The Dos and Don’ts of appointing new board members at a grantmaking organisation
Most grantmaking organisations have some sort of board. The people who sit on these boards have job titles that vary based on country and legal regime, but in English are most often called directors, trustees or simply board members.
Regardless of whether your funding organisation is run by a family, a government, a company or simply a random assortment of people, sooner or later your board will face the same question: how are we going to add someone new? This is a key moment where a funder can take a great leap forward, or where it can fall flat on its face. Here’s some tips about getting it right.
DOs
First up, and before you discuss any potential candidates, make a fresh new Word document with these words, nice and big at the top: “The minimum skills and experiences we should have on our board”.
Sadly the job isn't finished yet. Now you need to fill up this lovely blank document with a list of important skills and experiences that will help your funding organisation to succeed.
If you’re very lucky your organisation will already have done a board skills mapping, and all you need to do is cut and paste. But most likely you’ll need to compile this list of desirable skills and experience with your board members (and ideally staff team), either online or in person. And to be crystal clear here, this document should contain all the skills and experiences the board needs in its entirety, not the skills that each individual member needs to have.
Made your list? Great! Now, check to see if it's missing any key items. Here's three skills and experiences that we think will benefit virtually any funder board:
Experience of applying for grants, and spending grant money
Up-to-date practitioner knowledge of a relevant sector (i.e one in which the funder supports work)
Knowledge of research, measurement and evaluation techniques from a relevant sector (ditto).
Now you’ve got the second version of the list - everything’s going swimmingly!
Next, politely ask the current board members to share which skills and experiences they think they personally bring to the board. You could do this via an email, or in person. Again, if you're mega lucky, this will already exist on a shared drive somewhere. Once you’ve got the answers in from the board members, compile these into one list, removing duplicate entries.
Finally, the good bit. Compare the list of current skills and experience on your board with the list of list to the minimum skills and experiences the board should have. Pretty quickly you'l be able to see some really important skills or experiences that nobody on the board currently brings. Highlight these gaps, because they’re the bones of your recruiting drive.
Now you are in a position to write a job advert, majoring on the gaps you just identified. You need to write a job advert because (so sorry) you should definitely try to advertise your role publicly if you want to get the strongest candidates. We are aware that this will almost certainly result in more administrative labour than if you just tap one person to do the job in private, but if you’re giving away thousands or millions of pounds/dollars/euros, isn’t it worth spending just a bit on making sure the whole operation is overseen by capable people? Wouldn't you want your grantees to advertise for key jobs?
We recommend publishing board member job adverts to give a broad range of people a shot at these important roles. Clear, welcoming job ads, circulated through intermediaries who specialise in getting opportunities in front of people who didn’t traditionally have them will get you a broader pool of candidates, and ultimately a better board. It's more effort, but it's worth the effort.
Finally, you may end up having to interview candidates for board positions who have new skills or experiences that are quite different to those currently on the board (e.g expertise in measurement and evaluation). This is a risk moment for recruiting organisations, because if you don’t have these skills yourselves, it can be hard to recognise if you’re talking to an expert in a domain, or a very confident charlatan. We strongly recommend bringing in some guest interviewer skills to help avoid unfortunate outcomes.
DON’Ts
As well as providing handy tips about getting it right, we thought we’d also include a few warnings about avoiding some director recruitment beartraps. Here are the ‘Don’ts’.
DON’T appoint people who want to join a board primarily so they can pick and choose who gets to have money. Why not? Well, first, it's a bit power-crazed, and you won’t enjoy spending time with them. But second it’s a bad sign because unless the funder has literally zero paid employees, it is the staff team who will have the time to find and vet the strongest potential grantees, not the board.
DON’T fetishise business skills. The impressive skills someone acquired in their highly lucrative and successful banking/consulting/startup career might not be quite as transferable to all conceivable contexts as their MBA tutor claimed they were.
DON’T reward people with board positions just because they’re famous or because you’d like to get closer to them. This is a really important job that affects the welfare of countless people you’ve never met. It’s not a prize for succeeding at life.
DON’T have more lawyers, accountants and finance experts on your board than you have people who have up-to-date knowledge of the fields that you are working in.
DON’T suggest joining a board to anyone when attending anything that remotely looks like A Gala.
Have you recruited for a new board member recently? Did it go well or badly? Hit reply to share your story with us, privately.
