Digitally Transforming Your Board

Josh Kligman from Yearly was joined by Krista Martin from Boardable, to discuss best practices in establishing roles, responsibilities, and expectations to help everyone thrive from staff to board members. Krista talked about how you can help your board with change and adopt practices that will 10x your nonprofit impact.

You can read the discussion here:

All right. Welcome to nonprofit crash course. Hi Krista. how are you?

Good! How are you?

Oh, good. Good. Well, thanks for joining us today. I’m Josh Kligman from yearly and this is a new series today’s our our first edition called nonprofit crash course where in 15 minutes. We are going to break down really specific topics in the world of nonprofit marketing nonprofit fundraising and everything that relates to including your board and I have with us today Krista from boardable.

She’s a vice president of product and growth andshe’s going to talk about how to digitally transform your board in a lot of best practices that includes establishing roles and responsibilities to help your organization Thrive, whatever size organization you are so Krista. Thanks for joining.

Yeah, thank you for having me have the first one. That’s so exciting. These are awesome 15 minutes. You can learn a lot in that time. So happy to talk through this important topic.

Yeah, tell me tell me a little bit about your background Krista.

And you know what you’re an expert in terms of the world of boards.

Sure. So I have served on boards myself. So I have a board member perspective but really where my expertise comes from. I’ve taken board Source nonprofit Consulting but also affordable, we have helped transform digitall over 2000 boards. So we’ve worked with customers from very very small all the way to much larger organizations. So these problems although you know may seem different depending on how big you’re nonprofit is a lot of it’s the same and it’s hard. It’s hard to digitally transform something that for years has been done in a very manual and analog way and so that’s where my expertise comes from.

We’ve been building software, but also working hand in hand with leaders in the nonprofit space to make this happen. yeah, I guess my perception of nonprofits getting ready for like a board meeting coming up and I guess there’s a lot of different specific touch points with boards, but is a lot of manual processes that include a lot of papers binders running frantically around the office to get everything organized before. You know you or if you have a whole executive team is running out the door to get to that board meeting.

So what is the future of board organization look like from you know, a perspective internally within the nonprofit in terms of how nonprofits can organize and move to digital.

Yeah, I hope that the future is looking a lot more efficient. I think I mean efficient that’s such a buzzword but really all of the hard work that is put into a board meeting if it is in a way that can become a historical Archive of what happens. You can reference it all in one place rather than Emails that leave with the board member that just left the board or papers that get lost and aren’t read before the board meeting. I mean all of these problems they take away from the momentum. You should be building from meeting to meeting.

Oh do people lose their papers like before board meeting?

I mean, yes think about even a board packet and if it is created digitally but it’s emailed out but then a revision came and maybe someone’s referencing the later version. So they’re walking into a meeting with old information and so now part of the meetings going to have to be put towards getting everyone caught up about what they should have read before they step in the room and that’s time lost and that’s cost savings, time savings and then the impact I mean we all know yes, there’s a lot to do in a non-profit, but the the most important part of why non-profits exist is the impact they’re trying to make on the world and board members want to be a part of that impact.

It’s so relationship and the expectations between The staff your board your executive director those all have to be known to maximize impact. And it can get lost sometimes.

Yeah, the impacts really important, but I think my heart skipped to be when you talked about either losing physical papers or spelling something wrong because what have you spell a board member’s name wrong? I I remember I was creating an annual report at a nonprofit and somebody told me It’s inevitable that there’s going to be some type of within and report and then you’re going to send to the printer and then you’re gonna bring it to a meeting and then you’ll notice in front of the person who’s  let’s say name is spelled wrong.

So if that happens in a board meeting, you know, no one’s really going to say anything but it probably takes away from the Polish and the three weeks of work that you put into prep for that.

Yeah, you know, that’s so tough because itis board meetings almost there. They’re like a show right? It’s a little bit of a performance that’s happening from everyone who’s built all of the materials that are going to go and there’s it should be very structured. There should be a timeline. There should be an agenda and outcomes your shooting for so these are not just casual meetings and there is a lot of pressure around the preparation the facilitation the follow-up and not having a piece of software as a partner there put so much work on.

Everyone who’s involved and and depending on where you’re at. I would say in your digital transformation journey of your board. I’m sure you’re finding out ways of how you can get to that next level but being aware of where the optimal level is is I think where we’re at, right? Covid has changed things boards that we’ve worked with when 2020 hit many of them had not had a virtual meeting yet and it’s so imagine all that pressure that you have for in-person meetings.

Now you have to do it virtually and you’ve never done it before and so it’s a huge change management. Experience that has to happen between a lot of different parties.

All right. So whether you’re going to have a board meeting virtually or you’re going to do it in person, when you think of all the all the the papers and and presentations maybe even reports that you have to present during the meeting and distribute. Like what does that look like to set up for success for nonprofits associations other similar type organizations to make that transformation for digital like what does that actually look like? And and where are those pitfalls?

Yeah, so it kind of depends on where you’re at today if you’re still printing those out and sending them in the mail then maybe your next step is. Our next meeting we’re going to have these available. Online through email. Maybe that’s your next step and making that very clear of we we aren’t going to be sending these out right? So if you if you are looking to make this change to a more digital experience, you’ve got to start laying out your path.

