Gail Perry - 10 Ways to Liven Up Your Nonprofit Board Meetings

By Gail Perry

If you want to change the world, then you need to have engaging, interesting meetings. Boring meetings result in a bored board. And will a bored board get involved in fundraising? Probably not!

Lively meetings engage your board members and propel them into action. Deadly meetings can sap all the energy out of everyone.

Here are 10 great ways to create meetings that bring out your board’s best.

1. Focus the agenda on results
Start the meeting a bit differently. Like this: "In this meeting, we need to accomplish X and make Y decision. Is everybody OK with this plan? Is everybody OK with the timing of our discussions and the order of the agenda? We have an hour and a half. Can everybody stay for the full meeting?"

This is the way to engage board members deeply right at the start.

2. Be creative with the agenda
Roberts Rules can be quite deadly. Formal parliamentary procedure can drive the passion and enthusiasm out of any group of people!

Be creative. Can you reorder the agenda occasionally? Start with the interesting stuff first rather than minutes and committee reports?

Try to humanize your discussions to give your board members insight to the work your nonprofit is really accomplishing out in the world.

3. Focus on problems, challenges or broad issues
Bring big-picture strategic planning issues into regular board meetings. This activates your board members’ various backgrounds and skills sets, not to mention their interest.

It allows you to draw upon a deeper reservoir of their talent and energy, and gives them more interesting work.

4. Plan big
Bring big-picture strategic planning issues into regular board meetings.

For example, you could take the standard strategic planning issues focusing on organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis).

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Gail Perry Author's page Gail believes in parties first, rabble-rousing second, and having fun while changing the world. Gail Perry CFRE is an international fundraising coach, speaker, trainer and thought-leader. She is a leader in a new breed of fundraisers who are on the cutting edge of fundraising today. Her Fired-Up Fundraising approach, developed over the past 25 years as a nonprofit philanthropy expert, has helped organizations raise hundreds of millions in gifts. Gail's practical and refreshing approach to raising money in today's world is based on the very latest innovative fundraising strategies. An inspirational and popular speaker, she leads energizing fundraising workshops and board retreats around the globe. She particularly enjoys working with nonprofit board members, introducing them to a new perspective on fundraising and ways they can be successful at it. Gail's book, Fired-Up Fundraising, has been called the "gold standard guide to building successful fundraising boards." Gail got her start in fundraising at Duke University, and then went on to lead fundraising at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can read Gail's weekly blogs at FiredUpFundraising.com, and also find her provocative articles at FundraisingSuccess, Guidestar, and Capital Campaign Magic.

10 Ways to Liven Up Your Board Meetings