The Developing Your Board (DYB) project
This is a major project conducted by The Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies and the School of Accountancy.
The DYB project aims to assist nonprofit boards / management committees to become reflexive. Reflexive boards continually learn to adapt to changes in their environment and to manage the competing demands they face. Importantly for the life of the organisation, they are then able to pass these skills on to incoming board members. In this way, longterm sustainability can be achieved.
A nonprofit board / management committee has to give high priority to its own development and maintenance. Boards and their individual members must examine their own performance in a meaningful way and learn from their experience and their self-evaluations.
A number of US-based instruments exist for the purposes of evaluating nonprofit boards and their relative effectiveness. For example—
- Herman and Renz (1997) propose board effectiveness as a function of:
- Stakeholder and CEO judgements of board effectiveness;
- Board, staff, and funders' perceptions of organisational effectiveness;
- Objective indicators such as stated organisational effectiveness criteria;
- Other organisational variables such as total revenue, and retrenchment strategies.
- Another example is the Board Self-Assessment Questionnaire (Holland, 1998). This assesses board performance in six areas that have been shown to be characteristic of effective boards (i.e. context; education; interpersonal, analytical, political, and strategic skills)
- Lastly, the Governance Self-Assessment Checklist (Gills, 2004) assesses board effectiveness on twelve dimensions, e.g. relating to board culture, management, decision-making, monitoring, and development.
These instruments are not always suited to the Australian context.
The DYB project is developing both qualitative and quantitative evaluation tools for use in evaluating and benchmarking performance. The evaluation tools are based around the major office bearers in the governance structure of Australian nonprofit boards—
- Chairperson / president
- CEO / senior management
- Secretary
- Treasurer and
- The board itself
These instruments will be framed particularly for the Australian context. Nonprofit boards / management committees will be able to use them to assess and re-assess their performance over time and benchmark against similar nonprofit boards.
The project adopts the following primary guiding perspectives for evaluation tools—
- They should empower users to have ownership of their evaluation and planning processes and build reflexive boards that pass on such learning skills to their successors.
- They need to be relevant to boards and their context. 'One size fits all' governance solutions are inappropriate in the nonprofit sector because of diversity of organisational cultures, size, activities and geography.
- They need to be evidence-based and responsive to different contexts. Prescriptive 'how to do it' tools based on 'armchair' thoughts around ideal or heroic boards can lead to inappropriate guidance and may eventually prove de-motivating.
- They should encourage open discussion and interaction in a board on possible governance changes that would improve governance with positive impacts upon organisational effectiveness.
- They should engage multiple senses. Information will be presented in a variety of visual and oral formats to cater for differing learning styles and strengths.
Nonprofit boards will benefit from participating in our project by—
- Taking part in continuous assessment;
- Improving over time;
- Achieving sustainability.
The first surveys are being pilot tested. As the surveys are developed fully, tested and are found to be relatively stable, it is envisaged that a data warehouse of de-identified survey results could be developed. Boards / management committees will be able to upload their results into a secure online data warehouse on a regular basis. With a databank of results, it will eventually be possible for nonprofit boards—
- to benchmark their own performance against that of comparable boards (for example in terms of sector or size) and
- to assess their own performance over time.
Having a databank of results will also inform future evidence-based research on nonprofit boards and assist the further development of the evaluation tools.
If you are a nonprofit board / management committee and wish to be informed and involved, you should visit the DYB wiki.
The ANZ Queensland Community Foundation – A N Carmichael Memorial Fund, managed by ANZ Trustees, and John T Reid Charitable Trusts have made a very generous donation to QUT for this multi-year research on nonprofit boards.