to do. Well, did they expect to do it? You know, they’ve got to have those job descriptions clearly laid out, and if they’re not filling that job description the way they should be, Then somebody needs to talk to them, either the chair of the board or the head of the governance committee and say, you know, when you came on the board, here’s things that you agreed to do, like attend maybe 75% of the meetings. Nobody can ever usually make 100% of meetings. People get sick, they have to go out of town for work, but you should have a minimum of how many board member, board meetings they can attend, they have to attend because Otherwise, they’re just gonna say, well, I’m on the board, but I don’t really feel like going to any meetings. I, I once was talking to someone that said they had a, a person on their board who was a leading executive in one of the top companies in the country, and the person never showed up at board meetings, never got their company to contribute, never made a personal contribution. But they had her, her name on the board because it looked good and that you don’t wanna have either. You, you don’t wanna have somebody on the board. Just you can have an honorary board or an advisory board where maybe they don’t have all of those demands to be at meetings and get actively involved and to give. We didn’t get into fundraising yet. We will, we will, I’m sure we will, but it’s critical that board members. Live up to those commitments that they agreed to, but if you don’t have the job description, if you don’t have any agreements in mind, Then how do they know what they’re supposed to do? What else belongs in there in that, that, that job description or set of expectations? So aside from, you know, board meeting attendance, what else do you think belongs in, in the, the, the board member job description? I think it should give them a, a description of the board committees that you have, and in most cases, I think every board member should serve on one committee. Maybe they’re on the Technology committee if you have one, or maybe they’re on the development committee or maybe they’re on the governance committee or maybe they’re on the marketing committee, whatever, or maybe you have a program committee, but wherever their expertise is, they should be serving on one committee. They don’t have to all chair a committee because you probably have more board members than you have committees, but, but they should be willing to serve on a committee. They should definitely have a, a, a. Uh, an agreement to donate money, but I think one of the biggest mistakes organizations make is they set a dollar amount and say, board members are required or expected to give $1000 a year. Well, maybe some people would be great board members, but they really can’t afford $1000 a year. But the worst thing that happens is you bring somebody on the board that could easily give you $10,000 or $100,000 a year, but if you say in your job description, $1000 a year, you know what you’re gonna get from that person, $1000. People give what they think is expected of them. So, I think rather than saying $1000 or even $25 To make a statement in your job description that board members are expected to give at a meaningful level, and that meaningful level is gonna be different from everybody, so I don’t think you should have one amount and require every board member to give that amount because you can lose some good board members, but you could also lose a lot of money from the board members who would and could give you a lot more. 0 $1000 is what’s expected, so that’s what I’m giving. So a, a personally meaningful gift, right. Mm, let’s keep going on, um, there, there are these, well, yeah, we’ll get to fundraising. That’s a big one. I wanna, I wanna talk about the legal duties where all board members have a duty of loyalty, care, and obedience, which are legal duties because your board members are fiduciaries. They have legal responsibilities to your nonprofit. Uh, that’s, that’s why a lot of nonprofits have. Um, directors and officers liability insurance in case the directors don’t meet their legal obligation. I mean, we, we’re talking, we’ve been talking so far about things that are not legal obligations. They’re more ethical and really moral, I think, if you agree to join a board. And, uh, like the duty of loyalty, you know, to put the mission first. Do you wanna, do you wanna flesh out any, any more on the, The, the duties. Well, I think, you know, a couple of things that are important is one is confidentiality. You don’t ever hear something at a board meeting that’s confidential within the organization and go out and blurt it to everybody in the community. Well, this organization is ready to fold up or they’re considering merging with somebody or their budget is a mess or somebody in the organization has absconded with money or something. I mean, You have a duty to report that to the necessary authorities if it is something really serious like embezzlement, but you shouldn’t go out and talk about the organization to everybody under the sun, and I, I just feel like a lot of times people don’t understand that. Ethical, I think like you said, it’s more ethical than it is sometimes legal responsibility, but also one of the things that I think is really critical is that board members look at the 990 form that every nonprofit has to fill out, because if they don’t. They don’t even know sometimes how much money is coming in and where it’s going and maybe what the salaries are, so they do have an obligation to be aware of things like that that affect the organization. Well, that, that goes to that, that goes to