Foundations, 15 min
Before you start building, take 15 minutes to walk through what a great board actually is. It will make every tool in this app more useful.
Learn
Before you recruit anyone
Read this once, then come back to it. Each section is short on purpose. The tools in this workspace assume you have thought about what follows.
A great board gives you three things you cannot manufacture on your own: perspective, backing, and legitimacy. Board members govern to make sure the organization runs well, and ideally they also become your initial chief fundraisers and network builders.
The upside of nonprofit status is the ability to fundraise and expand capacity, and the board is the engine of that. The downside is real too. The board holds legal fiduciary responsibility, and structurally it is the boss of the founder or executive director. Both of those things are true at the same time, and a good leader plans for both.
What this workspace is not
This tool does not rank humans, and it does not produce a hire or reject decision. It structures your thinking and gives you language for hard conversations. It stores nothing on a server, so your work lives in this browser session until you export it. It is not legal counsel, and nothing here replaces advice from your attorney or your accountant.