Speaker 1: So when you're starting a non-profit, what board committees do you need for your board of directors? We're going to talk through some possibilities in this video. Welcome or welcome back, I'm Amber Melanie Smith, non-profit founder and executive director, and I make these videos here on YouTube all about creating a social impact, whatever that may look like to you. I, as always, hope that you find this video helpful and useful. Don't forget to give it a like and subscribe to my channel for more content like this. I also have a website, foundertofulltime.com, where I have trainings and resources for people starting a non-profit or developing a sustainable fundraising plan. So I hope you go check those out too. I think it's important to state that throughout the life cycle of your non-profit organization, your board is going to take on many different forms. It's going to evolve over time. The needs that you're going to have for the structure and composition of your board of directors is going to look very different when you are just starting a non-profit and launching than when you're much bigger and have grown and have a budget that can sustain paid staff working full time on your organization's mission. So I'm going to focus this video specifically on the board committees you might want to have when you're first starting out as a non-profit. When you are starting out as a non-profit, your board of directors is going to serve two main functions. The first is your governing or leadership body, so making policies and making sure that they're being followed. And the second is, assuming you don't have paid staff, which most non-profit startups do not, your board is actually filling in for some of those working operational roles that future staff might be filling in for. So things like fundraising, managing the internal operations of your organization, and running your programs. And eventually, assuming your goal is to grow your budget, the organization would have paid staff to take on those day-to-day activities, and in the future, your board would fall back to a more governing and representative body. Given this, and given, you know, the roles board members might play, let's think through what are some of the roles and committees that could be most helpful in helping your non-profit at this critical stage grow. Every non-profit and mission is, of course, a little different, so to get your brain in the right mindset to think through the answer to this question, you want to think about what are the different things you need to accomplish as an organization at this stage. It's also important to consider there are some activities and roles that are going to need to be ongoing or permanent, and those might be your standing committees. And then there are other roles that might just be one-time tasks or one-time projects that are short-term. Those might be your ad hoc committees or what you might call task forces. For most non-profit startups, you're going to need to handle some of the following responsibilities. One, you've got leadership, so someone or a couple of people who are directing everything, who are be able to look from a bird's-eye view at that strategy and make sure that people's activities are lining up with those goals. Two, governing governance, so that's developing policies for your organization and then putting systems in place to make sure those policies and processes can be upheld. Third is program design and execution, so this is thinking about what are the goals for serving your community that you want to meet as an organization, and then how can you best design and develop a program that is likely to reach those goals effectively. And then actually carrying it out. What do you need to carry it out? Do you need volunteers? Do you need equipment, supplies, etc.? So someone or someone's thinking through those specific program-related questions. Fourth, you've got fundraising. You know, you are probably unlikely to be able to reach those program goals unless you have some resources coming in paying for those things that you need for your program, so someone's got to be overseeing that. Marketing and outreach, which very much complements fundraising. You have to have someone developing the messaging that will appeal to the public for your cause and then going out there and actually raising awareness and talking to people and spreading the word about your organization. Then you have finance and accounting, so someone's bringing in the money but someone's got to be managing it and holding the organization accountable and making sure that everything's done above board and that your bookkeeping is all in order or else you might get in trouble with the government and get shut down. Then you've got developing strategy, which could be a role that leadership or governance also supports, and developing your annual budget. You know, you've got to have someone sort of driving that conversation to get that annual budget crafted based on the anticipated needs of the organization in the next year or handful of years. Then you have developing relationships with other people or community organizations or institutions or businesses in your community that you might need relationships with in order to execute on your programming and bring in support and resources and so much more. So if you don't have paid staff, it is most likely going to be your board of directors, hopefully with support from some community volunteers who are carrying out most if not all of these functions. So now that we've thought about some of the things that need to get done, the question is how do you split these items into committees? There are a couple of different schools of thought on this, and I will share both of them with you, and you can just think about what's going to work best for your organization and situation. Some non-profit sources, for example Blue Avocado, check them out, they're pretty cool, recommend a smaller number of committees, arguing that too many committees just becomes unwieldy and hard to manage. And there's some merit to that. So they would argue for no more than three or four committees tops, and here's what those committees might be if you go this route. The first committee might be something like internal affairs. This is the committee managing all of your behind-the-scenes operations, things like human resources, that finance and accounting piece that I mentioned, if your organization has any like facilities or equipment, managing the facilities, managing inventory of the equipment, etc. So stuff that is in the operations realm. There might also be some element of program design in the internal affairs, because though you might consider programs to be an outward-facing thing, knowing the logistics and the types of equipment or people you're going to need in order to properly execute those programs could be considered an operational task. Then the second committee that you might have under this smaller number of committee structure is external affairs. So this is the committee managing