Are your board meetings getting a bit routine and boring, especially as you negotiate through next year’s goals and budget? Do you wonder if you are getting full and complete feedback and “best possible” thinking from your board of directors? Here’s a quick way to put some energy, passion, and truth-telling back into board discussions and maybe even discover a couple of valuable “a-ha’s”!
Set up a free Survey Monkey account and ask each board member (and your leadership team?) to anonymously answer the following questions. I can almost guarantee this will generate great discussion and perhaps uncover some interesting ideas. Here you go:
- What do you feel we should absolutely stop doing immediately?
- What do you think we should absolutely be doing, but are not?
- What keeps you awake at night about our nonprofit agency/ministry?
- What do you feel we must change immediately, and why?
- What do you feel we need to protect at all costs?
- What potential opportunities do we have that are not being explored or implemented?
- What is the greatest threat we face that we are not addressing?
I think if you have everyone complete this survey, aggregate the responses, and discuss them at your next board meeting there is a better than even chance you will uncover some important issues that have either fallen through the cracks or, due to how polite we all tend to be at many nonprofits, have gone unspoken because they are uncomfortable issues.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes. This is a great way to insure you have Board Meetings that Don’t Bore and you can continue to serve your agency and board as a Board President that Does Not Bore.