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Today I want to talk about board disengagement and why it might feel like your board members aren't leaning in and what it might actually feel like from their perspective. I also want to talk a little bit about how to fix it.

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Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage. I've been in the social impact game for 25 years as a social justice lawyer turned two time nonprofit founder and leader turned growth strategist and coach for leaders around the country. I grew my nonprofit from me and an intern in a tiny closet to a high impact seven figure organization. And along the way I learned so so much about how to build an organization that has real impact and how to do it without burning out. In this podcast I share the nuts and bolts of all of it so.

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You can do that too.

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We dive into the mindset, strategies and tactics of how to scale a high impact organization and how to do it in a way that's truly sustainable.

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So the reason I'm focusing on this topic today or now is because I get a lot of questions. I always get a lot of questions about how to improve my relationship with the board or how to improve my board in general or how to make board members help with fundraising or networking. Right? Always questions that I'm getting from leaders about how they can work better with their board or optimize their board. But I've been getting a lot more recently and I think it's because if you are listening to this live in early 2025 for a lot of nonprofits in a lot of places things feel really chaotic and maybe even a little scary right now. And nonprofit leaders are looking to their boards for partnership, not necessarily to solve any problems or answer any problems, answer any questions, but to be thought partners to lean into the craziness with the leader so that the executive director doesn't feel quite so alone. So there's sort of an uptick in wanting boards to be engaged. So this topic feels really present right now. So I thought I would just spend a little bit of time talking about why you might be seeing disengagement and how you can address it both in the short term and put things in place to improve engagement and get board members to lean in long term. Right? Just make your board stronger. So I go really deep into this in my board Engagement Plan Planning toolkit. There are trainings and templates for pretty much everything that I'm talking about here and you can get that@brookerichybabbage.com backslash boardengagement toolkit. So if I talk about it here, assume that there is some resource or tool or template that backs up what I'm saying and helps you implement inside the board engagement toolkit. Okay, so let's start with what you may be seeing. Do any of these sound familiar? Board members are not showing up at meetings consistently. I have seen executive directors schedule, you know, an entire year of board meetings in advance. People have them on their calendars and still, you know, two days before the board meeting, the day of the board meeting, you might get an email that says, sorry, something's come up, can't make it. And you're sort of seeing that happen. Maybe you can't get them to leverage their networks. Right? One of the most important parts that and a nonprofit board can play in a nonprofit's ecosystem. Right. One of the most important roles of board members is to leverage their networks to help grow and expand the community of support for a nonprofit. I'm going to put a stake in the ground. There are lots of folks who say boards do not have to fundraise. I think that is not right. I also am going to be very clear that I think going in the other direction, too far in the other direction, is also not helpful. That there are so many organizations that I talk to where really the only thing that they ask their board to do is fundraise. That also is leaving a lot of sort of leverage on the table. There's a. There's a nice middle ground between never asking them to fundraise and being okay with board members saying, I am not going to contribute or help fundraise. I think that is not okay for a board member to say. And the other end of the spectrum of the only thing you ask them to do is fundraise. Right. And people call that a quote, unquote, fundraising board. And I. I am not a huge fan, which I can get into in a different episode. But what I will say for the purposes here is that if you have a board of engaged volunteers, one of the reasons those people are on the board, or one of the reasons they should be on the board is they care very deeply about the mission, and they care very deeply about helping the organization achieve its mission and have impact. And to do that, you need a community of supporters. Some of those supporters will be donors. Some of those supporters will be funders. Some of those supporters will be partners. They may be raving fans and help you market. They may drive people into your programs. You have to have a community of supporters. And so part of the Role of the board is to help build that community of supporters. That means helping to find donors and funders. That means leveraging their networks to bring new people into your world. If you are not seeing that that is a form of disengagement. Another thing you may be seeing, they seem confused about the impact that they can have. Right? I see this often. They come to meetings, they show up, they respond when you ask them to do things, but they don't really. They're not really proactive, right? They don't sort of take their own initiative around things. And so maybe they're don't quite know what they're supposed to be doing. And then another form of disengagement, and these are all sort of different disengagement archetypes, right? You may see all of them, you may see just one of them, but they're signs of certain types of disengagement. A final one that I'll reference is about meetings, right? You have the meetings because you're supposed to have