To get habits to change habits are like the hardest thing to break and we all know that I have habits that I have to keep working on to actually change in a better way and same thing amongst your board you’re going have, you know, those pre in person advantages like building a culture is much easier in person, right? You’re sitting next to each other even right here we met before this. So it’s been so nice that we got to talk about what we’re going to cover today. But now again we’re building this relationship but in person it happens a lot more organically so you have to be very intentional about these things.

Yeah, I think that’s that’s really important. And I guess it sounds like you don’t have to flip a switch overnight and have everything be Like on a platform like portable you can work to get there like you said with that example of sending it over email and you got to set expectations with your board members too.

Right? Because if you’re going switch everything to digital they have to be ready for it you may have and we hear this in the annual report world all the time. You may have a board member may just be that one person on the team that wants to hold those papers in their hand and they can still do that. I think even if you’re moving everything over to digital there still could be you know paper versions. There’s just less of it and then over the years they’ll become accustomed to something new.

Yeah, I think that’s exactly or pick something that allows that type of consumer of information to print it themselves. Maybe that’s the next step right you could print it in your house and you can use it that way or if you do still want your in-person meeting so you can prep digitally and then show up with that paper document.

So I think there’s a lot of ways to get to that transformation, but the biggest thing is setting expectations and no matter if you’re at so affordable right where we’re a software company, but you have to repeat your expectations across your your team how many times so you’re all on the same page working in the same direction and that’s okay to have to repeat them any times but the unique perspective of a board is if you’re only getting together four times a year often, you don’t get as many opportunities to make changes and so putting a clear communication process in place of if our next board meetings in 90 days, here are the things I need you to do as a board member prior to that meeting.

So once we hit that meeting we’re set and we are going to maximize our time and you have to be intentional you just have to put those plans together because if you don’t you’re all going to be a little bit dissatisfied with the experience that’s been given.

Can you just educate me on on how often you think boards usually me and it doesn’t depend on the size of the organization and does it depend on whether we’re talking about associations or Charities or varies by in Industry. I mean, do you have any sense?

Yeah, there’s so much variety here. We have a lot of our customers that maybe executive but then you have committing in between monthly. So it’s really based on how you are structured as an organization often. There will be segments of your users of your staff that are meeting every month and hopefully are in contact more often but your big gatherings if you know if they are more on that quarterly basis, then it’s important to have those in between activities to keep momentum going.

Yeah, that makes sense so that so like I guess a lot of them the meat of the the meetings comes from those committees and they’re really diving into projects with staff throughout the year or helping to set that strategy for the staff. So I’m trying to think about what are all these processes or papers or binders?

And in this world, you know before digital that that are involved so like with a with a board meeting you have an agenda and then you have maybe a board packet and examples of things that you’re showing those could be transferred to digital. What does it look like for the sub committees? And what are they working on in terms of digital assets first paper? And what is that structure?

How we address it through some of maybe more like discussion channels. So think about a committee maybe you are planning for an upcoming event. And this is just one example, but yeah instead of of having to do everything over email. Maybe it’s all in one place and you have tasks that are assigned you have goals that are set for registration. It’s all in one place and instead of losing all of that information the next year you play in the same Gala.

You can go back to your committee and you can actually look at all of the discussions goals and tasks that were sound assigned the prior year and learn from them and build on top of them. So that’s where that continuity from year to year often. It’s easy to forget how important it is as a board member that I’m helping this nonprofit not only do well this year. But yeah the following years. I want to leave a legacy right and so technology can help you do that. It can help you achieve the long-term strategic plan you really have in Instead of these short time boxed meetings. You’re really thinking more long-term.

I really like that. I haven’t thought about that before that idea of keeping everything all in one place and I guess with digital it makes it a lot easier and it sets it up so that you don’t. You don’t really lose anything and you know, I’ve experienced I think with reports that go to the board but not with the board meeting themselves. So I never really I never really thought of that. That’s that’s smart. So what does that look like for different size organizations or different Industries in terms of setting up for Success?

So if you’re if you’re really small nonprofit and you have you know, an annual annual budget of under a million dollars a year and then if you’re a larger nonprofit and you’re doing 30 million dollars a year and you have a whole team And you haven’t really transitioned your your your board structure and all the documents and everything. You just mentioned about subcommittees and putting everything in one place. You want to move to digital whether you’re moving slow with your idea of putting things into an email at first like the agenda and the minutes or you want to move fast and dive in like what does that look like for small versus large organizations?

A lot of it’s gonna come down. How many resources do you have? Maybe it’s in terms of money or maybe it’s in terms of time and talent of how you can get there. So if you’re a really small organization really if you put time towards this if you maybe put it as an agenda item in front of your board early on it starts putting in your culture. We’re going to be thinking about this and maybe today we can’t we can’t spend what we want to spend but we are going to be building towards that and planning that way. And you’re you’re basically creating your vision for your board right and and envisioning where you want to go helps you make a lot of decisions today that are going to benefit you very much down the road.

So I think if you’re a small board, if you’re struggling with budget, there are free options out there. We actually have a freemium version of our product that helps you get started. It helps you just view what board management could look like in a digital space, but outside of if it’s board management itself. There’s a lot of other free options that can help you take that first step.

All right. Well, that’s awesome. We’ve been talking to Krista Martin a vice president of product and growth at boardable and hope everyone learned everything. I learned a bit here more than you knew before I certainly didn’t in terms of best practices on transitioning your board to something. That’s more digital. We talked about keeping everything in one space. So Krista, thanks for joining our first edition of nonprofit crash course. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks everyone. Take care.