Become an Effective Board Member

Nat:
We all want to become effective committee and board members that contribute to the organisation. But it’s kind of hard to do that unless you know a little bit about the organisation. We’ve developed a straightforward three page list of things that you might want to look at. So documents that you might want to look at or questions that you may want to ask. This list can be used certainly at the beginning. You know, if you’re kind of considering what committee or board you should join or if you’re looking at a particular organisation and you’ve been invited along and you’re, you know, sort of weighing up if it’s the right organisation for you. But this is also useful if you’re a new board member or if you’re, you know, a new committee or board member who’s reviewing where the organisation is up to. This is a really great checklist, particularly for grassroots organisations, perhaps with, you know, only a couple of paid staff or just volunteers.

Emily Thompson:
For those of you who run service based organisations, we’ve actually got a really useful course. We’ll provide the link down below and it’s a course that, that is called Questions to Ask youk Board and there’s a more compreh list of questions and they get into some detail, you know, the sorts of detail that’s appropriate if you’re delivering services and you have an asset base. But this is a really, this one here is a really good organisational knowledge checklist. You know, you could even start with this. You could even, you know, if you’re a larger organisation, you could even actually look at this as a bit of an induction pack of things to actually provide to your committee or board members. So let’s have a little bit of a look at this. I’ll give you a bit of a run through, you can just download it straight from underneath the video and start working away and start having a look at it. But I’ll just give you a bit of an overview of some of the things that it captures.

Emily Thompson:
So we ask questions about the organisation particularly purpose and also is the organisation still delivering all those types of activities that align to that purpose. There’s questions about the membership base. This is really important in particularly grassroots organisations where you have a large membership base, understanding the rhythm, if you like, of membership, you know, when does it come up due, what membership packages are there? And particularly around voting rights, which can be really critical, particularly around those decisions that you want members to or that members have the power to speak to. The others are around legal liability. So a really great one also gives you assurance that you’re protected as a member of an incorporated association and what is done to ensure that as an individual, if you’re acting, you know, in the best interest of the organisation and not being negligent, that the organisation does protect you. So there are some really good things to look at for some of you. If you have something called directors and officers insurance or volunteers insurance. Just a really great question around making sure that you understand the pros and cons or what’s included and what’s excluded from that policy.

Emily Thompson:
There’s some questions about the committee or board and this is really important to note. You know, who are the other people around the table with you and what’s the breakup and the structure and, you know, the makeup of that committee and how long do they stand for and, you know, if there was any disputes, how would they be made? So these are all really great questions from the outset to know about. There’s questions then about meetings, how they run the process, the quorum. You know, it’s really important to know quorum, to have a legally constituted meeting, you know, particularly if there are any proxy votes or postal votes as well. You know, maybe you do an online voting system also. And then we have questions about subcommittees. So what’s the limit of delegation for the subcommittee? I mean, one great question to ask about subcommittees is what’s their purpose? And are we, you know, how do we measure the effectiveness of that subcommittee? Well, subcommittees should be there for a reason or a season. So they’re either there like a Finance subcommittee to help us really understand financials and analyse them, or they’re there because it might be, for example, a fundraising subcommittee, and they’re, you know, for six months of the year, they focus on these one event.

Emily Thompson:
So that’s. That’s the seasonality of subcommittees. But it’s important to know the decisions or the things that they’re allowed to make decisions on and the things that have to come back to your main governing body or committee or your board. Some questions around financials, really important to understand the finances. And of course, for all of these areas, if you want to dig in deeper, we’ve got a range of courses and videos and templates, et cetera, to help you understand these a little bit better. For example, the balance sheet, you know, ledgers, reporting requirements, you know, you might have questions about audit, etc. So, again, if you want to dig a little bit deeper into that and find out more about that, please just search the learning library and you’ll find some information on that. The other ones that we talk about are then we sort of go a little bit deeper into some of the legal obligations that we have.

Emily Thompson:
So we look at particularly the three key or two key areas in this case, which is conflict of interest and confidentiality. But I’ve included pecuniary interest as a third one because that’s a really important thing. Pecuniary interest is where you receive a benefit. So it’s important to know that you’re going to be a decision maker, a governor, if you’re not already on a committee or a board. And it’s important to know what the other people’s positions are around the table as well, because you carry collective responsibility for decisions the organisation makes. So this is a really important question to ask. And then I’ve got some questions around your contractuals and legals. So making sure that you understand the, you know, what legislation applies, how do we ensure compliance against that legislation? Particularly if you have things like working with children cheque, if you have a contract that you have for funding that you have to acquit.

Emily Thompson:
So there are certain things that you have to do at certain times, you know, working with children cheque, you need to make sure they’re updated and they’re renewed. So these are really important things for us to make sure the organisation has in place. And so. And then we talk about, you know, making sure that you have sort of monitoring and report reporting processes in place also. So download the checklist, as always, if you have any questions on these, reach out to the team and I really hope that this helps you. And if you’re providing it, you know, provide it to your committee. If you’re doing it, then you certainly can use, you know, I click to learn is very much about making sure that whilst we’re upskilling you, it’s also your committee or your board or your team of volunteers or your staff team that’s going to benefit from this also. So, of course you can.

Emily Thompson:
You can’t sort of distribute it broadly, but you certainly can work through this with your team. I hope you really enjoyed. If there’s anything there that you think you’d like to add or you’d like to see added again, reach out to the team. We’re always looking at ways to add more.

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