the meetings, but they sort of suck and everybody knows it and nobody wants to say it. They feel like formalities. You have to do them. Not actually like engaging spaces for strategy, for generative thinking, for problem solving together. Right? For being a team. So these are really common disengagement archetypes. And I would imagine that for many of you listening, at least one of them sounds familiar. So now I want to talk about why these happen. There are lots of reasons, but I'm going to focus on three. Because they are sort of the highest leverage areas you can fix. And when I talk about what you can do about it, it's really going to be in response to these core reasons, a few that I'm not going to go into detail about. You could have disengaged board members because they're the wrong board members, right? They aren't passionate about the mission. They don't really bring strategic value. They're on the board for the wrong reason. You know, they want to say they're on a board or someone asks them to be on the board, but they don't really. They're not really that invested. So there are reasons that you might see disengagement, and you should think about whether you're actually talking about board members who are the right board members, but assuming these are the right people. Here are three things to think about as you're trying to understand the root causes of these sort of disengagement archetypes. First, there's a lack of strategic clarity. This is a Big one. Board members don't always understand the bigger picture of your organization's work. You may think that they do. And even if you share program updates and emails letting them know about what's going on behind the scenes, honestly, even sometimes if they come to programs and events and site visits with you, they may not necessarily. This is really common. Understand the cathedral you're all building. What is the goal that you're all aiming towards? What are the priorities that the organization is focusing on strategically over the next three to five years? What's the long term vision that the organization is building towards? And how does what you're doing right now fit into that vision for you and your team, the people that you work with every day? That may be clear. You have work plans, you have okrs, you have very specific goals that you are working towards. But if your board members are coming together maybe four times a year, even if you meet every other month, you know, six times a year, they don't have those work plans. They're not in the day to day with you. So the connection between what they're seeing or hearing about from you and your updates and, and what you're actually trying to accomplish as an organization, it's not always as clear. If they can't articulate the vision and even the mission and the theory of change beyond what's in their talking points or what's on the website. If they don't really get it, they're not going to feel ownership over it. So that's often a core reason that you're seeing sort of lack of the lack of engagement in the way that you want to. Right, this lack of strategic clarity. The second is lack of clarity about roles and expectations. A lot of times board members just don't know where and how to add value beyond approving the budget, you know, voting on motions. Some may join boards expecting more hands on work, working on your finances with you, crafting your marketing strategy. Others expect a more sort of stand back governance role, future casting, strategic partnership. Either way, if they're not getting what they thought they were going to get, that disconnect, that sort of cognitive dissonance can lead to disengagement. They don't know how and where to lean in. And again, there can be a gap between what you believe yourself to be articulating and making clear and what's actually clear. So the sort of engagement pathways that you as a nonprofit leader would want for them aren't clear. And there can also be a misalignment between the engagement pathways you may want and the engagement pathways they want. So the lack of role clarity and expectations. And then finally, and I touched on this as one of the disengagement archetypes. Board meetings are just boring. They're not inspired as board members, right? Meetings focus on operational details. There are reports, and the board members are sort of passively taking in information and updates. That's honestly most of the board meetings that I hear about. That's a problem for a few reasons. One, board meetings are often the main touch point that board members have with the organization, with the leadership team, with the staff, with the work. And so if they are purely operational, a few things happen in people's minds. They think, I don't actually have to be at the meeting to get the updates and the reports. There's no reason to be to share time and space with the other people on the board for what I'm getting. I think another problem is people just don't want to go to board meetings. And so other things will take priority over attending board meetings. And they may not want to say that to you, but that's often what happens. I've been on boards where that is the case for me, that, you know, I go because I'm supposed to go, but I don't particularly enjoy the meetings. And then third, they're not feeling useful, right? They sit in meetings and somewhere in their minds they think, I don't really need to be here. There isn't anything happening here where I am contributing. They get stuck in this sort of passive oversight role rather than being engaged as partners in some way, strategic partners, thought partners, et cetera. So those are the three, I would say, not most common, but biggest, deepest reasons that you often see disengagement, lack of strategic clarity organizationally, lack of clarity about roles and expectations, and lack of engage. Engaging engagement. Right? Board meetings are boring. There's very little inspirational or meaningful engagement between meetings. Board members, when these three things are happening, can associate their role more with receiving information than unlocking opportunities for impact and what you want. This sort of magic