We consulted with the Jewish Community to develop their start up in terms of fundraising and organizational development.
Beyond the initiatives related to funds, the hybrid model developed to set up the Development Unit saw the active engagement of the governance together with a group of young volunteers selected among the Community members upon a call for applicants.
The initial training and volunteering collaboration had the purpose of creating a solid group of dynamic volunteers who could manage the Community’s fundraising activities.
Two years later, the group counts five operational participants who  are actively committed to developing a multi-target and multi-vehicle fundraising initiative to support the Jewish Community. A significant part of the Board of Directors itself, too, is actively engaged into the whole process.
Of course, the best has (always) yet to come, but the basis was laid.

Enjoy this interview with Brett Lalonde, who is currently Vice President of the Jewish Community of Florence.

L'articolo Bridging the gap among cultures: interview with Brett Lalonde, vice-president of the Jewish Community of Florence proviene da Engagedin.

[for those who, perhaps, had no idea what Board coaching is: it is a side-by-side consultancy path that brings together learning, practice and development of fundraising, as a tool of sustainability, for those organizations whose Board needs tailored and customized sessions from the point of view of skills, commitment, to say it generally the “design” of a different way of declining the issue of development for the organization.
It is a challenging job – but this always happens when dealing with fundraising -because it has no pre-identifiable solutions or models upstream, it must be developed in relation to the as-is situation and always finds original ways of development]

The organization I am writing has an amazing history, it was born from a strong motivation, has an established reputation and an appropriate number of committed volunteers. Despite these strengthen points, however, the level of their fundraising struggles to grow, being an issue to work on to secure the future of projects and programmes.

My consultancy with them has been developed following two main lines:
1) the fundraising strategy – the analysis, review and upgrade of campaigns, database development, communication and everything related to fundraising from a technical point of view;
2) direct and practical work – I would say coaching – with the Board of Directors, so that it can be the real hub towards a more effective sustainability strategy for the organization.

Once having “framed” the situation in terms of facts and figures, objectives and programmes, the transition of the conversation to fundraising saw some fear from the Board members.

While convinced – everyone! Which is already an excellent starting point – that fundraising is necessary, they showed a certain reluctance in asking, together with the fear (usually…) of creating embarrassments among friends and acquaintances, some perplexity about being able to ask.

The point was exactly this: “fundraising is fundamental, but I would never be able to do it because I don’t know how to ask for anything, not even for this organization that I care very much about”.

The Board members I am talking about are really volunteers of the organization: they not only make up the Board but have always provided professional volunteering activities on an ongoing basis to advance projects. They are genuinely involved and active in the cause. They are available to support the staff.
But they don’t feel to … fundraise.

[a short note: in the last 2 months, I guess by chance, the same type of situation has already happened to me 3 times. Evidently the issue arises, the Boards questioned themselves on fundraising and development and are interested in finding ways to overcome the stasis. And this is, in my opinion, a crucial step towards change]

As we always do during our consultations, I began to “tighten” on the subject to understand where to wedge a lever to be used to generate that change of pace that is the goal of the consultancy.
At one point, during this exchange of questions that I was leading, one of the Directors – referring to the president – reported that he had made an act of “piracy” (he literally used this term) because, dealing with the need to replace an essential surgical instrument which had broken and should have been the subject of a fundraising campaign in September, the President thought about it, rethought, worried that the broken tool would make it impossible to provide certain medical treatments. And in the end, one morning a few days ago, he picked up his mobile phone to call one of his corporate contacts… and asked him for 50,000 euros. Thus, without a shot being fired. And he got almost all of them.

I looked at him, then looked at the Director who reported the episode, and I couldn’t believe it. Not so much for the figure – I was certainly delighted for the lucky chance that perfectly fitted a need and a desire to contribute – but because the approach reported contradicted in fact what the president himself was saying until a minute earlier.
I pointed this out to him and asked him what he would call it, if not fundraising. He told me that yes, it was like an act of piracy because he went straight in with his contact and, without even going around it, told him that the surgical instrument had broken down, they could not provide treatments and that it would take a few months to replace it and, in the meantime, people would not have been able to take medical exams and that, in short, was not a good situation because it meant blocking the activity of the hospital. And the person in question replied that no, this shouldn’t happen and that he would take care of it, given the emergency.

