We’re excited to be launching a new program – a program that readers here, and colleagues at Facebook and LinkedIn all said would be a huge help.
Board education in digestible chunks. 20-30 minute audio classes for listening in your car or with your board. Going deep into a narrow topic, with thought-starters to move you from “listening” to “discussing and making it your own.”
Easy, convenient, affordable ($9.95/month), practical education, aimed at making organizations as effective as possible at creating extraordinary community change.
From the insightful and encouraging advice you all provided, both here and at LinkedIn and Facebook, we will be starting the Flash Class program with Governance and Planning classes. Which leads to the most important question:
- What topics are the most important to cover?
- If you could get your board to spend 1/2 hour talking about any education topics at all, what would those topics be?
- What topic, if it were presented, would you say, “Oh thank goodness – our board really needs that!”
We will assemble all the responses we get, and those will become the topics of the classes. So what do you need? What will be most helpful?
We can’t wait to get started!!!
There are plenty of things I expect can slow down a board meeting, but in our last meeting our board got tripped up in a conversation that surprised me. “Is this our job?” They were talking about the new organization chart our staff and Administrative Committee had spent a lot of time on.
We are a relatively small organization, so it was nice to have our board’s help with this. We wanted the Admin Committee to take a look at it, and as a staff member, I would have felt good knowing it had been officially “approved.” The question “do we really need to approve this?” ended up consuming at least twenty minutes of time.
So, to answer your question, I think our board would have been much better served to spend 20-30 minutes listening to some thoughts on roles (even right in the meeting), than they were by plunking that discussion–that nobody had a clear answer for–into the middle of another topic.
I know our members would soak up any information we could give that would define “this is what we do” and “this is what we don’t do.”
Thanks for asking and for your work!
Matt
This is so helpful, Matt – thank you!
HG
How about a class aimed at helping board members learn the tools to engage potential donors at a networking event.
It’s something that can be intimidating, even to the seasoned board member. So a simple step tutorial around introducing yourself and mission/vision, asking the right leading questions, and getting folks over the crest from ‘I’m interested’ to ‘Wow, I NEED to know more!’