Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of working with nonprofit boards of all stripes and sizes. “Working boards.” “Fundraising boards.” “Governance boards.” “Advisory boards.” “Turnaround boards.” These terms are often bandied about without a consistent sense for what they mean. Don’t all nonprofit boards work? Fundraise? Govern? Advise? So why use these adjectives when describing the nature of the work that a particular nonprofit work does?

My sense is that board members use these terms as shorthand to distinguish what their role is in contrast to the role of the chief executive (or executive director). When the distinction between what board members do in comparison to the chief executive gets blurred, a nonprofit organization fails to live to its full potential at best and can drive itself (and staff) into the ground at worst.

Simply stated, a nonprofit board member’s role is to govern – and the chief executive’s role is to manage. BoardSource, the nonprofit sector’s leading voice on nonprofit governance, identifies the following list of responsibilities of nonprofit board members:

1. Determining the mission and purpose
2. Selecting the chief executive
3. Supporting and evaluating the chief executive
4. Ensuring effective planning
5. Monitoring and strengthening programs and services
6. Securing adequate financial resources
7. Protecting assets and providing proper financial oversight
8. Building a competent board
9. Ensuring legal and ethical integrity
10. Enhancing the organization’s public standing[1]

While no one could argue with this list of responsibilities, what’s appropriate for a board member to do (instead of the organization’s chief executive) can get confusing in practice. Here are three common challenges I have encountered in my work with nonprofits:

Challenge #1: Supporting the chief executive.

Ultimately, the only staff member that a nonprofit board “supervises” is its chief executive. While there may be other staff with whom board members have relationships and interact closely in their work, the chief executive is the only person in a nonprofit who manages staff. In practice, this means that no board member should be going directly to staff to ask them to do projects – the board member should be running those requests through the chief executive who is the staff’s supervisor. Doing anything else undercuts the chief executive’s authority and can create awkward dynamics in an organization. It can also create human resource challenges when wires get crossed.

Challenge #2: Ensuring effective planning.

Discerning who does what relative to planning can be tricky. Best practice suggests that the role of board members in planning is to help the organization articulate its priorities and allocate its resources towards the accomplishment of those priorities. Once a plan (including key performance indicators) has been finalized, board members should receive regular reports from the chief executive about how the organization’s programs and services are progressing. It is appropriate for a board member to ask questions about the organization’s progress – but it is not appropriate for a board member to be directly responsible for the execution of a nonprofit’s programs and services. Doing so would obfuscate the important role board members play in providing financial oversight and risk management, as it is impossible for someone to objectively oversee the work they do.

Challenge #3: Securing adequate financial resources.

Many board members do not relish their fundraising responsibilities for myriad reasons. They may fear rejection. They may fear establishing a quid pro quo expectation. Or they may fear not having the right skills to effectively ask someone for money. While these fears are legitimate, any board member who avoids fundraising is not living up to the full and reasonable expectations that an organization has of them. The way that each board member secures adequate financial resources may not look the same: some people may write checks. Others may introduce their friends and neighbors to their cause. Still others may feel completely comfortable asking strangers for money. It is incumbent for a nonprofit organization to help each board member determine how they will personally fulfill this critical responsibility. Each board member plays a role in fundraising, but not all of the roles are identical.

When board members perform their governance duties well and trust their chief executive to fulfill their management role, that nonprofit will be working most effectively accomplish their mission.

[1] “The Guide to Board Member Roles and Responsibilities,” BoardSource website, https://boardsource.org/fundamental-topics-of-nonprofit-board-service/roles-responsibilities/