10 Ways to Liven Up Your Board Meetings

Divide the four subjects over four board meetings and at each meeting, take your board through a discussion or update of one of these issues.

5. Look at your board meetings as cheerleading sessions
Your meeting is an opportunity to fire up your board members and put them into action.

Try seeing the board as the team that is out on the field, with the role of the staff being there to encourage and congratulate board members: How would you stage such a session?

Identify who would need to speak in order to rev up the energy of your board.

6. Use consent agendas
Why devote valuable meeting time to routine business items that do not require much board discussion?

Mail out a consent agenda in advance that can be approved in one vote. Any member can ask that a consent agenda item be moved back into the regular agenda for discussion.

Try handling committee reports in this manner by providing written reports in the place of lengthy oral reports.

7. Interview the executive director
What keeps your executive director up at night? If you were a board member, you’d certainly want to know! And that issue may not even be on your agenda.

How about a relaxed “fireside chat” with your ED for about 10 minutes before the formal agenda begins? What an interesting discussion this could be and how engaging for board members.

8. Select a theme for each meeting
You could follow a strategy developed by former Alliance for Peacebuilding CEO Chic Dambach. He likes to select a theme for each meeting based a particular need or issue facing the organization.

He says, “This allows ample time for in-depth analysis of that topic. For particularly important issues, the theme can be repeated over the course of several meetings until the issue has been adequately addressed.”