board members - moss + ross

Advice for Engaging Boards

By Mary Moss Let’s look back at the last month, which seems like a year. Your first order of business was to make provisions to meet your mission even as you were shuttering your offices. Somehow, you had to go virtual administratively and also devise new ways to meet your constituencies’ needs. Then, in the flood of programmatic adaptations, you cancelled or postponed fundraising events, reached out to your donors and volunteers to check in, and pushed out some great annual fund appeals. You have done a terrific job. Now, what about your boards? The pandemic thrusts boards onto center stage to assess and reassess the risk that COVID-19 poses to the organization. Risk management will continue to be the number one focus during the crisis, with special attention directed to program delivery and finance. Yet there [...]

Your Board Really Can Be Great!

By Susan Ross. I was asked for my perspective on the probing question “Is Your Board Any Good?” in a recently released short video from local agency Angel Oak Creative. During the filming, I suggested to the interviewer that “Is your board as good as you need it to be?” might be a better question. At moss+ross, we work with lots of boards, and Mary and I have rarely run into one that really is not “any good.” But we have seen boards that aren’t making best use of their skills, have fallen into performance ruts or lost their focus, and have ended up being less effective than the nonprofit or institution – or their board members - deserved. Sometimes a retreat or custom training can be a big help to getting a board reengaged and focused. Last [...]