Giving 2.0™ Guide: Nonprofit Board Service

A nonprofit may organize a board to primarily focus on utilizing the financial and network capital of its members to provide or solicit funding on behalf of the nonprofit. Fundraising boards typically spend their meetings hearing reports from a nonprofit’s leadership team and discussing ways to expand and/or pursue development opportunities.

• For example, an arts institution—museum, symphony, opera—may build a board that includes wealthy donors, C-suite executives from corporations with an arts funding focus and/or collectors who may donate works of art, historical artifacts or other collectables to the institution.

Some boards may leverage the professional experience of their members (or specific members) to advise and inform a particular C-suite executive or team within a nonprofit. In some cases, nonprofits may develop a separate advisory board or boards, in addition to its legal board of directors. An advisory board does not exercise any official decision-making power, but serves a specific purpose, such as cultivating future board members, providing expertise or providing credibility.

• A nonprofit that focuses on the well-being of children, for example, may build a separate policy advisory board that consists of child-advocacy experts to inform its activities.

• A nonprofit that focuses on international development, for example, may have diplomats and government officials on the board who can provide advice to the nonprofit about operating in a particular geopolitical space.

A new nonprofit or one struggling with its reputation may organize a board with a number of high-profile individuals whose respective network, experiential and reputational capital give the nonprofit public credibility. These members are not necessarily active participants in how an organization operates, unlike working boards, but serve a more titular role.

• A startup nonprofit looking to secure funding may choose to develop a separate titular board to build its credibility with local investors. Members of the titular board would likely be listed on the nonprofit’s webpage and/or promotional materials and provide some funding to the nonprofit (often seed, signaling or annual funding). However, these individuals rarely exercise decision-making power or have high engagement in the nonprofit’s strategy, evaluation or operations.

A working board, the most high-engagement type of nonprofit board, refers to a group of individuals who are proactively involved in strategy creation and implementation, human resource issues and financial oversight. Unlike other board types, working boards are more involved in the day-to-day operations of the nonprofit and typically take on a ‘coaching’ role. They may also participate in fundraising and policy creation, as well as program development and scaling.

• An early-stage direct-service nonprofit may have a working board whose members actively participate in the administrative, fundraising, oversight and programming efforts of the nonprofit. The board may also fulfill organizational functions that staff would typically handle in a later-stage nonprofit.