A board agenda is more than a list of topics. It is a reflection of what a board believes is important. A board that spends 70% of its meeting receiving reports and approving routine items is telling you something about how it views its role. A board that consistently and intentionally makes room for mission, strategy, future opportunities, risk, impact, and difficult questions is telling you something very different.
If I want to understand how a board operates, I don’t necessarily need to sit through a year’s worth of meetings. Show me the agendas!
An agenda tells me what a board prioritizes, who is expected to talk, whether members are looking backward or forward, whether they are being asked to make decisions or simply receive information, and how much of their limited time is devoted to strategy versus operations.
A board meeting is an important tool for communication with and among board members. Everyone is busy, and you want to make the most of your time together. That’s why I encourage nonprofit leaders to think of their agenda as a governance tool, not an administrative document.
Busy Does Not Equal High-Performing
Boards can have packed agendas, beautiful reports, a lot of discussions, votes and activity … and still not be doing particularly effective governance.
A high-performing board asks:
“What is the most important use of our collective brainpower right now?”
Rather than:
“What do we need to get through tonight?”
I’ve sat in plenty of board meetings where the agenda was packed, everyone was busy, and a tremendous amount of information was shared. Yet when the meeting ended, I wasn’t always sure what the board had actually accomplished.
Busy is not the same as productive. And productive is not necessarily the same as effective governance.
Start With the Work, Not the Agenda
Rather than starting with: “What should be on our next board agenda?” start with: “What does this board need to accomplish over the next 3, 6, or 12 months?”
Instead of looking at each board meeting as an isolated event, map the important governance work across the year. What does the board need to know? What decisions will it need to make? What strategic conversations need time? What skills or knowledge do members need to develop? What milestones should the board be monitoring?
Then you use that information to build the meeting calendar and agendas. This is called Agenda Mapping and it is much more intentional than simply recycling the previous meeting’s agenda or randomly adding topics that come to mind. Agenda Mapping thoughtfully connects the board’s work across the year, rather than treating each meeting as a stand-alone event.
Build the Year Before You Build the Meeting
High-performing boards don’t create each agenda from scratch. They look at the annual governance calendar, as well as the organization’s strategic priorities, to determine when important conversations need to happen.
Here’s a very simplified example of what this might look like. Your organization’s annual governance calendar will – and should – look different.
| Quarter | Possible Governance Focus |
| Q1 | Strategic priorities, annual goals, board development, financial outlook |
| Q2 | Program impact, community trends, fundraising strategy, board engagement |
| Q3 | Strategic progress, risk, future opportunities, succession |
| Q4 | Evaluation, budget, next year’s priorities, board self-assessment |
The exact topics will vary by organization; yet the principle is simple: Don’t let the calendar dictate your governance. Let your governance priorities dictate the calendar.
Give Every Agenda Item a Job
Every item should have a clearly identified purpose. For example:
- Inform – What does the board need to know?
- Discuss – What requires collective thinking?
- Decide – What decision does the board need to make?
- Develop – What knowledge or skills do board members need?
- Connect – How does this reconnect members to the mission, each other, community, or stakeholders?
- Monitor – What needs ongoing oversight?
- Evaluate – What are we learning about organizational performance?
- Act – What needs to happen as a result?
You may notice that “report” didn’t make this list. While there is often a lot of reporting that goes on in board meetings, the reports should have a bigger purpose. Maybe it’s a format for informing the board or developing their knowledge. Perhaps it demonstrates performance for monitoring impact or gauging reach.
When inserting a report into the agenda, ask the question: Why does the board need this information? What are they supposed to do with it? A report just for the sake of reporting could be delivered over email and may not warrant valuable space on the board agenda.
Stop Giving Every Topic Equal Weight
Not every agenda item deserves 15 minutes. And not every item deserves to be discussed at all. Consider categorizing items as:
- Consent: Things members have reviewed and can approve efficiently.
- Monitoring: Information the board needs to oversee.
- Discussion: Issues requiring collective thought.
- Decision: Issues requiring board action.
- Strategic Conversation: Issues where the board needs to wrestle with possibilities, implications, or tradeoffs.
The amount of time given to an issue should reflect its importance – not how long the report happens to be.
Protect the “Thinking Time”
Many boards say they want to be strategic, but they don’t actually schedule time to think strategically. They let other things, like routine reports, lengthy committee updates, or irrelevant tangents take over and hijack their meetings. If every meeting is packed with updates, committee reports and routine business, strategic thinking gets whatever scraps of time remain.
High-performing boards reserve the time before the meeting happens. Protecting time for high-level thinking requires a commitment from everyone – especially the Board Chair. Strong meeting leadership, combined with tools like time allotments, a timekeeper, and agreed-upon expectations for board member participation, can help keep meetings on track.
