Board Evaluations: The Complete Guide for Not-for-profits

When you sit on a not-for-profit board, you're invested in the cause and naturally, you want to give your best performance to ensure you do it for good. Best practices for governance suggest that boards, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, should make regular self-evaluations every year. This is the key to improving your performance every year. By making regular evaluations a standard practice, you’re ensuring that you will view board work as one component.

The primary goal of doing board self-assessments is to evaluate the board’s performance and set priorities for board development. Whether your board is new or has worked under a foundation for ten years, best practices in good governance and the path moving forward. Your board’s view of governance is a direct reflection of your leadership.

As an end-of-year habit, you don’t have a lot of flexibility in how you approach your not-for-profit board evaluation process. Just as you’ve had board evaluations in the past, this guide to techniques and not-for-profit board evaluations should empower you with the tools for exploring options that go far beyond a basic checklist and help you build improvements for the future.

Related article: The Benefits of Board Portals for Not-for-profits

What Do You Hope to Learn from Your Board Evaluations?

While not-for-profit boards spend their time working for a living, many things are left unsaid. Good self-evaluations will draw out the things we wonder to work on, and we’re usually met with surprising details as we read. You may be surprised to learn all feedback about board member strengths, as well as your organization as a whole. That’s when it’s time to rethink your multiple approaches in leadership and remove tensions.

The best practices on your board evaluations should point you in the direction of helping you establish your board priorities that take place over the short term (1–3 years), and over the long term (5 years and more). Templates for evaluations can be a valuable tool, as long as you bear in mind that the template is a generic structure. It’s always best to have a committee write the questions and modify them according to the size and needs of the organization.

Ultimately, the results of your not-for-profit board evaluations should help you discover whether you’ve accomplished your objectives and the existing measurable goals with designed effectiveness. If you’re not, you have an opportunity to ask why without making grievances and formulate a plan for action.

Related article: How to Write a Report to the Board of Directors

Developing a Not-for-profit Board Self Evaluation Protocol

One of the main objections of doing board self-evaluations is that they take too much time. You can overcome this objection by streamlining the process as much as possible. The answer is your committee needs a self-evaluation protocol that gives you a clear context to guide the key elements your protocol is based on and help guide it.

BoardEffect offers a guide when you structure your board’s self-evaluations. There’s no right or wrong answer. Keep it as simple as possible. This is the right way to treat your board and its uniqueness. You can distribute board self-evaluation forms by members to complete on your own or present a set of questions for boards to discuss as a group. If your board prefers discretion, you might consider the benefit of using anonymous evaluations. This has the advantage of getting the most genuine, honest feedback possible.

Keep these things in mind before you write a final copy of your evaluation form:

• Prepare questions in a positive way.
• Give an opportunity for your own voice; acknowledge responses.
• Provide an evaluation form of [Likert scale: Agree / Agree / Disagree / Strongly Disagree].
• Provide room in form to insert comments and expectations.

Related article: How a Board Portal Will Improve the Performance of Your Not-for-profit Board

Select Specific Areas to Cover

As you design your questionnaires, it will make the task easier if you break it down into the following sub-areas:

1. Core board responsibilities;
2. Importance of board responsibilities for the short term;
3. Responsibilities that make board effectiveness

You may also like to combine this with other existing measures that center on behaviour your not-for-profit’s mission and strategic direction. By focusing on your core for not-for-profits purposes, it gives you a valuable structure to clearly state your mission and determine your value. The whole board is on the same page with it. Sub-questions that support assessment focus on important issues like the following:

• How the board sets board goals
• Ensuring the board discusses issues in the proper sequence to strengthen its leadership
• How the board engages new individual board directors
• How to deliver policy guidelines
• How to define and support the executive director position
• How to frame financial sustainability
• How to approach risk management and protect its reputation
• How to strengthen board outreach into community and tap its expertise
• How to maintain the structure for the not-for-profit performance

From the second section onward short-term goals and the infrastructure you need to put into place to keep the program in check.

Finally, the third section should focus on the issues that enable your not-for-profit to succeed. For example, it’s a good idea to consider how you explore your not-for-profit’s organizational structure like the chain of command, outcomes, priority, passion, and progression.

Related article: What Role do non-profits Boards Commonly use Board Portals?

Analysing Your Not-for-profit’s Board Self-Evaluation Results

Another decision you’ll need to make is how to go about analyzing your results. You could opt to put the task in the hands of a committee. Alternatively, you can do what’s called a ‘self-assessment’ which means results from forms submitted by parties including individual board members: senior executives and selected stakeholders.

Once you measure your results, it’s so much to expect a neat measure of board performance. What you can expect is to get a feel for the major areas that need improvement.

One thing that’s crucial is that the results of your not-for-profit board evaluation process will enlighten you in many ways. When you put the time and effort into it, you’ll learn what you’ve done well and what you need to improve. It always gives you new light on what board members are fulfilling their duties and which aren’t. The results will indicate which board members need further development, and in certain cases, who need to be replaced.

Another benefit is that only you and your board get all the tools you need to run your nonprofit effectively. But it helps when the survey takes all parts needed for conducting board evaluations. With BoardEffect, you can easily keep your questionnaires anonymous and keep track of who has completed them. The electronic survey feature is designed so that you can set up a variety of question and answer sets to maximize the benefit of your efforts.

The survey tool also automatically tracks and analyzes the results. You’ll also have the opportunity to save your results so you can simply import the process into the coming years. BoardEffect’s platform is highly secure and you can get smarter results for added security. It’s just one of many valuable board management tools that you get with BoardEffect to ensure the most effective not-for-profit board leadership possible.