the duty of care, I think that you’re, that you’re tending, you’re a good steward, um, you’re evaluating the finances of the nonprofit, right. OK. Um, also, uh, within the duty of care, um, being prepared for board meetings, not only attending, but being prepared. I’ve been to meetings where, you know, some people are cracking open the book and that was sent to them a week in advance and they’re poring over it looking like, you know, this looks like their first read, and here we are, it’s 5 minutes before the meeting starts. You know, that is, that is not. Adhering to your, your duty of care. Yeah, back in the old days, I used to call it the ripping envelope syndrome because everybody mailed out a board packet, hopefully they did at least a week ahead of time and usually had the, the budget in and things like that, and The meeting would get called to order and the board here said, well, the first thing on the agenda is approving the minutes, and you hear all these envelopes ripping open. Oh, I guess I better read those minutes now. Well, now it’s all. Most of organizations send it electronically, so instead of the ripping envelope, I guess you have to searching your iPad for it or something. I don’t know. But I think that’s, sadly, that’s what a lot of board members don’t take that seriously, that they need to come prepared to the board meetings, not just be there, and if they’re prepared, then they’re gonna have questions. I, I’ve sat on several finance committees for organizations because I used to be a banker and people always shoved me on the finance committee for some reason, and I, I used to think, am I the only one here who has any questions? Like nobody else ever raised a single question about anything in the budget, and I, I thought, well, I don’t want to sound like I’m a naysayer or something, but I just have questions. It wasn’t that I was, they were doing anything wrong, but I had questions about, well, you know, how come we’re only paying this much for that? Is, are we getting a good deal here or what? And I would have a lot of questions, but other people just I think they, they think the financial stuff is beyond them, so they don’t want to ask, and maybe they’re afraid they’re going to embarrass themselves, but don’t ever be embarrassed to ask a question, because as a, as a staff member, I appreciate when people ask questions like that because I want to give them all the answers and, and have the board members know what’s going on. But a lot of times people are afraid to ask questions, so come prepared, and if you have questions, jot them down ahead of time, so when that’s covered, maybe it’ll be explained as, it’s usually the financial reports that people have a lot of questions about, but um, You know, if it’s not explained, then ask your question and don’t be afraid to look like you’re dumb or something like that. You’re just knowledge. You wanna be knowledgeable because that’s your duty. You’re fulfilling your duty of care. How did that feel? Did, did you feel? Uh, awkward asking your questions. Did it, did you, did you end up suppressing your questions because you were the only one asking, or did you go out and still, you know, continue to be the, the sole questioner? Well, you probably know me well enough to know I’m not exactly shy, Tony, so, well, I want, I want our listeners to know. So I can tell you I don’t stop asking the questions, but I used to leave meetings wondering like why wasn’t anybody asking any questions about this because I, I sat on one finance committee where I wondered why some of these other people were even on there because one was a former teacher and one was an air traffic controller, and I thought, you know, they don’t exactly pore over budgets all day. At least I know. The questions asked, but then I wondered why were they on the committee, you know, they should have had some people that were a little more knowledgeable. Oh, they were specifically on the finance committee, not just because they could be valuable board members, but the, the finance committee, doesn’t sound like the best place. This wasn’t the right place for them. The third duty for nonprofit board members is the duty of obedience. Say something about following laws, bylaws. Yeah, I think that’s important to be, to have bylaws for the organization and to be aware of them. I mean, everybody has bylaws, but how many board members actually read them and understand what the mission of the organization. is, I, I often have met with boards talking, usually during strategic planning processes, and I’ll ask them all to recite the mission of the organization, and you can believe if there’s 10 people in the room, you’re gonna get 11 different answers, you know. Uh, because most people really just don’t. They don’t know this stuff, so it’s hard to be obedient to something if you don’t understand it or don’t even know what it is. So board members should know your mission statement, be committed to your mission statement. They should be developing the mission statement or maybe usually mission statements don’t need to be updated too often, but your vision statement might change and Board members need to be aware of those things, and like you said, be obedient to the bylaws. If, if the bylaws say your terms and uh you can have 3, 2-year terms or whatever, and term limits is another tangent that I could probably go on forever talking about term limits. And some people say, well, we don’t have term limits because we don’t want to lose good board members. Well, you don’t have to lose them just because they’re not on your board anymore. You can keep them engaged. They could maybe move