Rob Dolin's space: Organizations

What makes an exceptional [non-profit] board member

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 02:59:30 GMT

Criteria found based on a survey of over 2,000 people may be suprising to some:

The majority of chief executives say commitment to mission is one of the top criteria they use when selecting board members. In BoardSource’s Nonprofit Governance Index 2007, they listed commitment to mission among their top three criteria 61 percent of the time — more than any other factor. That was followed by the ability to network (40 percent), professional skills (37 percent), and willingness to serve (32 percent).

Hmmm, so summarizing: people who are passionate about the cause, well networked, have professional skills, and are willing to make a time commitment are important. Moreover, less important criteria:

Criteria that many assume are very important, such as being a major donor and knowledge of organization’s industry/field, were in the chief executive’s top three less than 18 percent of the time. The Index surveyed 1,126 chief executives and 1,026 board members.

I think this should be encouraging for folks interested in getting involved with a non-profit and making a difference. You don't need to necessarily know the field or donate big bucks.

An article on the full report can be found at: http://www.boardsource.org/Spotlight.asp?ID=14.333. Cheers--
--Rob

Basic email listserv infrastructure for a non-profit

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:09:07 GMT

Yesterday evening, my colleague Bob was explaining some of the challenges around technology he was seeing at a non-profit he is considering volunteering with. He was talking about how many email lists or "listservs" the group had. I was quick to suggest that the group (it's a relatively small group) should have three listservs and I promised I'd write something for him explaining my thoughts. Thus, this blog entry. Enjoy--

--Rob

Three listservs for a non-profit

Announcements - A non-profit MUST have some ability to message all of its members / activists. This should be a comprehensive list of everyone who has ever volunteered, expressed interest, etc. in the organization. Anyone should be able to join, but only the organization's chair, communications officer, and staff (if applicable) should be allowed to post and said postings should be reviewed by the organization's leadership prior to posting.
Board - There are emails that are specific to the board of directors like calls to meetings, meeting agendas, meeting minutes, and requests for feedback on an idea that need not be broadcast broadly. The gate to this list should be membership in the board, but all list subscribers should have open access to send to this list.
Discussion - Many organizations operate with just the above two lists, but I believe having a third open discussion list is extremely valuable. This list should be open for anyone to join and anyone to send to. It should be moderated only as necessary to prevent unsolicited commercial email (mortgage offers, sexual enhancement ads, etc.) However, this list should be open so that any member can share content tangentially related to the organization, a random suggestion, or other "good and welfare" type content.

More active online groups grow while less active groups actually shrink

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 21:58:01 GMT

This morning, I decided to compare the sizes of nine YahooGroups for caucuses of the Young Democrats of America with their message traffic. I expected some correlation, but I was suprised to find a rather strong correlation between traffic and growth rate of the group:

Details - More specifically, I compared the membership growth of the group over the past year (~July 06 to ~June 07 i.e. FY07) to the number of message posted to the group during that time (normalized to the number of messages posted to the group.)

Inactive Groups Shrink - As you can see, groups that had on the order of one message per member (over the year) grew 20%+ while groups with on the order of 0.20 messages per member actually shrunk. I'm guessing this is due to people unsubscribing as well as YahooGroups bounce maintenance.

More Posting Diversity Implies More Growth - When drilling-down into the authors of posts, I found that minoritycaucusyda and disabilityissues were dominated by a single poster whereas ydalaborcaucus and ydajc had more diversity among posters.

Other Reasons for Growth? - Of course, simply posting to a group does not generate more members, but it seems that auxillary activities like group members forwarding the mails or group members inviting their contacts could be drivers of group growth.

I hope you found this data useful. Please don't hesitate to leave a comment with your thoughts or a link to related data. Thanks--
--Rob

Technorati tags: YahooGroups, viral, social networking, Young Democrats, caucuses, listservs, online organizing, politics