VOLUNTEERISM

How a Careful Orientation Can Help New Trustees Get On Board

By the end of next year, all the founding board members of Covenant House Washington, a shelter for homeless and runaway youths, will leave their posts due to term limits. But when the new trustees start their tours of duty, the executive director, Vincent Gray, will be ready for them.

Mr. Gray says he once felt anxious about the coming transition. But brainstorming with his group's board-development committee led to a plan: to bring on several new trustees this year and next, and to offer them a thorough and consistent orientation, a process that begins as soon as a new board member agrees to serve. "This way, " he says, "they can make a much more informed decision about whether it's for them." Mr. Gray and the board's current chairwoman met with all trustees-to-be to discuss the organization, complementing their talk with slide and video presentations. They provide an extensive manual, a tour of the charity's facilities, and ask prospective board members to spend a couple of hours working with staff members on the streets of Washington.

At Covenant House, orientation is never truly over for board members. "It's something you do early on to establish a foundation, but boards need to be nurtured with information all along the way," says Mr. Gray. Toward that end, the board recently put in place an informal quarterly luncheon program for trustees, which includes presentations by Covenant House employees on the charity's new projects.

Familiarizing new trustees with an organization's history, mission, and policies, and spelling out their duties as board members, is crucial and often overlooked by charity managers, says Berit Lakey, a senior consultant at BoardSource, in Washington, a national clearinghouse for information on nonprofit boards. Failing to orient new trustees means it may take longer for them to feel confident about participating in an organization's leadership, says Ms. Lakey.

A shortage of board candidates nationwide underscores the need for strong orientation. A recent study by the international management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, sponsored by the Volunteer Consulting Group, a charity in New York, found that nonprofit boards in the United States have between one million and three million unfilled seats.

As a result, qualified candidates are ardently sought. "[Boards are] looking for many of the same people," says Floyd Branson, assistant director of operations and personnel for the Purdue University Cooperative Extension Service, which provides agricultural and community-development information to Indiana residents and maintains boards in all 92 of the state's counties. "We need to be attractive to them, to assure them we'll provide the tools they need."

Those trustees who do volunteer often find that their responsibilities are broader than they had anticipated, a result of the tight budgets of nonprofit organizations limiting the number of staff members they can hire, says Mr. Branson. "Today volunteer leaders of any kind are acting almost as ad hoc employees," he says, necessitating a thorough understanding of the organizations they serve. Careful orientation is critical, he says, because board members come from all walks of life and possess different expertise and experience.

Some organizations have opportunities to welcome new members one at a time, while others must conduct orientations for several trustees at once. The Z Space Studio, a 15-year-old theater-development organization in San Francisco, recently underwent the turnover of nearly its entire eight-member board. After a five-year period during which Z Space underwent rapid growth, several founding board members opted to leave, according to Emily Hall, the board's chairwoman. The change called for Z Space to find a way to bring all of its new members up to date at the same time.

The group chose to conduct its orientation during a one-day retreat, says Ms. Hall. The goal, she says, was "to get to know each other -- our backgrounds, why we were each there, what pushed our buttons about Z Space -- and coalesce as a group." At the retreat, the group's founder and artistic director shared his vision and recounted milestones. The participants discussed the board's role and plans for growth, with new trustees sharing their respective visions for their involvement, which Ms. Hall says was important to making board members feel valued and to helping Z Space's leaders learn about their trustees' interests. "Often people are looking for a volunteer experience that expands upon or distracts them from their job," she says. "You might have a marketing person who wants to do fund raising. It's important to understand what they want to contribute [regardless] of their functional title."

After the retreat, Ms. Hall followed up with board members individually to see if they had questions: "As chair, I felt it was important to make the effort so they feel comfortable, and because the board is small, I can take the time to reach out."

No matter what form it takes, one of the most important parts of any trustee orientation should be a thorough explanation of a charity's finances, says Hildy Gottlieb, president of Help 4 NonProfits & Tribes, in Tucson, which offers management consulting to charities and Native American tribal organizations, and author of Board Recruitment & Orientation: A Step-by-Step, Common Sense Guide (Renaissance Press, 2001, $17.95). Ms. Gottlieb says that boards should outline financial commitments and responsibilities for fund raising for new members during the orientation program, beginning when a prospective member is first approached about joining the board.

She recommends that organizations modify their bylaws so board members cannot vote until they have demonstrated a basic understanding of their financial responsibilities, including how to read balance sheets. "It can't just be the responsibility of the treasurer and finance committee if everyone is voting," she says. But orientation shouldn't necessarily be offered only to new trustees -- longtime board members may also benefit from refresher courses. When the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation, in New York, doubled the size of its six-member board this past spring, the group's president, Nancy Biberman, hired a board-development consultant for the first time in its 11-year history, in an effort to bolster members' knowledge of board governance. After the organization experienced a growth spurt, which included a $23-million building renovation, its board was heading into 2002 with significant fund-raising responsibilities. Ms. Biberman wanted to develop its sense of stewardship and decrease its reliance on staff members.

Trustee candidates toured the organization's Urban Horizons Economic Development Center and met with Ms. Biberman and another board member. Those that agreed to join the board received folders that included the organization's bylaws, audited financial statements, the budget, information about programs, and board-member responsibilities.

The consultant reviewed the materials at the first board meeting of both new and current members, and addressed how working together would be different now that the board had doubled in size. "It made the original board see the ways in which we'd been perhaps too collegial and needed to develop some more formal systems," says Ms. Biberman. "It made the new members feel like they were coming into an organization that was ready to grow, and that the process would be the same for all of us."

Ms. Gottlieb recommends a refresher course for an entire nonprofit board, rookies and longtime members alike, at least every two years. Topics covered should include organization-specific updates, as well as briefings on legal and accounting issues affecting the nonprofit field overall and the organization's specialty in particular. Veteran trustees are integral to the process, she says, both as potential mentors for new members and as sources of hard-earned wisdom. "We ask board members, 'What do you wish you had known? What would have made you a better board member early on? What do you wish you knew now? '" she says. "And we ask the CEO, 'What do you think your board doesn't know? ' We do that as a group. It's an insightful exercise."

Finding the best ways to give trustees the information they need to do their jobs is a matter of tinkering, Ms. Gottlieb says -- and empathy. "The most innovative programs, and those that work the best, come from folks putting themselves in the shoes of the person coming on," she says. "When you brainstorm, remember what it was like to be new."

How does your charity prepare newly recruited trustees for their responsibilities? Tell us about it in the Volunteerism online forum.