by Patrick Gaul

Building and maintaining a board of directors can be a challenge for many organizations. Ideally the motivation for a potential board member should be passion for the service your agency provides.  It is also important to have the right mix of board members.  “Diverse boards are better able to expand capacity and weather tough times” according to the article Board Diversity: Your Biggest Challenge in the May/June 2009 issue of Nonprofit World.

If you are looking at ways to improve development, why not look at the things you highlight when recruiting employees?  Are there any benefits that can be efficiently extended to board members?

I recently had a conversation with an administrator at a non-profit Ease@Work customer.  She had been telling a board member about the new fitness coaching service we had recently added to our program.  This board member was interested in this service because, like most of the US population, she was looking for help with weight loss.  

She called us to ask if they were allowed to include board members in the census of covered employees.  My immediate answer was yes, of course she could.  When I checked their contract I learned she could even do so without incurring any additional cost because adding their board members would not increase their numbers beyond the maximum allowable under our agreement.

Ann Kent, the Non-Profit Services Director at Business Volunteers Unlimited told me, while there are no laws against offering something of value to a volunteer board member, our customer should check her organization’s bylaws.  In this case, since this agency can offer our program to their board at no cost, it is highly unlikely that the bylaws will forbid it.  In most cases our agreements are based on a per employee rate.  Even then, at approximately $2 per employee per month our program should be well within any limits set in the bylaws.  

In many cases the benefits offered by your organization will be too costly to extend to your board members and may not be needed by the board member.  Health insurance comes to mind.  Your board members probably already have access to an EAP as well.  However, if they work for a large national company they probably do not have an EAP that offers as many high quality local resources like in-person fitness or nutritional consultations. When they find out how inexpensive it is, they’ll applaud you for making such a wise benefit choice.