While I was trying to put together the elements to point out, in the most flat and convincing way possible, that fundraising was exactly that thing, another Director – he too until recently was telling me that he would have no problem writing or contacting friends and acquaintances, former colleagues and anyone else, but without even mentioning the expression “I ask you to …” – he told me that a similar thing had happened to him too. Unlike the president, he had not called it piracy but rather “Providence”.
During an evening with family friends, he had talked about a project that he was following personally for the organization and that he would have liked to develop it by involving a greater number of beneficiaries and that he hoped to be able to have the funds to do it. Then, listening to one of those friends who talked about his company budgets and savings due to their efficient management, he said to him – literally – “since you still have this money in hand, why don’t you think to do something for someone else and donate for this project? “. This person had told him that he had never thought about it and that yes, he would have talked about it during the next company meeting because it was a good idea. A few days later he had asked for a meeting with the Board member of the organization and, within a few days, that money had arrived.

Providence, then. Or piracy.

Whatever you call it, it’s something these people feel more comfortable with than the term “fundraising”.

I have thought quite a bit about this aspect. As I wrote above, it happens quite frequently to me that I find myself faced with this type of approach and that I have to find the key to be able to turn it into something concrete and structured – which in my head and in my vocabulary is called fundraising but, obviously, it can also take on different names.

On this point, therefore, I would like to list two aspects / suggestions:

– Demystifying the term fundraising can sometimes be the interpretative key to change the perception and, consequently, the concrete approach (because not all Directors, I am aware of this, are “pirates” or benefited from “providence”). It is evident that it is the correct term but, if it is a repulsive one, perhaps sometimes it is worthwhile to find alternative ways to achieve the same conclusion.
Whenever I have taken this approach, in cases where it seemed necessary, it has turned out to be the right one. Of course, I had to learn to be flexible in terms and lexical properties, but it was – and is – always a useful exercise for me too. Because learning to look at things from different points of view is what it teaches to include (as well as being enormously stimulating);

– Going deep, not feeling satisfied with the first answer or perplexity or doubt, is the way to understand what the real situation of the organization is and, above all, its potential. The ability to analyze, the comprehension both of facts and figures and the context, the active listening and identification of the right questions are, in my opinion, among the fundamental tools of the fundraiser – in this case declined on a consultancy path aimed to develop the Board but, in general, valid in the relationship with donors and with anyone involved in the development issue.
Not having stopped at the first question / answer – “we are afraid to ask” – meant that, in an informal atmosphere and open discussion, without judgment or hesitation in sharing doubts and perplexities (and this “openness” must be generated, because a sometimes it does not come at all by itself), the “true” answers emerge.

In this year and a few months in which we have all had to deal with the unthinkable, my impression is that one of the lessons is precisely that of openness to the other, even when what is shown is vulnerability.

Because that’s where you build it, whereas perfection (or, to use a term I don’t like: performance) doesn’t need curiosity and insights.

L'articolo Board and fundraising, whatever you call it proviene da Engagedin.

Furthermore, again to get rid of any doubts and avoid misunderstandings: this applies when you’re on the board because you’re the nominee of a related institutional body, and also when you’re on the board simply at the invitation of the chairman who’s a friend of yours. And even if you’re on the board because you accepted a candidacy without realising that fundraising would come up.

And please note that I say fundraising, not collecting funds, because what we’re talking about are all those strategic activities whose purpose is the organisation’s future sustainability – an entirely different thing from simply collecting funds; it involves strategy, your idea of the future of the organisation of whose board you are a member, all the volunteers, the projects, communication and your approach to external relations, and so on.

In my experience in Italy (that is, with Italian non-profit organisations), it is frequently the case that directors do not know and/or are not enthusiastic about the idea that fundraising is one of the activities they are expected to deal with.
Because the underlying concern is always the same: “I’ll have to ask my friends and acquaintances for money.”. It doesn’t matter that fundraising is not really about this, or that it starts from another, more noble way of thinking. People get hung up on the idea that fundraising is begging for alms.
And this – quite rightly – would put anyone off.