to an advisory board if that’s appropriate, or they can serve on a committee, but you keep them involved in other ways. But what happens when board members If you don’t have board term limits and you just keep recycling the same old people, I sat on a board once before I even was in the nonprofit world. I was serving on a nonprofit board. And When my term was up. I noticed something, well, before my 6 years was up, I noticed that the same people would go off the board 1 year, and then next year they’d come back, and I thought, we don’t ever seem to get any new board members. We’re just recycling the same old board members. And when my term was up, the CEO said, well, thank you for your service. You know, you have to be off the board for a year, but then you can come back. And I said, I know I can, but I won’t. And he said, oh, did we do something? Are you upset? I said, no, I think this is a great organization. It’s a wonderful organization, but you need to get new blood. You can’t just keep recycling the same old board members. So if you’re gonna have term limits, take them seriously. And yes, sometimes it might be appropriate to bring somebody back that really was a valuable board member, but that should be the exception, not the rule. And I think a lot of people get themselves into trouble by either You say, well, we have board, we have term limits, but we don’t pay attention to them or they take the people off for a year and then next year they’re back on again. So, so those term limits, I think are critical and you need to really pay attention to them. Fundraising, board fundraising. All right, so we talked about your individual giving, that it should be personally meaningful. That’s the best way to. Describe it. Um, what about other fundraising obligations, fundraising or friendraising for, for board members? Well, I think fundraising is absolutely essential, and every board member should be involved in it. However, that doesn’t mean you have to go out and ask people for money. Not everybody can do that. I mean, I’m sorry, but they’re just people who can’t, don’t feel comfortable with that. But fundraising is a 4-step process. It’s not just asking for the money, it’s identifying donors, cultivating donors, making the ask, and then stewarding the donors. So you’re at step 3 before you ever got to ask for money. And board members can do things like help identify people. They can come in and say, you know, my boss might be interested in his company getting involved in this organization, making a donation, or, you know, I have, I used to kind of chuckle when I was working as a staff member before I was a consultant. I was working for a museum once, and I went to a wedding reception, and it was a small. Private wedding, it was held in the reception was held in somebody’s home, and I was talking to somebody there, a relative of my husband’s actually, who said, oh, I hear you’re working at the museum, and I said, yeah, I am. And she said, oh, I really love that museum. I’d like to give you a gift, and she wrote out a check for $500 and I go back from this wedding reception with a check in my hand. But it gets worse. Then I went a couple of months later, I went to a funeral, and believe it or not, I came back from a funeral with a check. I didn’t ask. I just happened to make these relationships, so it was cultivating donors and identifying donors, you know, those who don’t like asking, maybe they can host a cultivation event. They can invite some of their friends or relatives or whoever that might be a potential donor. To come in for a tour or to have lunch with the CEO. When I was a, a development director, about once a month, I would invite somebody to come in and have lunch with the CEO and we had a president’s dining room, and it was real, you know, fancy dancy, and, and people were real honored when they had lunch with the president, and most of the men turned into donors later. So, Board members can do things like that, and they can help steward the donors, making phone calls, signing letters to people that maybe they know or are friends of, and that to me is really important when people see that your board members are, know that you’re a donor and are calling to thank you or writing a handwritten note or something. It’s really goes a long way. So, you can be involved in fundraising, very heavily involved, without ever asking for one single gift. Now, some people have the gift to do that, and sure, then you wanna turn loose and let them do the asking, but I, I’ve had a client once for a capital campaign, and we, they, one of their board members was the unusual person who loved asking for money, and I knew that he was gonna really be an excellent asset to this Capitol campaign, but I knew the rest of the board members were scared out of their wits to even think about asking that for that kind of money. So, when I had the meeting with the board to kind of get him ready for this campaign, I started out by saying, OK, who woke up this morning saying, boy, I can’t wait to go out and ask for money for this organization. And I knew exactly what was gonna happen. This guy’s hand was gonna go up, and everybody else was gonna say not me. And so I called on him and I said, well, Jim, I know you really do like asking for money, so I’m gonna invite you to help me with this training session and talk to people about this. And so we talked to them about how they could identify donors, help us cultivate donors, help us steward donors, and they got really excited about that because it was something I felt comfortable doing. So, A few of them did ask for money eventually, but, but not like, like