EP3 Tips for Rotating Boards

People volunteer for different reasons. After doing this for more than 25 years, Susan Finch has seen a lot of motivators. One is the need make their mark to be seen, heard, to feel important. That can still work for an organization, but without some guidelines and roadblocks in place, it could result in a website going down, social media debacles, embarrassment, loss of sponsors and volunteers. Tune in with Nina Hambleton and Susan as they go over some simple, helpful tips to prevent this and still allow your incoming volunteers and board to make their mark in the most positive way.

I want to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about the nature of nonprofits and we're well-meaning volunteers can kind of botch stuff up. This is more coming from our experience, what I've experienced with my clients, because in addition to running, Binky Patrol, I have a marketing firm, Susan Finch Solutions that takes care of all online pieces for companies, including their website, social media domains, podcasts, and more. And I've seen a lot of organizations have their online presence, social media websites, everything gets botched up because of well-meaning volunteers, interns, or those wanting to make their mark. You know, the ones at the ego, it's kind of the nature of nonprofits and business organizations. They have a rotating board of directors and officers, and many times, well-meaning volunteers and board members want to help and change things.

They want to bring what is familiar to them and make changes to create their mark. And then they leave the next year and in their awake as a mishmash of methods code to that incoming volunteers and board members have to detangle undue redo, fix rebuild.

Here are a few suggestions to keep this debacle from happening in your organization. It's never too late to do this. If you don't have it in place yet, start now document this stuff and create a guide to onboard volunteers and board members, two different guides. And this can include a style guide. What fonts do we use? What colors here's our logo. These are the right logos. Don't please don't do this. Please don't say these words, please do this. And an explanation of the tools used for the website.

If it's WordPress, that would mean plugins. Why you use it, the theme that you use, and that you don't want people changing those. And the easiest way to do that is to not give them access, to be able to make those changes. You can't just make them all admins and let them do everything. Make them contributors. If they want the bigger stuff done, they can send you a request or something. Same with social media. You don't want them to be able to invite all their friends or whoever they want to, to be able to contribute to your stuff and give them access, limit it with all your marketing material, same thing we use Drive, you know, a nice central location for all of our templates that we use. And so we allow people to use those because drive like it has versioning, which is super cool.

So if somebody breaks something or botches it up, I can go back a couple times to where it wasn't broken. And we limit admin access to most things I know for the Binky Patrol website, it's not in WordPress yet. It's in, some other proprietary content management system and there are only three super admins that can make big changes. Everybody else is a user and they are locked down to only be able to edit their pages, and their stuff. And it's worked out really well and it makes it easy too. Then we can lock people out, remove them, delete them, and update them whenever we need to.

Another thing is passwords, I know it's tempting to make one sheet and say, here's how you get into everything. Be careful who you share that with. Be careful who has access, and what the sharing rights are. Can anybody with the link get to it, or only those invited? Can those invited invite other people? Lock it down, and make sure it's safe and