Our board assessment service utilizes the BoardSource Self-Assessment (BSA) tool, which is designed to educate and provide insights on your board’s governance performance. It will enable your board to operate at the highest and best use of its collective capacity, as well as offer a candid look at where your board is today. A BSA will examine various board processes such as nomination, recruitment, the Board CEO/Executive Director relationship, board participation, and overall health. This comprehensive tool provides a detailed overview of your board’s performance.
The board assessment measures your board’s performance against recognized roles and responsibilities as defined by BoardSource. The four areas measured include setting direction, ensuring resources, providing organization oversight, and board structure and operations.
Board Assessment Factors
1. Set Direction
One of the board’s primary roles is to set direction and outline strategies for achieving goals. Key elements to consider when setting direction are your organization’s mission, vision, and values. Effective and strategic board members take responsibility for identifying the issues that must be addressed to serve the organization’s mission, vision, and values in the years ahead. Board members should utilize their unique talents and experience to identify these issues and to inform the organization’s understanding of them.
2. Ensure Resources
Your organization, like all nonprofits, requires a competent board, adequate financial resources, and a positive public image to accomplish its mission.
3. Provide Oversight
Oversight involves both authority and accountability. However, in the board’s oversight role, the emphasis is on accountability — on making sure the organization’s assets are safeguarded and used responsibly and effectively to implement the mission. The board provides oversight not only of the finances and programs, but also of the organization’s legal and moral conduct. Furthermore, the board delegates authority to the chief executive, who is therefore accountable to the board. Thus, the board’s oversight role also includes supervising, providing feedback to, and supporting its chief executive. As fiduciaries and stewards of public trust, board members must always act for the good of the organization, rather than for the benefit of themselves.
4. Board Structure and Operations
Every board needs structure — rules, guidelines, boundaries. A meeting is where the board makes and reviews policy, sets direction for the organization, defines and follows its own ethical guidelines, oversees the operations, and addresses its own well-being.
Contact Us for Your Board Assessment
Exceptional boards are a strategic asset to be leveraged by the organization. They add significant value and make a discernible difference in the organization’s advance on mission. We use the BoardSource Board Assessment, a user-friendly online assessment tool that is widely respected and utilized across the nonprofit sector, as a tool to guide your board on the path to exceptional performance.