Where to Find a New Board of Directors: Gavin Give-A-Hoot Wants to Change the System

Where to Find a New Board of Directors: Gavin Give-A-Hoot Wants to Change the System

Gavin’s decision to find new people for the board of directors was faster made than done. He started reading the bylaws sentence by sentence to discover that the board of directors has to be elected every two years. He was happy to see this because it had already been two years since the last election of the board.

He started trying to find candidates, but where should Gavin start to look? It is hard to find people to volunteer anyway.

While he was sitting at his desk in his home office trying to figure out how he could find suitable candidates, his wife came in to ask if he already wrote the yearly donation check to the afterschool program.

Gavin got an idea. He went down the list of loyal donors and found a few names that would fit as members of the Board of Directors.

He made himself a check list:

• Sharing a passion for the mission of the organization           
• Strong ties to the community       
• Willingness to help hands-on     
• Supporting efforts to raise money           
• Commitment to participate in all meetings

“Great!” he thought, “but are there more ways to find good candidates?” He asked himself. “Let me see if there is anyone I know who serves at other boards.” He started researching other organization’s websites and discovered that a few of the members of the Tinyville Arts Council were serving on Boards of other local organizations.

While Gavin was planning to get a new Board of Directors together, the phone rang. It was Jane Know-it-all (President) and Brian No-decision (Vice President). They were on the line to complain that Gavin’s move would destroy the Arts Council.

See how Gavin Give-A-Hoot will handle this conflict.

Ways to find active members for your Board:

• Regular donors and patrons
• Active board members of other organizations
• Well-known members of the community
• Local business owners

Many people would jump in and help by serving on the board of an organization, but they never were asked to step up.