I’ll talk about fundraising training for boards of directors in another blog.
What I want to do here is share a few thoughts on why fundraising should always be a “problem” for the board.
I’ll do this logically, point by point:

– the first and most important reason is related to the actual significance of fundraising. If we assume that fundraising is, first of all, a question of relations among the believers in a cause, and that donors are the first believers because they are personally committed (through their donations) to the promotion of the cause, saying that a director – who represents the political and strategic apex of the cause, who embodies its value system, who has the duty and the honour of promoting and developing the cause – has to commit personally to the activity that ensures a future for that cause is a tautology.

When you put it like that, it makes logical sense, doesn’t it?
That’s because in practice… it does make logical sense!

This is what the motive is “all” about: moral support for the cause, for the values expressed by the cause.

It encompasses the pride of belonging, the sense of representing a world of values where fundraising should be a point of honour.

And this is the difference I see every day in my work with foreign organisations or organisations whose board is composed of non-Italians, especially if they’re people from the Anglo-Saxon nations.
The desire to commit oneself to one’s role (and the awareness that one should do so) as a model for a community that looks to the organisation of which one is a director is something I see, often, when membership of the board is a source of pride and an expression of “weight” in one’s community.
In these situations, I have often encouraged the chair or the directors to use this weight to generate emulative effects to support fundraising campaigns … and it has always worked.

– because – and this is another reason – fundraising by the members of the board can, notably, take the form of fundraising “among one’s peers”.

Let me explain: except in special cases, potential board members are usually selected among people whose expertise, position and professional profile, acknowledged prestige in their community, “name” visibility, extended network of acquaintances (here are some suggestion on how to find the candidates your organisation needs – link to the post on recruiting directors), mean they play a preeminent role in their area of operation. And this has a natural logic connected to the weight to be given to the impact of the organisation (of its cause).

For this reason, directors are usually people whose “natural” network of acquaintances constitutes an excellent pool for awareness-raising, promotion and engagement activities – everything you need for fundraising (I said it wasn’t a question of collecting funds!).

When the director activates this network, it means they project the organisation into contexts it otherwise wouldn’t have reached.

But it also means, for the director, emphasising the prestige of the position they hold, underlining the importance of the mission they represent, stimulating and encouraging the dissemination of that mission in order to broaden the circle of people who are familiar with it and talk about it.

This is the role of the board with respect to fundraising.
It doesn’t necessarily involve “asking friends for money” – often it does, and, as we’ll see in another post, this doesn’t have to be traumatic since we’re talking about projects set up to resolve problems or create opportunities, not about alms offered for pity’s sake (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it isn’t usually enjoyable).

We’ll return to the topic with some real examples taken from daily experience.
But what I want to emphasise now is that next time, before becoming alarmed if the word fundraising is associated with a proposal to join the board of an organisation, ask yourself a question: do I believe in the importance of the cause the organisation is promoting? Is it a cause that affects my life, my values, the things I’m fighting for?

If the answer is yes, fundraising will be one of the activities that will give you the greatest happiness and pride as you try, each one of us in our own small way, to improve the reality around us.

L'articolo Should the board (really) be involved in fundraising? proviene da Engagedin.

Picking up from the first part of the post, here are a few pointers that experience has shown to be useful.

First, you have to build up a job profile. In other words, you need a description of your ideal board member.

How do you do this?

You start by answering a few questions:

– what does a director have to do in our organisation?

Does he or she have to be operational, i.e., follow a certain area in person?
If so, a specialist is needed – if I need a director to follow the development of fundraising, it makes sense to look for someone with knowledge and experience, perhaps because they have already helped the organisation with this type of initiative. An organisation with an important restructuring or new building program involving relations with the local authorities, with engineers and skilled workers, might think about appointing an architect or a construction engineer – the board of directors of La Collina degli Elfi of which I am vice-president includes an architect, and the difference was clear to all the other directors as soon as the architect began following all the modernisation and restructuring operations.

