Board Development for Nonprofits
Aligning you for success, now and in the future.
Impact Starts Here
Helping You Help Others
Achieving true effectiveness in board development for nonprofits can not be accomplished by mimicking for-profit governance practices.
From decades of experience working with organizations nationwide, we understand nonprofits require a tailored approach based on a proven framework built for the 21st century.
That’s why we created the Aligned Influence model. It’s built to align all roles and provide a structure for both young and well-established nonprofit organizations to thrive.
By embracing this model, you’re not just aligning your organization. You’re amplifying your community impact and ensuring your donors’ trust and investments are protected and nurtured.
Ready to redefine governance in your organization? Aligned Influence is here to guide you on the path to success.
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- Tim Foot, CEO/President
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Meaningful Impact
Effective Board Development for Nonprofits
The Difference
Build an Impactful Nonprofit With the Right Approach
A 21st Century Perspective
Guided by an insightful understanding of today's nonprofit challenges, we apply a 21st-century approach to enhance board development. Our focus extends to factors such as culture, size, complexity, and leadership, ensuring your nonprofit achieves optimum performance.
Eliminate Conflict
Conflict between nonprofit leaders and boards is an unfortunate reality, often leading to an unproductive game of power tug-of-war. The Aligned Influence model resolves this struggle, creating a harmonious ecosystem within your organization. This promotes seamless cooperation between executives and boards, ensuring true effectiveness.
Clarity of Roles and Purpose
Aligned Influence’s approach to executive and board development is grounded in finding a shared purpose that defines roles and highlights the dependencies between all members. The role of the board is to direct, protect, and enable, while the role of the executive is to lead, manage, and accomplish.
People-First Model
While it’s true that policies are an important part of your nonprofit’s governance, real challenges are overcome when your leadership team is aligned. Policies are merely tools. Impactful solutions come from the alignment of people and the community voices that define an organization’s very essence.
Empowering Impact
Nonprofit Consulting Results
The Aligned Influence Model will accelerate your journey toward change. Experience a transformative shift in your organization in mere months, not years.
Retention
Your fortified alignment ensures your nonprofit's leadership remains robust and long-lasting.
Fundraising
Help your board members tap into their sphere of influence to advocate, support, and secure funding for your organization.
Community Visibility
Your new alignment allows you to amplify focus and elevate projects for greater community visibility.
Unity
You will experience unity by defining and aligning roles for the board, executive director, and their staff.
Smooth Transitions
Streamline executive searches and transitions when rules are clearly defined.
Nonprofit Governance Roadmap
3 Steps to Alignment
As part of this journey, a skilled consultant is crucial to the process. Utilizing an Aligned Influence facilitator – a guide throughout your alignment – will expedite results, ensuring your nonprofit thrives more efficiently.
Step 1
Assess the current level of alignment within the nonprofit.
Step 2
Craft the policies and calendaring tools that support that alignment.
Step 3
Lock that alignment in place through a calendar of critical activities each year.
Sounds easy right? I encourage you to read more about the theories and structures behind Aligned Influence in our book Aligned Influence: Beyond Governance.
What Church's Are Saying
Testimonials
Kristy Brooks
Jason Mark
Barbara Simonds
Our Clients
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Resources
Why Nonprofit Corporate Governance is Important
Is Your Nonprofit’s Board of Directors Not Ready to Govern?
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Frequently Asked Questions
Being “on the same page” is another way of saying “aligned.” Alignment is foundational to any system, including the organizational system that makes up a board and an executive leadership team.
To achieve alignment, there have to be at least two things to align. 20th century governance focused on one thing: defining the role of the board. 21st century governance, on the other hand, acknowledges that we need to identify unique and alignable roles for both the board and the executive team.
Aligned Influence defines those roles and the consulting practices necessary to “operationalize” governance so that these critically important entities can work together toward their common goals.
Fundraising is a talent that most organizations recruit a development director to lead. It’s also common for board members to be well-connected leaders in the communities in which their organizations serve.
That said, Aligned Influence defines one of the three roles of the board as “enabling”. To enable is to utilize the board members' sphere of influence to advocate for the work of the organization and, through that advocacy, to help make any fundraising efforts of the development director more successful.
Let board members do what they do best and the development director do what they do best.
The Aligned Influence model identifies three roles for the board (to direct, protect and enable) and three roles for the executive (to lead, manage and accomplish).
We often hear executives tell us that they are "burnt out" because they are driving all six roles.
Boards need to do the work to understand what it means to direct, protect and enable, as well as what the organization – and their roles – looks like when these three functions are being carried out correctly.
This is accomplished through intentional organizational development that includes engaging both the board and the executive team.
This is the most common mistake that many organizations make. They acknowledge that organizational development is critically important, but there are more urgent things that demand their attention.
The urgent will always take priority over the important until you decide that the important is too important to put off any longer. In fact, many of the urgent things are driven by not having addressed the important things.
Stop looking for the “quick-fix” and commit to the hard work of good organizational development in aligning the roles of the board and the executive team.
We are so glad that you have reached that golden moment when everything is working well. But what happens when one or two of those board members change next year? Or if you suddenly lose your current executive director?
Times of health are the perfect time to invest in the organizational development that will “lock in” that golden moment regardless of who the executive is or who is on the board. NOW is always the best time to invest in your future.
Elevate Your Nonprofit’s Potential!
Discover effective board development for nonprofits through the Aligned Influence Model and elevate your potential today.