By J. Patrick Traynor

With Giving Hearts Day 2025 now in the rearview mirror, you’ve hopefully taken some time to reflect on what went well this year and where you’d like to make some improvements for next year.

One area that many organizations report wanting to improve is how they engage their board both for GHD and year-round. Spring is a time of optimism and new beginnings, and we hope that extends to the way you approach your board this year.

This is a great time of year to think more deeply about what you can do to improve your board-engagement efforts and also to consider what type of individuals you want serving on your board in the first place. Your charity could have the boldest vision imaginable and a bulletproof plan to achieve it, but if you don’t have a board full of enthusiastic, supportive directors, you’ll be hard-pressed to bring it to fruition. To put it more plainly, you need to get “the right butts in the right seats.”

One of the best ways to ensure this happens is simple but often overlooked: a board job description.

A board job description lays out clear expectations for a High Impact Board member and can be an invaluable tool as you consider who you want around the table. For those of you currently looking to fill vacant board spots or expand the number of directors on your board, a job description can (and should) be used in the recruitment and orientation of new board members.

A High Impact Board job description can also be used to regularly reframe the focus of board meetings from one of incremental improvement to one of exponential impact. Above all, the expectation to think bigger and aim higher should be clearly articulated in the job description of a High Impact Board member.

Free Resources

Instructions: If you’ve never created an HIB job description before or are looking to update an existing one, we’d recommend checking out this free resource below. If you prefer, you can also just use this one for your own organization.

High Impact Board Job Description

Instructions: Another way to make sure you’re attracting the right kind of board candidates is to have potential directors fill out a short application or questionnaire like the one below. This is an example that Soul Solutions Recovery Center in Fargo recently used as they sought to fill board vacancies.

Potential Board Member Application