Or perhaps it needs to be someone prominent in the community in which the organisation operates? In this case, it would be wise to turn to an “authoritative” name who is also interested in the organisation’s cause. It makes no sense – and I want to be clear about this because on several occasions I have had lengthy discussions when boards were being renewed – to appoint a well-known person who has no relation with or interest in the mission and accepts the post simply as a favour to the person asking them. If they are elected, in the best-case scenario they will have no impact on development … unless you’ve been clever enough to spark their interest in the cause along the way (it does happen)!

Say something about possible conflicts of interest?

– how much time will he/she have to devote to their work as a board member?

This question is often (very often) left hanging, in the belief that somehow or other things will sort themselves out. In these cases, the result is a chair that stays empty for months.

Being clear and transparent from the start is a great source of simplification later on.
The message “don’t worry, if you can’t take part, we’ll manage somehow” is something I’ve heard and continue to hear quite frequently during recruitment of possible candidates.
Said candidates, for a variety of reasons, allow themselves to be persuaded; but then they really are unable to take part, and end up as a name on paper, but in practice do little or hardly any “real” work.

Would it not be more honest – and strategic too – to quantify the extent of commitment beforehand?
How many board meetings are expected to be held during the year? One a month segments the candidates differently compared to two or three meetings a year.
Also: if the answer to the previous question is that an operational director is required, how much time will the appointment take up (indicatively)?
Moreover, if the director I need has to be operational and so commit to the organisation to some extent, is it advisable for them to live or work close to the organisation? Because if the board meetings are held 4 times a year and all the directors are technologically equipped to attend from remote locations, then the candidate can operate from a distance. Otherwise, the work of the board runs the risk of becoming bogged down in an endless stream of emails, Doodle requests, constantly shifting calendars.

Clearly, the answer to the first question affects all the rest. And the more precise the question – with a proper starting grid – the more predictive the answer.

– what is expected from the ideal director?

That they make their network of contacts available to the organisation (to the organisation’s fundraising activities)?
That they personally promote the mission, for example, by communicating and sharing the mission messages on their own social channels? Or, if they are a professional or an entrepreneur, on their own website?
That they fundraise in person, by contacting their own acquaintances and building up support or by organising small events to promote the organisation?
Or that they make their expertise available to the organisation – for example a solicitor who donates his time during a legacy campaign, or the architect mentioned earlier who prepares the project renderings in their free time?

Let me conclude with a point I consider of fundamental importance: always, always bear in mind that every director is, first and foremost, an ambassador for the organisation, its cause, the values it embodies, its “approach” to the world.

When you’re thinking about the ideal director, consider this first of all, and ask yourself: could the person I’m thinking about be an ambassador for my organisation? If the answer is yes, carry on with the questions we’ve looked at above – and many others we’ll talk about in future posts; otherwise wait a moment before sending out a request, try and think of the ideal ambassador and draw up a list of characteristics the person you’re thinking of should have, and only then move ahead.

L'articolo Recruiting directors (yes, it’s advisable) – 2 proviene da Engagedin.

Working on development with Boards of Directors is a fascinating exercise, which shines a light on the dichotomy that often exists between theory and practice, between committed directors and boards that don’t work (or don’t work the way they should).
Rolling out fundraising strategies when the governing body isn’t on board (which is what the blog’s title alludes to) is like driving on a motorway with the handbrake on: if you’re lucky, you’ll move along slowly, struggling, with the engine at top revs, to try and build up speed; if you’re not, you’ll go into a spin.
Clearly, we would prefer the first hypothesis, but neither one is desirable when you’re planning projects, positive change, effects on the community.

So?

The fact that the board is virtually absent, has little or no interest, isn’t engaged or engaging, is often considered par for the course, without adequate thought being given to the strategic implications this has for the life of the organisation and the cause it supports.

To put it bluntly:

you can’t make a problem magically disappear by pretending it doesn’t exist.

At a certain point in even the best fundraising plan, the board will re-appear from somewhere in all its (vain)glory and force everyone to jump through corrective hoops, or revise their objectives and re-define their potential Often, to undertake lengthy Zen meditations.

Simplifying complexity is one of the “guiding” concepts in my approach to this job Dismantling problems in order to make them easier to handle is a useful way to move ahead without being discouraged by apparently unachievable objectives.

Involving governance in development strategies is fundamental. It’s challenging.

It’s gratifying.