Board retreats can create a concentrated opportunity for this kind of thinking, but strategic thinking shouldn’t be reserved for an annual retreat. Well-designed board meetings should continue those conversations throughout the year.
Strategic conversations require:
- Context
- Good questions
- Multiple perspectives
- Time
- Sometimes uncomfortable disagreement
- The ability to explore before deciding
Well designed board meetings can perpetuate high-level thinking and ensure that strategies developed at the retreat don’t live on as good intentions.
Design Questions, Not Just Topics
One of the simplest ways to improve a board agenda is to stop writing agenda items as nouns and start writing them as questions.
For example, if membership is an important issue, instead of putting “Membership Report” on the agenda, consider: “What are we learning about changes in membership, and what implications might those changes have for our strategy?”
Or, instead of: “Fundraising Update” ask: “What needs to change with our fundraising strategy to reach our three-year revenue goals?”
Finally, instead of: “Staffing Update,” include the question: “What organizational capacity will we need in order to accomplish our strategic priorities?”
Boards need to be intentional about the conversations they have, not just the information they receive. The topic tells you what you’re talking about. The question tells you why you’re talking about it.
Make the Agenda a Shared Leadership Tool
The agenda is one of the places where the Executive Director and Board Chair practice shared leadership. The board meeting agenda should not be something the Exec throws together, with the Chair approving it or maybe just seeing when they show up to the meeting. Creation of the agenda should be a shared leadership responsibility between the Board Chair and the Executive Director.
It’s a shared responsibility because the Executive Director brings organizational context, insight into emerging issues, the opportunities that are popping up, the risks to be aware of and the perspective of the staff. All things that the Board Chair does not see because they are not working in the organization on a daily basis.
On the other hand, the Board Chair brings the governance perspective, understanding of board dynamics, a focus on strategic priorities, questions that only the board can address and awareness of where the board needs development. These are important perspectives that the Exec won’t necessarily be attuned to as they are working hard to run the organization.
In partnership they ask: “What does this board need to spend its time doing?”
High performing boards often schedule a standing agenda-planning conversation between the ED and Board Chair a couple weeks prior to the board meeting. Depending on the organization’s structure, the Board Secretary may also be part of this conversation, particularly when they are responsible for board communications and meeting materials.
Leave Room for the Unexpected—Without Becoming Reactive
Intentional doesn’t mean rigid. Anyone who has worked in the nonprofit sector for any period of time knows that even with the best laid plans, something unexpected will inevitably pop up. Things like:
- A major funding opportunity
- Leadership transition
- Community crisis
- Regulatory change
- Significant financial development
- Unexpected partnership opportunity
are important and need to be addressed. A good agenda has enough structure to keep the board focused and enough flexibility to respond to something important.
With a reactive board everything urgent gets onto the agenda.
Intentional boards don’t ignore urgent issues. They put urgency in context and determine whether the issue is actually important enough to displace something else.
The “Agenda Test”
Before finalizing an agenda, ask yourself these eight questions:
- Why are we meeting?
- What does the board need to accomplish?
- Which items require board-level thinking or decision-making?
- What can be handled through the consent agenda or written communication?
- Where are we creating space for strategic conversation?
- What questions do we want board members wrestling with?
- Are we spending the most time on our most important priorities?
- What do we want members to leave the meeting understanding, deciding, or doing?
To help you stay focused on creating effective board meetings, I’ve developed this High-Performing Board Agenda Checklist for you. But here’s the thing: It’s easy to create a good-looking agenda. The real test is whether the agenda reflects how your board actually spends its time.
Challenge
If after reading this, you believe your organization’s board agendas might be saying a lot about the focus of your board, I have a Three-Minute Challenge for you. Pull out your last three board agendas, then ask:
- Look Backward: How much time was spent reporting on what already happened?
- Look Forward: How much time was spent thinking about what comes next?
- Count the Talking: How much time did board members spend receiving information?
- Count the Thinking: How much time did they spend thinking, questioning, deciding, and shaping the future?
If you discover that most of your board’s time is spent looking backward and receiving information, don’t beat yourself up. That’s incredibly common. But now you have something to work with.
Your board’s time is one of its most valuable resources. Don’t use it simply to get through the agenda. Design the agenda so your board can do the work only a board can do: govern well, think strategically, make thoughtful decisions, open doors, and help move the mission forward.
The next time you look at your board agenda, don’t just ask, “What are we talking about?” Ask, “Is this the best use of this board’s time?”
Email me at Kim@Athena-CoCo.com, or schedule a Discovery Call if you would like to discuss shifting your board meetings from “sit-n-gets” to strategic drivers for the important work of your agency.
Kim is a mom, lover of being active and the outdoors, and helper of nonprofit leaders.
kim@athena-coco.com
