NTEN Change Issue One: March 2011 : Page 7
tion where it’s both accessible and editable, but there’s a bit of a learning curve for board members. A popular solution in the corporate world is to maintain an intranet, or internal website accessible only by staff. Sim-ilarly, you could use your content management system to create one with a secure section for board members, allow-ing them to access and download references and resources. More simply, you could use the free Google Sites to create a board “start page” that members see when they log in, where you post calendar info, email group discussions, links to documents. and other information useful to the board. Meetings and Communications BOOSTING BOARD COLLABORATION one else. Simple conferencing—like that provided by freeconferencecalling.com, or for a fee through many large communications providers—can give voice to a single remote member at an in-person meeting, or unite an entire board virtually. But you can enhance the telephone conference experi-ence with other tools. Let’s say you want to share a presen-tation with board members during a call, or show them financial reports or something else on your PC. You could host the conference call through a service like ReadyTalk, GoToMeeting, WebEx or Yuuguu, which provide audio and let participants share their screens with other participants. Or, take it a step further and video conference people into a board meeting. Skype and Oovoo are free to download and use, but the participant will need to have a web-YOU DON’T cam, microphone and speakers. Both tools are WANT TO SPEND free for basic versions, TOO MUCH OF but the technology is not as reliable as telephones. YOUR TIME— It canalsobehardtouse a number of differ-OR YOUR STAFF’S with ent people—it’s simply difficult to follow more — PLAYING than three or four peo-LIBRARIAN. ple all in different little NTEN: CHANGE · MARCH 2011 · PAGE 7 Meetings take place relatively infrequently, and you want to keep board members active and engaged in the time between. Email remains the gold standard for communica-tion, in many ways. Board members often like email—it fosters ongoing discussions at the participants’ leisure, and it takes little effort on their part to. You can share documents, and with the advent of smartphones, access is virtually uninterrupted. If your board’s bylaws allow for it, members can even cast votes by email. An email discussion can formalize your email conversa-tions a bit, and make it easy for board members to define how often they see emails. These email lists—which can often be created within your existing email tool (like Out-look or Google Apps), or inexpensively through services like Electric Ember’s NPOGroups or CollectiveX—also make it easy to archive and search past discussions. For meetings themselves, don’t overlook the noble tele-phone. It’s still the fastest and easiest way to talk to some-
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