Professionalism is essential – fundraising is a cross-sector profession (cit. Valerio Melandri) and fundraisers must be able to read situations in order to interpret them. And once they’ve read and interpreted a situation, they have to find solutions and tools to drive change – in this case internal change even before external change (on the impacts of the cause).

I’ll be talking about this and many other questions at a special session at the next Fundraising Festival – from 15 to 17 May, in Riva del Garda … click here for the program, and, if you haven’t already done so, think about registering: it’s worth it, every time!
In 90 minutes, I’ll be talking about the way I work with boards to help them define and correctly “play” their role in supporting the organisation’s development and fundraising. I’ll also be suggesting useful tips and tools on working with governance, based on my own practical experience in Italy and abroad.

Because a fundraiser should take an interest in the board of directors, engage it and be engaged by it, share expectations and commitments.

Together, we’ll discuss ways of working, on Thursday 16 May at 10.30 a.m.
I look forward to seeing you at the Festival!

L'articolo 1, 10, countless ways to rekindle the love between Governance and fundraising proviene da Engagedin.

If there’s something that saddens people in my profession, it’s the apathy, that mood of slightly bored resignation that develops in board meetings when one person is speaking and everyone else is listening, mutely.
Or checking their email on their smartphones.
Or doodling on their notepad without even raising their head.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m one of those people who doodle on diaries, notepads and any piece of paper within reach.
I don’t check my smartphone, because I think it’s impolite and because I think multitasking damages effectiveness if it’s compulsive and taken beyond certain limits – doing one thing at a time, as well as possible, is enough, in my view.
I’m also one of those people who wants to take part, if they’re involved. And who wants other people to do so too, because a board is a collegiate body and, as such, functions best when everyone contributes.

So, sad board meetings.
Even so – and I say it equally bluntly – they are not always the result of apathy among the directors.
Sometimes, staying alert during interminable reports (often delivered from notes, not even off the cuff), or being faced with decisions that have already been taken and only need to be ratified, is not exactly a stimulus to say your own piece.
Obviously, the question is how the board works.
This is what I want to examine in this post, to give you a few ideas on how to restore the group dynamic of a collegiate body if you ever find yourself in this type of situation.
As always, these suggestions are ideas I have put into practice in my own work, so they are practical tips that can be quickly applied.

The first suggestion is to do with the engagement and interaction of the directors.

The person responsible for calling the meeting, preparing the minutes and the agenda, reviewing the order of business – usually the secretary – has a delicate and decisive task. Because the way we communicate has an immediate impact on the recipient’s perception of the communication.
So an agenda written in “officialese” (a word I dislike, but in this context I think it’s appropriate), with bullet points and in a dry language, is not perhaps a form of communication that will arouse enthusiasm – we’re talking about a non-profit organisation: passion for the cause, remember?

It might be helpful to re-write the agenda using a key word that can be expanded into 5-6 lines of description and the goal to be achieved (i.e., the decision to be taken); or to edit the reports for the board meeting in brief points and key concepts, which can be discussed in depth if necessary, rather than present pages and pages of words in justified Times New Roman 12 which make you drowsy after the first 10 lines.
Isn’t that better?

Still on this point: board meetings are often organised quite far apart. At intervals of a month, in the best case, otherwise at longer intervals.
Communications, updates and reminders between one meeting are unlikely, except, sometimes, between the very small group of directors who are always present. Sometimes.

Remember “out of sight, out of mind”? If the old saying has been going strong for several thousand years, there must be some truth to it.
An idea that works well, in these cases, is to email updates at regular intervals between board meetings – for example, if meetings are held on a quarterly basis, once a month ensures continuous updating without being intrusive – using a layout similar to a newsletter rather than a list of bullet points.

It’s not difficult: free programs are available to create documents with an attractive personalised layout that presents the content effectively.
Personally – and I’m not particularly tech-savvy – I use (and have got other people using) MailChimp, but other programs are just as good.
You start by setting up a format, planning the transmission dates, deciding on the tone of voice… and then you hit send.

It sounds easy, because it really is. And planning transmission dates and content makes (professional) life easier. The content doesn’t have to be the latest news, it can be more of a round-up of life in the organisation – the main activities since the last meeting, perhaps a few particularly successful social posts, or an article with news about the mission, which can provide useful starting points. In short, you’re spoiled for choice. What you need is a (simple, lightweight) action plan and a little time to roll it out.