of a board is when you have a group of volunteers who are equally passionate about impact, about the potential of your organization to have impact. They're equally passionate as you and your team, and they just play a different role on the team, right under the tent. And so you want your board members to associate their role with this unlocking of opportunity, looking for opportunities to build community, looking for opportunities to address strategic challenges. If that isn't there, then you will often see a retraction. They don't know how to be helpful and or it's just not that interesting. So let's talk about what to do about this. So like I mentioned, I talk about I sort of give you a roadmap for building board engagement over the course of a year. In my board engagement toolkit brookwitchybabbage.com boardengagementtoolkit there are engagement strategies, planning worksheets and calendars, trackers, meeting templates, everything you need to implement what we're talking about here. So the first thing is to clarify and communicate the organizational vision. So again, you may think that this is clear. I guarantee you there are at least two or three people on your board for whom it is not as clear for them as it is for you. So every board member should be able to not just say what the mission is, but talk about the mission in their own words. Talk about the work that you do in the way that they talk about things so that when they are in spaces in their networks, they are not regurgitating a mission, they are talking about work that they understand. Right? So how do they talk about your mission? They should also be able to articulate your organization's strategic priorities. The three to five areas of focus that the organization is leaning into strategically over the next three years. They should be able to articulate those in one or two sentences, right? It should be something like foreign I'm excited to share that I'm running a new eight week fundraising scenario planning Sprint starting in March as we're all trying to navigate the choppy and sometimes frightening waters of funding freezes and shifts in funding priorities. The way forward is to have a clear set of scenario game plans, so I've designed the Sprint to help. This will be a highly focused and targeted eight week week sprint. I'll be working with a cohort of leaders to develop four concrete things. A three scenario funding plan with best base and worst case scenarios mapped out, a decision trigger protocol so you know exactly when and if you need to pivot a budget reprioritization guide to protect your mission critical work irrespective of the scenario you choose and a 90 day action plan so you can move forward with total confidence. The Sprint's going to include four training and feedback sessions, live as a cohort slash community plus structured step by step worksheets and guidance between calls. Now normally the sprint is $2,000, but I'm offering it as a free bonus to all of the folks who are inside my next level nonprofit playbook community. So that means when you sign up for the Playbook and you get all of the awesome things in the next level nonprofit playbook, including the growth stage assessment, personalized growth plan, private podcasts, live trainings, all of great stuff in the Playbook. You also unlock the sprint. You can learn more about Both@brooke richiebabbage.com Backslash Playbook this is an organization I'm on the board of. Here's what we do, here's what's really exciting about what we do to me. And over the next three years, these are the three areas we're really focusing on. National expansion. We're really looking to take the program model that we have perfected over the last 15 years and go really deep in Georgia because that's where we're located. And you know, one other priority like that should roll off the tongue. When they can do that, then there is a level of clarity about what the organization is doing that will lead to their ability to lean in and help you get to that vision. Right. And achieve those priorities. It's a lot easier to engage board members around national expansion when they understand that that's what you're doing. One thing you could do is create a really short board impact brief that you send out between meetings and make sure that the work that you guys are doing is aligned with the bigger picture. So in addition to updating board members on impact you're having and things that are going really well, add an extra sentence or two that links it explicitly back to the strategic plan, the strategic priorities goals in the, in the strategic plan, make that bridge. Create that bridge between what's happening in real time and again, the cathedral you're all building. Even if it seems really clear to you sometimes that that level of explicit this can be really important for board members who are not living and breathing this every day. So a second thing you can do is shift your meetings from reporting to strategy. I Recommend at least 50%. I actually think it's better if it's 75%. But at least half of every meeting should be meaningful discussions, future opportunities, strategic challenges, big picture goals, thought provoking questions like what is the biggest obstacle we're facing in our community? What. How is our. How are we being perceived right in light of everything that's changing externally? And do we need to think about how we talk to and work with our partners? You don't have to ask questions. I actually will go a step further. I don't think you should ask questions in board meetings that have clean, pat answers. What you want is to use the Meetings in ways that require synchronous engagement. I always like to say to the folks in my program, do the things asynchronously that can be done asynchronously, and save the things for your time together that are best done in person. Generative and strategic. Messy conversations where there isn't necessarily an answer at the end of your, you know, 45 minutes. Those are more interesting, just better meetings. And as a nonprofit leader, you get a room full of thought partners. And if you get to the end of the meeting and you say, this was really interesting, I