How to Carry Out a Board Skills Audit in 4 Simple Steps

Rising stakeholder expectations. Complex reporting requirements. Cyber risks like never before. New strategic challenges — and opportunities.

How can you make sure that your board is up to the mission, with the right people in the right roles?

We have two words for you: skills audit.

Maybe you do some form of this activity already — perhaps through an informal discussion when a board member retires, or a one-time director self-evaluation that gets stashed away in a file cabinet. But that’s not enough for today’s challenges.

It’s Time to Up Your Game

Recruiting new members is no longer as simple as asking around for someone with a legal, accounting or fundraising background. You need to get more granular, specific and strategic. Does a candidate’s background bring greater diversity to your current group of directors?  Many states have specific requirements for nonprofit board composition.

You need a methodical, proven approach to make sure you’re looking for the right things — skills, demographics, core competencies, connections, digital and cyber expertise — and make sure these criteria line up to your long-term goals. You also need the right tools to keep track of every board member and candidate’s unique profile, so you can more effectively recruit, train, retain and plan for the future.

This checklist is here to help, making it easier than ever to strengthen your board and give stakeholders confidence.

Getting Started with a Board Skills Audit

An effective skills audit boils down to four steps:

• Identify what you’re looking for, with an eye on today and tomorrow
• See what you’re working through with evaluations and assessments
• Find the gaps with a skills matrix
• Mind the gaps through targeted training and recruiting

Download our guide to conducting a board skills audit, which will help you work through this process. 

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Step One: Identify What You’re Looking For

Create your wishlist for a dynamic, diverse, agile, future-focused, ready-for-anything board. You’ll use it to evaluate both current board members and prospective candidates.

Start with general criteria that apply across organisations and industries:

• Basic credentials and competencies, such as past experience working with budgets or working in a governance role
• Demographic attributes and backgrounds, for contributing to board diversity
• Leadership acumen, from setting strategy to performing governance and oversight
• Ability to uphold a board member’s fiduciary responsibilities, which include:
  • Managing resources responsibly (duty of care)
  • Making decisions that are best for the organisation (duty of loyalty)
  • Complying with all bylaws and regulations (duty of obedience)

Now get specific to your organisation. What challenges and opportunities lie ahead in terms of:

• Finance
• Operations
• Risk management
• Regulations and laws
• Fundraising
• The people you serve and your mission

What specific skills will you need on your board in order to navigate these opportunities and challenges?

With your ideal state defined in terms of skills and attributes, now it’s time to see how your board’s status quo stacks up.

Step Two: See What You’re Working With

Now it’s time to assess your current board. Here you have a few options:

• Self-evaluation of the entire board
• Self-evaluation of each board member
• An evaluation by a professional third party

Which should you choose? Governance surveys indicate that the vast majority of boards prefer to keep this task in-house with self-evaluations or evaluations by peers.

Although self-evaluations are preferred by most, there’s a risk that some board members won’t be entirely honest with themselves. Others might be intimidated by a self-assessment. This is yet another reason to conduct skills assessments more often — board members get more practice and are more likely to buy into the process.

Step 3: Identify Gaps

Now it’s time to bring your current state and ideal state together into a matrix. The good news: You won’t need futuristic sci-fi technology to bring this to life. Your board management software will help you do the job.

Simply fill out the top row with the names of current and prospective board members. Then fill out the most leftward column with all the relevant skills, competencies and demographics that you need. Include the categories that best fit your needs.

We have included a handy example of a board skills matrix illustrating this process with more useful tips in our free Board Skills Audit Guide. Download it now to access the example and tips.

Step Four: Now Mind the Gaps

Now that you know where the gaps are in your board, you’re ready to start addressing them. In this final step, put the knowledge gained in steps 1-3 to work so you can:

• Revisit board and committee roles and responsibilities
• Build your candidate pipeline
• Refine your recruitment process
• Gather training resources and curricula
• Craft or revise your succession plan

You may be thinking: There’s a lot involved in getting to this point — and you’ve got a lot on your plate already. What can you do to make the process easier?

The Right Technology Saves You Time

Fortunately for busy nonprofit leaders like yourself, specialised software is available to streamline and simplify the manual processes of evaluating board skills, so you can identify what’s needed, map it all to strategy and take the next steps.

This includes:

• Digital surveys for self-evaluations and questionnaires. Easy to administer, take and return on time, they keep skills inventories current while ensuring important disclosures (such as conflicts of interest) remain timely and compliant.
• Digital dashboards that provide a consolidated view of agendas, activities, roles, responsibilities and next steps.
• Handy reporting that makes it easy to share progress with executive leaders, regulatory authorities, donors, stakeholders and more.
• A one-stop library that puts everything new members need in one place for anytime, anywhere access: policies, minutes, matrices, training materials and more.

Whatever tools you use, make security a top priority to keep hackers out, restrict sensitive conversations restricted to those who need to know, and protect personal data.

With thoughtfully considered steps, a strategic approach and the right tools, keeping your board’s skillset fresh is easier than you think. But don’t take our word for it. See for yourself by booking a demo to learn more.