The results are guaranteed: you’re recounting the “behind the scenes” for people whose job is to steer the organisation’s strategic development and will therefore be interested in the day-to-day goings-on.
This is an excellent way to keep the whole board focused, up to date with the latest information, close to the heart of the organisation’s activities.

Another proven way of keeping the board close to the heart of the mission is to organise training and residential events.

Let’s take them separately: on-going training, in my view, is one of those tools that should be used often and well because it generates ideas, opens up perspectives, offers different points of view, plots new paths. In a word: it stimulates change.
And for the members of a board of directors, change and development are – or at least should be – core issues.
Training doesn’t necessarily mean whole days spent in the classroom – if directors are volunteers it can be difficult to get them away from their daily commitments and bring them together. It could take the form of theme-specific workshops or laboratories, lasting an afternoon, which could be repeated 2 or 3 times over the course of a year, covering strategic issues the directors should be trained in (and informed about).
Some examples: the Reform of the Voluntary Sector or a specific new law in the sector in which the organisation operates, communication, team building, to name just a few. Or, and this is an issue with which I’m closely involved, fundraising, in relation to a tool or another related topic – how many directors really know what we’re talking about when we talk about fundraising? (the reference is a free adaptation of the famous Raymond Carver title “What we talk about when we talk about love?”).

Still on the training theme, an experience I found useful is to organise “residential” events, in locations away from the organisation – holiday farms, B&Bs or hotels: places that create a “holiday” mood – in order to work on the personal relations among the board members, on development issues in a full-immersion and (more or less) permanent session lasting the entire weekend, on sharing thoughts and ideas.
For this to work, the residential event needs a purpose (to be declared in advance, so that all the participants know what they will be working on), a coordinator (if the role is not taken by the chair).
And of course – and this also applies to training in the strict sense – a budget.
Don’t let the word put you off. Large investments are almost never needed to organise training or residential activities: one of the best practices I am delighted to see in all the organisations I meet is the ability to formulate alternative solutions to the first option, at zero cost or almost, without losing effectiveness.

Planning this sort of opportunity for the board, even just once a year, is an excellent way to encourage the directors to – and I use the term in a deliberately exaggerated way – “look after” the organisation, to feel close to it, part of their own lives, and not, as sometimes happens, as yet another appointment to be squeezed into a diary already packed with engagements.

L'articolo How to keep the board close to the heart of the organisation proviene da Engagedin.

I don’t want to mention them all, but one of the answers you hear specifies the provenance of the directors rather than actually identifying them.
We have often observed a sort of reticence in describing how the members of the board of directors have been selected, as if there had to be some a priori justification.

This post isn’t going to look at boards that “work” – that will be for another occasion – but, on the contrary, at the peculiarities that lead boards to stagnate.

We can typify some of the cases we have encountered most frequently:

– Directors who are friends of the “chair”.

This is typical of organisations with an “historic” chair who often performs the work of the entire board almost on their own (by choice in some cases).
In these organisations, the chair usually asks his/her contacts, generally during the renewal of the board, to do him/her the favour (!) of standing for election, because otherwise it would be difficult to find anyone willing to be a director.
The friends often agree, thinking that what is involved is signing the minutes every so often. Because they believe in the cause, of course, but they’re always very busy.
So the chair carries on working alone. With all the constraints this places on the development of the organisation.

– Directors who are political appointments, usually in organisations whose articles of association envisage the presence of representatives of authorities and/or institutions in the governing body.
In these cases, the directors often have very little or no idea not only about the mission, but more generally about what a non-profit organisation is and how it operates – they tend to refer to a general idea of “people who do good” that held sway several decades ago.
The same thing applies: either you manage to get them seriously on board or they will be uninfluential (in the best-case hypothesis) for the purposes of the organisation’s strategic development.

– “Technical” directors, who are usually experts in their own field, but sometimes have a low propensity for the relational approach inherent in fundraising. Above all, they are often unfamiliar with the non-profit world in the “contemporary” meaning of the word.