your outward-facing things like fundraising, public relations, marketing, etc. Third, you've got your governance committees. So this committee, as I mentioned before, is developing and managing policy, but they also might oversee the responsibility of attracting and recruiting new board members for future board cycles. This is all about maintaining the health of the board and the organization. And then the fourth, and you can't go without this one, is your executive committee. This is your leadership. This typically would include those common roles such as chair or president, whichever you want to call them, vice chair or vice president, secretary, and board treasurer. And it's also common that these people, these positions, might also serve as liaisons on the other three committees that I just described. There are benefits to this approach having a smaller number of committees. For example, less, in theory, committees to manage, possibly less meetings, etc. But there's also an argument to be made that unless your board is comprised of very experienced people in the non-profit world and people who are very competent and skilled in each of the tasks we described, that you might find yourself moving too slowly for your tastes with a structure like this. There's going to be a lot of figuring stuff out. There's going to be a lot of figuring out who's going to own what task because so many different tasks are under the umbrella of one committee, for example. So I'm going to talk about the other approach, which is a more specialized approach where everyone has a very, very clearly defined role, but there are many more committees. So pros and cons. In this specialized approach, you still have your executive committee. That's your chair, vice chair, treasurer, secretary. This is the leadership of the organization. It's probably going to be similar no matter which way you go. You would also similarly have a governance body of some kind. So the committee dealing with the policies and the managing board health and stuff like that. Where we get into a little bit more differentiation is with the finance committee. So this committee might be comprised of people who have specific accounting skills and are just specializing specifically in managing your organization's books and making sure the financial health is going well for the organization. Then there's a marketing or outreach committee and development committee. Now you might have this be combined into one, so marketing, outreach, and fund development, or there might be two, marketing and outreach, and then another one, fund development. I think whether you would have this be one committee or two will depend largely on the types of skills you have on your board. If you have people with strong fundraising experience, then it might be okay to have these combined. And I was saying before that marketing and outreach and fundraising go hand in hand because the marketing and the outreach is going to be done to get people in, get them to become part of your audience, get on your newsletter, etc. And you're going to need that audience in order to effectively do fundraising. So they often go hand in hand. And then you might have another committee focused specifically on programs and executing on those. So I would expect to see on this committee people who maybe either have lived experience with the issue area that your organization is tackling and can really do a good job of articulating the needs of people who are having that experience so that the programs can be designed to properly meet and address those needs. You might have people who have previous program management experience. You're going to want someone on here who's strong with evaluating outcomes, so people who've made strategic plans before, people who've created logic models, stuff like that. Basically people who can make sure that whatever the program is that you do, it's going to meet the goals that you set. So I talked through those two different styles, two different formats of board structures for standing committees. Then I previously also mentioned this idea of ad hoc or short-term committees or task forces. So a couple of examples before we wrap up here of what those might include are as follows. The first might be a strategic planning task force. The idea here is you need people with these strong strategic planning and evaluation skills to lead the board in the process of developing the future strategic plan. So strategic plan, if you're not familiar, is when you set goals and desired outcomes for your organization, whether that's internal goals like we want to raise this much money, we want to hire our first staff, etc. Or programmatic goals, we want to serve this many people or animals, we want to plant this many trees, we want to change this many lives in these specific ways, etc. And the strategic plan is going to help you map out how you're going to get to your goal, what actions you're going to take in order to reach the goals that you set. So someone or someone's who are very strong at this skill set might be needed to help lead the rest of the board in developing it, but this is a short-term task, maybe a couple months depending on the complexity of your cause. You might also consider a board nominating task force. This is sometimes separated out from a governance committee where it's specific people, perhaps even a representative from each of the other committees, who are responsible for seeking out and nominating or recommending future board members to the board based on the skills that your organization believes it needs for the next period of time. Then you have something like a special event or a campaign committee. So you want to host one big event or host one fundraising campaign that might take a couple of months. You want someone driving the campaign or event planning behind the scenes to make sure everything goes well. I'd love to hear from you. Are you in the process of building out your board of directors? What are some of the other needs that you're anticipating? Or how do you think you might use some of the ones that we described here? I'd love to hear from you. Share in the comments below. And as I mentioned earlier in the video, if you are in the process of starting a non-profit or trying to come up with that sustainable fundraising plan for how you're going to generate revenue for your cause, I have some trainings on my website foundertofulltime.com. So definitely check those out. I also do a newsletter for change makers and nonprofit leaders. The link to subscribe to that is in the description below. I will often include news and trends and sometimes funding opportunities that I come across. So you definitely want in on that. Finally, I have a Facebook group, Change the World or Bust. I've got a couple thousand folks in there from around the world making an impact. It's awesome. Come on by, come join us. And that's all I have for you today. I hope that this was helpful for you as always. Once again, I'm Amber Melanie Smith, and I hope to see you next time.