Making the Case for Board Education

Moving beyond the fiduciary in order to maximize 'value of trustees'

The Brief Case 📚→💼→📈→📊

Ideally, you have a list, spreadsheet, or some other table that outlines the professional backgrounds and talents of your trustees (and if you do not have one, create one — it is worth the effort).

Take a look at it, focusing on one trustee at a time. Some of them may work in law and may also bring additional expertise in, say, public relations or zoning or negotiations. Or they work in finance or education or real estate and also serve on other nonprofit boards. Some of them bring a historical perspective to your school or to your town. Some of them are quants (analytical) or artists (creative) or both.

Once you have a sense of the whole, take out a pad and list an approximate hourly value for each trustee’s time. Then, add up all of those numbers and multiply the total by 20, a conservative estimate of the number of hours each trustee spends working for your school each year. Let’s call that number your VOT (Value of Trustees).

There are two ways to look at your VOT. One way is with the kind of gratitude that leads you to treat each meeting, each interaction with trustees, as a high value experience that better be better than good. The other way is through the lens of compound interest. Though your VOT is not something you pay for out of your operating budget (thank goodness for most of us!), it is something you can treat like an investment that, over time, can lead to outsized returns for your school.

The number one way to invest in your trustees, and to compound the interest of your VOT each year, is to ensure that they are learning in ways that help them to be increasingly effective trustees for your school. We are emphasizing the obvious here so that it is not taken for granted. Generic trustee education has its place on every board; ideally, though, trustees are also — and increasingly — educated to be on-mission and to understand and support the school at which they serve.  

📚 The Learning Case for Board Education

Trustees enter board spaces in all kinds of ways. Some of them are stepping off a train or out of car, straight from work. Others have more time and flexibility and likely spend time on projects or with other boards that interest them. Some of them are doing some of the above and also leading the life of a busy partner, parent, caregiver, or grandparent.