I am on 5 different non-profit boards. I am not bragging. It is a lot of work that I rarely get paid for. I would never intentionally be on 5 – it just happened because they interest me.

One thing I have noticed is that they do not always understand how to best utilize and communicate with their non profit board members. If you improve the communication and clarity around how your board members can contribute, you will have happier board members, more productive board members and better results from your board.

People on boards want to contribute. Often, the non profit may think that the board is not contributing as much as they would like. But the non profit also needs to understand that their board is involved with a lot of things. So you need to make things as simple and as clear as possible.

Here are tips to improve non profit board management and utilization

1. Aggregate Communication – Some non profits will send me a flurry of 5 or more emails all on the same day. That is fine if you do not want me to open any of them.
2. Prioritize Communication – It is important to have FYI stuff, but make sure board members understand which messages are critical and which messages are just keeping people in the loop.
3. Simplify Communication – Summarize a message at the beginning so I know if it applies to me. If you send me a newsletter, make sure there is a good table of contents. I will not read the whole thing.
4. Be Specific – Inaction by board members can often be attributed to a lack of specific requests. For example, if you wanted more people to help get the word out about a fundraising event, you could make an appeal for every board member to invite all their friends. However, you would get better results if you said each board member is responsible to bring 2 guests. While not all will bring 2, a larger group of board members will at least try to bring several.
5. Clear Goal and Clear Value – Your non profit must be able to articulate the goal that the organization has. It is why people serve on your board. You also must understand and publicly recognize how board members help the goal. For example, I help the organizations make better technology decisions and marketing decisions – often saving them a lot of money. It pumps me up and gets me excited when this is mentioned, because I do not always feel like I am doing enough.

Simplify – All of this focuses really on one overarching principle. You must make it simple for board members to be good board members and contribute in meaningful ways. Simple goals, simple specific requests and simple missions will help you create a simply fantastic non profit board.