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| Best Practices: Philanthropy |
Measuring Up
Matthew Schuerman
10/01/2005
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5. Who Is On The Board? A good board requires enough members (at least five) to ensure
a diversity of viewpoints and a diversity of loyalties, so that a single trustee
cannot dominate the decision making. Directors should collectively know enough
about accounting, budgeting and policy to be able to monitor the executive
director and select a new one when the time comes. Indeed, a board that is
overly beholden to the executive director is dangerous. “Sometimes just looking
at the board list can be surprising,” says Judith Stockdale, president of the
Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation. “I’ll see people with the same last
name, and I will ask, and they’ll say, ‘Yes, it’s a married couple.’ Or maybe
I’ll see relatives of the executive director.”
 | | ANOTHER 30,000 groups dealing with public and private education gained
nonprofit tax status. How likely is it you will have heard of any single
one? |
Ask to meet with a few board
members. While you may assume that the nonprofit’s president will have chosen
the most enthusiastic trustees, the way they answer questions can still impart
to a prospective donor how much energy flows through the organization. “They
should be able to give three stories about the organization, things the
organization has done,” maintains Julie Holdaway, executive director of San
Diego Grantmakers, a donors’ organization. Ask also how many board members
donate to the charity; 100 percent is the norm. Both are simple tests of how
much a board cares. “I would say that 90 percent of the time when I find an
organization is in trouble, it was because the board was ineffective,” says Ron
Ancrum, a former consultant who is now director of Associated Grant Makers in
Boston.
6. Do You Use Volunteers? This is a favorite line of questioning for
Jane Leighty Justis, executive director and trustee of the Leighty Foundation,
in part because she has spent ample time as a volunteer and as a trainer of
volunteer coordinators. She asks how many volunteers the organization has, what
they do, how long they have been volunteers and whether the group employs a
trained volunteer coordinator.
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