Skip to main content

Accountability = Success

By February 18, 2015January 15th, 2018Culture Change, Data, Engaging Your Board

Using Dashboards to Cause Nonprofit Board & Staff to Take Action

Changing your board story, our topic of the month, takes time.

It also takes changing staff & board leadership behaviors to shift a board culture.

One of the tools I recommend when I work with social sector boards is to create a board activity dashboard and a fundraising activity dashboard. Creating the dashboards is the easy part.

Deciding what to show on the dashboards is what takes time and intentional conversation.

Step 1: Provide ample time for the board members to answer a few key questions. Refer to this post 5 Questions Every Board Should Ask for some helpful questions.

Step 2: Once the board has determined the ways they will be of most value AND what they want to track, the role of staff is to create a dashboard to support their actions.

Step 3: Make sure your dashboard shows both what has happened in the past AND what actions you want to cause in the future.

Step 4: Review dashboards regularly with time to discuss activity status.

One example of a board governance dashboard that I use in my coaching and dashboard training sessions:
boardgovernancedashboard
Here are a pair of a fundraising charts I like to share with board & staff to show how many donors vs. how much money is being generated by a specific category of giving:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge


Want more tips for engaging your board? Download Mission Possible: Your Workbook for a Successful Board that includes some of my favorite worksheets and templates to help you create an amazing board experience AND cause board engagement all year-long.

6 Comments

Leave a Reply