Most Boards Are Alumni of Indifference

The third Thursday of the quarter, on the seventh floor of a downtown office building, eleven trustees of a midsize community organization filed into a glass conference room at 5:42 p.m. and were handed a forty-three-page board packet they had not read.

The chair, Diane, called the meeting to order at 5:51. The treasurer, Bill, walked through a finance update from his iPad in the voice of a man reading a menu. The development director, Sasha, presented Q3 fundraising results in nine minutes — she had nine minutes, she had been told, in a sixty-minute meeting that had been allocated, in 2014, by someone who had since left the field. A new trustee, Jordan, asked a real question at 6:39 and was answered with the warm, slightly impatient politeness people use with children at dinner tables. The motion to approve the audit passed. The motion to approve the slate passed. The meeting adjourned at 6:58 with the chair thanking everyone for their deep engagement.

There had been no engagement, and no one had been deep. The trustees had been present.

Most of them had cared, once. Seven years ago Diane had walked into the executive director's office after her younger daughter's bat mitzvah, sat down on the couch, and said I want this organization in my life. She had meant it. She still — somewhere — meant it. But she had been chair for four years now, and what she had become was something else. She had become an alum of the moment she signed on.

The trustees in that conference room, like the trustees in every conference room like it on every third Thursday of the quarter, are mostly very nice people who once felt something. They are now, with great formality, the alumni of having felt it.

The asset everyone has stopped asking

There is, in the architecture of every nonprofit, a particular asset that the senior team has more or less stopped asking anything of. It is the most overrepresented line item on the website, the most underrepresented line item in the actual revenue mix, and the only resource on the org chart whose primary work product is the approval of minutes.

It is the board.

This is not a criticism of the people on it. The people on it are, by the population, more capable than any other category of stakeholder the organization will ever encounter. The chair has run a hospital. The treasurer has audited four of the Fortune 500. The vice chair sits on the investment committee of one of the country's largest foundations. The new trustee, in her last role, raised a billion dollars of capital across two industries. These are not amateurs. They are top-of-field professionals doing five hours a quarter of remedial committee work because the organization has not figured out what else to do with them.

The reason most boards underperform isn't that the wrong people serve. It is that the right people serve, and are then asked to read a packet.

The interaction model is the bug

Almost every dysfunction of a nonprofit board traces back to a single inherited design decision: the board's primary interaction with the organization is the meeting.

The meeting is a deeply specific medium. It is synchronous, it is performative, it is recorded, and it is, by the time a trustee has been on a board for two years, a setting in which she has learned exactly what is expected of her. What is expected of her is attendance. What is not expected of her is the use of any of the assets — the Rolodex, the judgment, the affection — that caused her to join.

The development director then spends her quarter avoiding board members between meetings, because she has been told, by every nonprofit how-to article ever written, that her job is to protect the board's time. In practice this means: between meetings, no asks; in meetings, no asks; ever, no asks. So she does not ask. She presents. She updates. She thanks. And once a year she takes the chair to a long lunch and gently inquires whether the chair could perhaps host a small reception.

A board, in this design, is an expensive newsletter audience.

How we got here

Nobody decided to underuse the board. The whole apparatus is built to underuse it.

The bylaws describe a fiduciary body. The IRS describes a fiduciary body. The auditor describes a fiduciary body. The consultant who sold the org its strategic-plan template six years ago described a fiduciary body. The fiduciary body is, in the framework, the ground floor of what a board is. Almost everyone treats it as the ceiling.

You did not slight Diane. You inherited a profession in which the legal minimum of board behavior — fiduciary compliance — became, by quiet drift, the operational maximum. You hired her for the seven years of pent-up affection she carried in with her. You spent those seven years using almost none of it.

What a board could be if you actually believed in it

A board treated as the most underused asset on the file looks almost nothing like a quarterly meeting.

It looks like a chair who is briefed every two weeks by the development director, by phone, for fifteen minutes, on three specific names — not generic engagement, but three specific names — and who, between calls, makes one of her own. It looks like a treasurer whose audit firm becomes the door through which the organization meets six new prospects nobody had ever named. It looks like a vice chair who reads the major-gift portfolio quarterly, not for governance but for introductions, and who, twice a year, hosts seven people for dinner at her house and lets the executive director sit beside the one person at the table who has been waiting eleven years to hear about the work without realizing it.

It looks, in other words, like the people on the board doing what they were good enough to be invited for. None of it is a slide in a packet. All of it is a relationship between a person who once cared and an organization that has decided to ask.

The hardest sentence to say to a chair

There is a sentence development directors do not, mostly, say to their board chairs. It is we have not been using you.

It is hard to say because it sounds like a criticism of the chair, when it is the opposite — it is a confession from the organization. We had your affection and your address book for seven years and we asked you to read a packet.

The chair, if she is the kind of person you wanted on the board in the first place, will not be hurt by that sentence. She will be relieved. Most chairs, in private, suspect their term has been ornamental and are too well-mannered to say so. The first time someone at the organization names it out loud, the room loosens. The next meeting is different. The Wednesday call she didn't expect — the one with three specific names on it — is the meeting she joined for in the first place.

The connective tissue problem

What stops the two-week call is not affection on either side. It is preparation time.

A development director cannot brief eight trustees, every two weeks, on three specific names each, if every briefing takes her two hours to pull together by hand. The math doesn't fit inside the week. So she shrinks the work back down to the quarterly meeting, which is the only ritual that fits the calendar she has been handed, and the chair stays an alum, and the board stays a packet.

What we want a research tool to do at Rōmy is collapse that preparation. The eleven-year stranger who lives three doors down from your treasurer — the family foundation already quietly funding a cause neighboring yours, the daughter who just took a board seat in another city, the husband whose loss is the entire reason the trustee took your call last week — that's not new information. It's the work of one afternoon, repeated for every trustee, every two weeks, in a development office that has eight afternoons a quarter and ninety-two things to spend them on. Compress that, and the calls happen. The dinners happen. The board stops being an alibi and starts being a door.

The board has not been underused because it was the wrong board. It has been underused because the connective tissue between trustee affection and program reality has been hand-built every time, by one person, in the cracks between everything else.

A different ask, this week

This week, if you run a development office: pick one trustee — not the chair, not the vice chair, somebody two rings out — and put fifteen minutes on her calendar. Not a coffee, not a tour, not a board errand. A phone call.

Tell her, with specificity, two donors in the file you think she might quietly know. Ask her, simply, would you be willing to make one introduction. Then be quiet long enough for her to answer.

She will say yes. She has been waiting seven years for someone to ask her.

The packet was always the wrapper. The board was the gift.