Without a solid foundation in compliance, even the best-laid plans can quickly unravel. Compliance isn’t just about ticking boxes or avoiding penalties—it's about ensuring that your organisation operates with integrity and is positioned for sustainable success.
Setting Your Strategic Board Agenda: A Tool for Future-Focused Governance
A well-organised board agenda is more than just a checklist for directors. It’s a critical tool that shapes the discussions and decisions made in every meeting, driving the future of the organisation.
Is Your Constitution Fit for Purpose?
One of the core responsibilities of board directors is to ensure that the organisation's governance structures are robust, relevant, and legally compliant. Yet, the importance of regularly reviewing constitutions is often overlooked until something goes wrong.
How to improve Board Governance
Bowman’s main message was that each item for a board agenda would be linked to one of the fund’s strategic goals. He urged chairs to rigorously enforce this, partly as a means of preventing “personal gripes that go on for ages” from individual directors. Such a policy would also mean that agendas should not have an item labelled as “any other business”.
Using your Vision/Purpose to unlock business and service innovation
Your Vision statement is more than a catch phrase: it's a call to arms and one of the most powerful innovation tools available. But you need to know how to use it. The real question is: How well do we map our existing business, services and programs against the key elements of our Vision statement, and how well do we “walk the talk”?
Ending micromanagement around the Boardroom: A primer for Directors
Have you ever been trapped in a Board meeting that has totally lost its focus? Do you dread Board or staff meetings that achieve little or nothing? Sometimes, without even knowing it, any Director can waste the time of the Board by leaning into operations rather than strategic governance. So how do you handle the toxic trap of micromanagement?
How can we make our online board meetings more effective?
With current increased uncertainty and complexity, it may be tempting to put off the board meetings for your board or committee because you can’t meet face-to-face. But do you really need to cancel or simply pivot?
The Strategic Advisory Board: Creation, Development and Extracting Advantage
Given the pace of change and complexity in today’s business environment, Advisory Boards are often underutilized resources for strategic, high-value information and guidance.
Three simple strategies to maximize your next external Board evaluation
For many corporate and nonprofit organisations alike, the need to evaluate the Board of directors, the strengths, weaknesses and skills gap at any given time, is critical to managing its effectiveness. Leverage these strategies and put your crosshairs on the areas that need the most improvement.
[Whitepaper] What's the True Role of Your Board of Directors? (Hint: It's Not What You Think)
How you view the role of the Board can have a big impact on its effectiveness. Does your Board meet to tick the boxes on compliance? Or is it about choices and creation? This free white paper, Choices, Future, Communities, is a wake-up call to anyone who thinks they are too small to make a difference.
“Even the cockatoos in the pet shops are talking about mergers in the Nonprofit Sector!”
Despite the challenges of regulatory uncertainty and economic pressure, a space to begin proactive discussions around mergers, acquisitions and other forms of sustainable growth has been created for organisations which are willing and prepared.
“We will never be hacked” and other cyber security myths that are leaving nonprofits exposed
How prepared an organization is to detect, respond and recover from a cyber attack will determine its resilience following the inevitable data or security breach it will suffer some day. Are you preapred for the inevitable?
3 ways to handle a board decision you disagree with (even if you are the lone voice)
Reasonable people can disagree on important issues. But what do you do if you firmly believe the consensus decision is wrong and that the Board is veering toward a decision that could be extremely damaging?
The Case for Nonprofit Board Succession Planning
In a recent study, less than half the nonprofit CEOs surveyed said they did not have an adequate succession planning process in place. If building a board leadership pipeline is among the most important areas for board improvement, why does it routinely fail to take priority?
The 10 duties and responsibilities that every Director must understand
Use the following as a sample of Director standards with which to inform and assess each Director on the Board as well as incoming candidates or volunteers.
How to cut down wasteful Director micromanagement with a good Board induction program
If decision making around the Board room is likely to recede into the weeds its productivity and effectiveness is greatly diluted. The Board induction program is the first and greatest opportunity to set personal expectations from the beginning of a Director’s tenure.
What is an in camera session? How to maintain confidentiality in the Boardroom without generating fear
“In camera” is a Latin term which can be understood to mean an "in private" session in this context. It involves a confidential meeting, or a portion of a meeting, taking place with only Board members present.
What is strategic awareness? 8 ways you can begin to use it in business and in life
Strategic awareness rarely features in modern textbooks on management, yet is something that can fundamentally change conversations and decision-making at the Board level.
In essence, strategic awareness is the...
Before you alert the press: How to evaluate merger opportunities for the greatest compatibility
The primary reason driving most mergers is to gain some type of advantage or to stave off some sort of disaster. The only way organizations can decide if a merger makes sense is to evaluate whether it significantly advances their vision and strategic objectives. Since these strategies are, presumably, designed to increase the ability of the organization to deliver against its vision, their accomplishment should, by definition, increase profitability.
The responsibilities of the Honorary Treasurer are too much for any one individual. Try this instead.
Many nonprofit organizations elect or appoint an individual to the position of Treasurer and that person is deemed responsible for the financial management of the organization.