Board Recruiting Best Practices – Show your board you love them – Put them on your website
With nearly 2 million nonprofit board seats opening up in this country every year, nonprofits need to work hard to successfully recruit the most attractive board members. We’ve discussed many different strategies for doing just that in this blog. One of the best and easiest strategies is to put your board on your website. If your nonprofit is not showing off who is on their board, they are missing an easy opportunity to maximize their chances of winning at the board recruiting game.
Top Six Reasons Your Board Should be Featured on Your Website
- It’s expected. If your board is not featured on your website potential funders and board candidates will likely scratch their heads. What are you hiding? Why don’t you want to share the names and backgrounds of the critical folks supporting your work?
- Not listing your board sends a message that you don’t value the work they do for you. Nonprofit board members want to feel appreciated. By not sharing the names and bios of the wonderful trustees who make your work possible, you send a message to potential board members that you don’t value the role of your board.
- Potential funders and board members want to understand who the people are behind the important work you are doing. Increasingly donors and board candidates won’t consider investing their time or money with nonprofits that don’t share these details.
- Sharing the background of your trustees is another way to signal that you are open and transparent about how your nonprofit operates. Board candidates and potential funders want to invest with nonprofits that share the details of how they operate. Withholding this information makes board candidates wonder what else you are failing to disclose.
- Posting pictures and bios of your board make potential friends of your organization feel a more personal connection to your work. Seeing the actual faces of those making what you do possible helps potential friends care more about what you do.
- Your board is likely a tremendous selling point for why people should place confidence in your work. Most nonprofits have terrific boards made up of wonderful trustees with very interesting backgrounds. When you fail to share the details of their lives with potential new friends of your organization, you miss an important marketing opportunity.
Nonprofit board members work hard to support the charities on whose boards they sit. Thank your board members publicly by putting them on your website in as visible a way as possible, with their names, photos and biographical information. Curious about the wonderful people who support our work? Meet the BoardAssist board on our site. We can’t thank them enough for all they do for us! We could not exist without them.