took a lot of notes. It was great hearing different perspectives from different sectors on this challenge we're having or on this thing that I've been noodling on. And I'll check in with you guys about sort of where I go from here. That's great. And in that meeting, your board members have actually felt useful. That's what they want to feel. Then you will start to see they send an email, hey, what happened after we had that conversation or this came up in the meeting? Did you want me to follow up, you know, and get you a little bit more information there? Right. They can see ways in. You can make that shift pretty easily by shifting reports to written reports, not reading them out in your meetings, having board members read them in advance, and saving 10 to 15 minutes in your meeting for them to ask questions. Assuming, and you can tell them this, I'm going to assume that you've read the reports. And our synchronous time, the time we spent together, is just for clarifying questions and anything that comes to your mind about the reports. But we're not going to be spending our time together with me or members of my leadership team sharing information that we could have actually shared in advance. A third thing that you can do to improve engagement is to make sure that each board member has a specific strategic role. I recommend two meetings a year, one on one meetings with each board member. And part of the point of those meetings is to identify both the things they're excited about in sort of the annual plan for the organization. Right. The goals that you and your team have set, Share those with the board and say, what's exciting to you about this? Where would you want to lean in? Where do you feel like your skills and competencies and interests are most aligned? And also to identify their strengths as board members and then match them with areas where they can contribute most meaningfully. So instead of, for example, just saying, I need everybody's help with fundraising, or, Steve, I need your Help with fundraising, Invite specific people to connect the organization with three people at their corporation who run employee engagement opportunities and see if you can coordinate with them to do trainings about your topic. Right? That's a specific ask, that's a specific way that you can engage people. So try to be as clear and specific on an individual level. And if your board is ready for this, right? If you have a board that's basically a well functioning governance board and you're ready to take the next step into a generative board, you want these specific strategic roles to be tied to goals that the board has set for itself, right? If you have an earlier stage governance board, then start with the annual plan that you and your team have crafted and make sure that the board sees how they can support you and your team in achieving those goals. But if you have a more mature board, the board should be setting its own board level goals to move the organization forward in alignment with its long term strategic priorities. So you want these specific individual strategic roles to be aligned with those board goals. Finally, create a culture of board engagement beyond the meetings. This means things like showing them their impact regularly bringing in stories and testimonials from the board. Like things that board members have been doing between meetings. Share it with other board members. I just had a great meeting with Sarah and she really helped me crack the nut on this challenge. Thanks, Sarah. Right. Send that whole, send that to the whole board or include that in your board update so that board members understand that part of what it means to be on the board is leaning in in these little ways. Right? Going beyond just picking up the phone when the executive director calls. Encourage your board committees or some organizations have small board pods. Right? If you don't have structured committees, encourage them to identify at least one key initiative they're going to work on together. It could be board training, it could be network building, something around fundraising or cultivation of new networks and then set milestones for them. Right? In three months, this is what this board POD or this committee is going to have achieved. You'll come back, board committee or board pod and share this with the rest of folks. You can hold informal check ins with board members to see how they are engaging with the organization between meetings. So to recap, a lot of folks are wanting their board members to lean in more now nowadays. And if you don't feel like you're getting the juice from your board members, start with asking yourself which of the reasons we've talked about here. Right? Lack of strategic clarity. Engagement is just not interesting or inspiring. And lack of clear roles and expectations. See if any of those apply to your board members and then start small, right? Change how you hold your meetings. Start sending board sort of inspirational board check ins or updates between meetings. Identify specific ways individual board members can lean in. Again, I have some really great strategies for this Inside the Board engagement Toolkit Brooke ritchiebabbage.com boardengagementtoolkit what I will say to sort of close us out is your relationship with your board is like any other relationship. It's a relationship. It's a give and take. And really often having a board can feel to a nonprofit leader like make work right? You have this entity, this board that you're supposed to have and you don't quite know what to do with them and that's okay to feel that way. A lot of organizations feel that way. The answer is talk to them like partners. They will be engaged when you engage them the way you would engage any passionate, interested supporter, as a thought partner, as a strategic co problem solver, as somebody to help you move the organization towards impact. And the more explicit you are that that is what you are expecting from them, the easier it will be for them to lean in. That is it for this week. I hope this was helpful as you navigate your own board journey. I will see you back here next week for more Mastermind.