Like many people involved in nonprofit leadership and governance, I have sat through my share of directors’ meetings that were vexed by this question: How can we attract a certain type of desired individual to our board? In one case, a group I was part of wanted to add a successful Wall Street dealmaker. In another, the target was a partner at a major law firm. In yet another, it was an well-connected insider who could be our ambassador to Silicon Valley.
If those groups had had an easy way to fill such a need, they would have been debating among alternative candidates rather than wringing their hands about not having any. Indeed, they simply did not have any good contacts interested in board service and their mission within the desired talent pool. So they were stuck, at least temporarily. In one case, a governing body I served on bemoaned its failure to recruit a candidate with the desired profile in multiple meetings spanning several years. If this sounds familiar, read on.
Until recently, I thought that the only way out of such a conundrum was to doggedly network and hope that over time someone would turn up a candidate with the desired profile who also wanted to serve as a board member. Sometimes that took months, or even years. Occasionally no one ever surfaced who fit the bill. In the meantime, the directors felt that they had a significant unfilled gap, which tended to depress morale and ultimately, group performance.
However, during a consulting assignment for Civics and Service International (CSI), which until fairly recently was known as Child Steps International, I learned of another way to recruit great board members. While interviewing the board members of this organization (which is focused on civics education in Liberia), several mentioned that they had gotten involved through an unusual way: at the invitation of what one referred to as a “LinkedIn headhunter.” I was intrigued.
I asked CSI’s founder, Tenneh Johnson Kemah (who had been a graduate student of mine at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy), what this was all about. She said that some years back, CSI was in its infancy and not sure how to build its board beyond Tenneh’s friends and family. When she heard about an organization called Board Member Connect, she jumped at the opportunity to hire them to help recruit passionate, talented, and well-connected people – one fewer puzzle for this start-up to solve on its own.
As it turned out, at the point where it secured this contact with CSI in 2013, Board Member Connect was also in its infancy. CSI was among its first three clients. Using LinkedIn and its own proprietary database, Board Member Connect found three individuals who had connections to Liberia and a passionate desire to join a team that could help this struggling nation to thrive. Those directors are still involved today and were among the most receptive to my recommendations as a fund-raising consultant in late 2020 and early 2021.
At last count, Board Member Connect had completed more than 200 client engagements with nonprofits across the country. Nearly every contract has resulted in a board member meeting the specifications set by the client being successfully recruited and onboarded.
Since its early days when it helped CSI, Board Member Connect has refined its approach in many ways. Perhaps most importantly, they have developed a flexible pricing model based on how many board members an organization wants, and how narrow or broad their candidate profiles are. For example, Board Member Connect can recruit someone from Wall Street who is willing to make a $100,000 annual contribution, but it will cost considerably more than recruiting someone from the same community who is the equivalent of Vice-President or higher and has a passionate interest in your organization’s mission. If you want the candidate to be from a particular demographic with respect to age, gender, or ethnicity, that will impact the cost as well. Their typical fee is $5,500 for two successful board member recruits, though as mentioned above, that amount can vary significantly based on the terms of the search.
Board Member Connect also contracts with corporations seeking to place their executives in challenging nonprofit governance roles that can round them out as professionals prior to taking on a challenging executive role. As you can imagine, there are times when they are able to identify a nonprofit and a business that can solve each other’s problems.
Board Member Connect’s clients are diverse. They include local and national groups that span the gamut in terms of sectors. Youth development, health care, advocacy, legal services, independent schools, and workforce development nonprofits are among their satisfied customers.
Nonprofit boards of all shapes, sizes, and ages can get stuck in trying to bring in fresh blood, new perspectives, deep pockets, and specialized expertise. One of the tricks of effective leadership is to know when you need a third party to help you jump-start a stalled effort upon which your future as an organization depends, at least in part. (To learn about scores of other nonprofit leadership hacks, check out my book When in Doubt, Ask for More.)
The tendency for nonprofits to want to “do it themselves” and save money in the process is sometimes the best approach, but just as often it is short-sighted and self-defeating. Remember: there is a reason you are stuck, and it is probably that you lack some connections or capabilities essential to getting this recruitment job done to your satisfaction. Board Member Connect may be just the partner you need to build the governing body of your dreams, or at least to help you take some big steps in that direction.