Jim did. I mean, he was just gung ho over. He loved going out and asking for money, and those people are a dime. They’re not a dime a dozen. They’re as rare as a rare coin, I guess. Uh, the, the, the board member calls, just, just calling to thank donors. You, you can do that for a half an hour before a board meeting or a half an hour after a board meeting. And people would love to get a call from the board member. And even if you’re leaving a message, just saying, this is Linda, I’m a board member with the museum, and we thank you so much for that most recent gift that you gave us. Uh, here’s a number to call back. If, you know, if you, if you’d like to chat, but it’s not necessary. We just want you to know how grateful we are. I mean, you can leave a message like that. These are the, these are the simple low-hanging fruit tasks. Uh, handwritten notes can also be valuable. You could do that for a half hour before a board meeting. And, and, but you want folks to identify. I’m a board member, and, and we’re on behalf of the organization, we are grateful for your gift. Those things mean a lot, and they do. I, I’ve often put together board thankathons and even, even sometimes when they are asking for money, I wanted to tell you another kind of a cute story that I was working with a client who was doing a phoneathon. They were doing a phone appeal to ask for money. And one of the women that came in, as soon as she walked in the door, she said, oh, I really hate the thought of this. I don’t wanna ask for money. I don’t really feel comfortable with this. And I, I called the executive director aside and I said, you know, I don’t think we should have her on the phones because she doesn’t feel comfortable doing it. She doesn’t want to ask for money. I mean, we weren’t asking for large sums of money, it was a phone appeal. But she said, I have an idea. The executive director was really smart. She said, I have a good idea, and I had a stack of Pholithon forms there for everybody to call, and she started paging through them. And she said, this is my mother, but that person doesn’t know, that board member doesn’t know that this is my mother, but I know that no matter who, I told my mother we were gonna be doing this appeal, and I know that my mother said whoever calls her, whatever they say, she’s gonna give $500. And I said, well, that’s great. So I took that form and I put it on top of the pile, and I said to this person, I pulled her aside. I said, I know you don’t really feel very comfortable with this, but how about if I just give you like 2 or 3 forms, and you make a couple calls, and if you, if you don’t like it and you don’t wanna do it anymore, then I, I’ll let you help me with the paperwork, cause I have a lot of paperwork here to do. And she said, oh, that sounds good. She said, I’ll give it a try. Well, we were all in little cubicles in the office. Every, every caller was in a cubicle. And of course, she gets the executive director’s mother at the top of her list, and we literally heard her scream, and she comes running out and she said, you won’t believe this, you won’t believe this. I just got a $500 gift. And I said, oh wow, that’s really great. I said, So are you OK with doing a couple more? She said, Yeah, give me some more of those forms. And she raised more money at the end of the night. We literally had to tell her it was time to stop calling now because we didn’t want to call people after 9 o’clock at night. But that was just an example of how we, we kind of set her up, yeah, I admit it, you know, but she found that it wasn’t as bad as she thought it was gonna be, and, and she raised a lot of money from people, so. Uh, you just never know until you try some of these things, what’s gonna work. Linda, why don’t you leave us with some, uh, parting words about the revolutionary Board. Well, like I said, I, I don’t expect you to put on your red coats and go out and shoot somebody or anything like that, but if you do have a board that is struggling and you don’t know what else to do, I think it is time to do some evaluation. And in the book, I mentioned that if anybody wants any of the forms that I included as part of the workbook, if you want a Word document, So you can customize it for yourself. I’ll be happy to send that to anybody that have purchased the book. Just tell me which forms you want. And also, I have a, I call it a veteran’s discount since, since it’s Revolutionary War-based theme here, that if they want me to do an analysis of their board for them, I’m gonna give them a veteran’s discount on that, that consulting work to help them. With the evaluating their boards, because sometimes you just need an outside party to say, you know, well, this is not so good, and hey, there’s, here’s something that’s good, you should build on that. So, a lot of times people needed some expert help from the outside. As a veteran of the United States Air Force, I, I thank you for offering a veteran’s discount. Well, thank you for your service. That’s Linda Lysakowski. The book is The Revolutionary Board, a workbook to help you assess and improve your board of directors. You’ll find Linda at Linda Lysakowski.com. And you can connect with her on LinkedIn. Linda, thanks so much. Pleasure. Hey, thank you, Tony. It’s been great as always being with you. Next week, non full-time executives. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I’ll do it from a distance. I beseech you, find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martinetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great. There we go. After something else. Yeah. What happened? Oh, I pressed cancel.