– “Internal” directors, who often tend to reproduce the organisation’s hierarchical structure, and sometimes turn themselves into mere “walk-ons”.

We could go on, but what we want to highlight is the missing element in all the above strategies – or pseudo-strategies – for selecting directors.
In other words:

What is the criterion used to recruit a director?
What is it that makes one person potentially more suitable than another to hold a particular position?

In our experience, there are basically three criteria involved in the recruitment of a (potential) good director – actually, there’s a fourth criterion, concerned with natural empathy, but we’ll look at that separately:

– competence, meaning the specific competence – where necessary, which is almost always – connected with the cause;

– the link, the familiarity with the mission in terms of the person’s interest in it;

– commitment, that is, the time that can be dedicated to the organisation in relation to its needs (to be defined).

Let’s look at each one in greater detail.

Is competence, meaning knowledge and expertise relating to the mission, or at least to the sector in which the organisation operates, really necessary, in all cases?
In our opinion, the answer is yes.

With a few qualifications, which we can illustrate with an example taken from personal experience.

During the summer of 2016, I was told about a recruitment call at the International Advisory Panel of Rogare, a research centre former associated with the Hartsook Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy at Plymouth University, in the U.K.
I have always worked both in Italy and abroad, and one of my interests has always been comparative analysis of what is known as pro-social behaviour: study of the social, cultural and economic factors that, in different countries, determine attention to the Voluntary Sector and to social causes (and cultural, environmental causes, etc.).

What I found interesting was the recruitment procedure, which in Italy is still unheard of with regard to boards of directors.
I had to send a curriculum vitae, write a short biography illustrating the main features of my Italian and international consultancy work, and explain why I was interested in being considered as a board member.
I had to read a 5-page document describing the role and responsibilities of each member, the eligibility criteria, the duties of each member with regard to engagement with and promotion of the mission, the frequency and organisation of meetings (the board is an international body whose members are located around the world).
I filled out a form in which I described the type of work I would undertake to perform as a board member, over a three-year period (the term of office), specifying my contribution and the “difference” I could make within the Panel.

Presenting myself as a candidate meant taking on a commitment in an informed manner, reading – beforehand – what I should expect and what I would be asked to contribute, reflecting on how I could produce an impact on the Centre’s mission.

In my work outside Italy, I often read material of this type in the application packs for the role of board member. And I find it a serious and, all told, natural approach, which enables you to make an assessment a priori and also ex post, with regard to the commitment (which is quite different to a personal assessment, and a source of stimuli and professional growth).

And in Italy?
To date – and I should be happy to be contradicted – I have not seen a structured approach of this type.

Countless board members work with enthusiasm, devoting time and energy, focusing on the development of the mission, and are sincerely and deeply interested in Voluntary Sector questions, in development opportunities, in the complexity and the hybrid forms that this can take today.

Countless others, however, who occupy seats on boards have only a very vague idea about the non-profit sector and its characteristics, about why profit and non-profit are two different worlds that talk to one another (they have to), but take different approaches, about the reasons why a person decides to work in one sector rather than another (without there being a hierarchy between the two, they “simply” respond to naturally different approaches).
And in most cases, this lack of competence is reflected in the results, which are often unexceptional (in the negative sense of the word) and sometimes inadequate.

How can this be resolved?

One idea could be to follow the example described above. With differing degrees of complexity, building a clear idea of the competences needed by the board members means sitting down and drawing up a list of these competences, beginning with the tasks the future directors will be required to take on – definition of the role, once again.

Is the organisation involved in scientific research on a particular pathology? A physician (technical competence), a patient or a family member (“practical” experience) might be the ideal choice to consider for the development of projects.

Or perhaps the organisation needs to formulate a development strategy. Perhaps someone who already has some experience in this area and is interested in the mission, or someone with competences and experience in fundraising or project management might be useful.

A great many examples could be provided.
The essential starting point, however, must always be the same: answering the question “what is the organisation’s idea of the future” and “who is the best person to take charge of the path towards the future?”. Because, inevitably, answering these questions makes it possible to identify the characteristics of the most suitable candidates.

L'articolo Recruiting Directors (yes, it’s advisable) – 1 proviene da Engagedin.