The Importance of Individual Meetings

Building strong relationships with your board members is a must. Helping them to understand their responsibilities and guiding them to meet them is integral to this relationship.

Besides your regular board meetings, we recommend that the Board Chair schedule two individual meetings each year with each board member. Those meetings play specific roles in helping them to build personal commitments and goals for their work with you and then ensuring they meet them.

Meeting 1: Held at the start of your fiscal year, during this meeting, you’ll set personal goals with each board meeting. You can also review their past year of participation and engagement with them and analyze what went well and what they anticipate needing support on in the coming year.

Meeting 2: Held mid-way through the year, you’ll want to check in to confirm they are on target to meet their personal goals. If you determine they need assistance or further follow-up, you may find additional meetings are necessary to ensure that they meet the commitments they made at the start of the year.

Preparation:

• Review board member’s background, contributions, and previous involvement

• Share your checklist with each board member in advance, so they know what to expect and feel prepared to set goals during your time together.

• Remember, your board members should already be up to date on the organization’s needs, successes, opportunities and challenges. Do not use this time to talk about the organization. These meetings are meant to focus on the individual member’s role. 

• If the member wants to talk about specific ideas for the organization, set up a separate time to do that, so you can stay on track in this meeting and ensure that your time together results in determining their own commitments.