Board Management

About once a month we have a brown-bag lunch discussion here at the San Francisco Non-Profit Tech Center, in which we send out a general invitation to the Bay Area's NPO community. We usually get half a dozen or so, which makes for a pretty good discussion. On Wednesday, we had a discussion about Boards.

I won't go into too much detail here, but we have a wiki for our discussions if you're interested.

http://nonprofitoperations.aspirationtech.org/index.php/January_31%2C_20...

I didn't participate much, since I haven't had much experience in this area, other than my experience with Aspiration's board in December. It was interesting to see how our board interacts with Heather and Gunner, and how they provide us with support and advice. We have a really good board who are hands-on but not too much. At the brown bag, I heard a few stories about boards that essentially micromanage, and others that provide financial support (as in, $10,000/year is required from each board member). We don't have either of those dynamics at work in Aspiration, and I think our model works well for us.

 

I've also been working on an Advisory Committee for Social Source Commons, which is a "board" of sorts. Basically, we're trying to pull in the expertise of people from a variety of NPO's to help give advice for SSC. We're hoping for some good advice for the site as well as data as far as what tools they use and recommend. I'm pretty much in charge of running this, so any advice is helpful.

 

It's also interesting that we got a Board Management tool entered into SSC in the past week called BoardTrax. Does anyone use this, or any other "board-management" software? I'm thinking of testing it out for the purposes of the aforementioned advisory committee.

 

If anyone has any experience or advice in dealing with boards or committees of this nature, please let me know.