Boards of directors can and do fill many different roles for nonprofit organizations, running the gamut from policy oversight to helping secure resources to serving as partners with management. Opinions on what the proper role for the board should be are equally divergent, ranging from a conviction that the board should simply raise money and focus on policy to the view that the board can, and indeed must, take on a more robust set of responsibilities. Perhaps the most practical way to approach the issue of effective governance is to ask the leaders of boards of organizations that are recognized for success how they spend their time.
After conducting interviews with the board chairs or CEOs (or executive directors) of 32 top nonprofit organizations, we catalogued the practices of effective boards.
As a result of this research, we have concluded that a high-performing board plays three distinct roles:
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