Customer Reviews

How Are We Doing?: A 1-hour Guide To Evaluating Your Performance As A Nonprofit Board

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This book will be an invaluable resource for busy Board members who want to focus their efforts on both the practicalities of their job as well as the greater vision which inspired them to volunteer in the first place. The key to this book is in the sub-title - A 1-Hour Guide to Evaluating your Performance as a Nonprofit Board. It is a rare find - simple, straightforward and designed for busy people. Each chapter is just a few pages long and ends with questions for the reader and/or Board collectively to answer. These questions are then summarized at the end in an Evaluation Survey. Sections include Making Our Community Better, Becoming Good Stewards and Building a Great Board. In an easy format to carry with you, it will surely become a staple for many Board meetings.

This is a lot of wisdom in a small space, an easy to read-and-understand approach to determining if a non-profit board is doing what it should be doing. Each brief chapter focuses on one idea, and leaves no doubt in a reader's mind about how to determine what would work best for their organization. I am already using that one sentence, "It's negligent to keep investing money in programs without proof they make a difference," as part of my discussions with clients. This is a book I can, and will, recommend to clients and colleagues, secure in the knowledge that they will thank me for the recommendation.

We purchased copies of this book for all of our board members after a consultant recommended it and I reviewed it. This is a very quick read (less than an hour), but the book is filled with great passages about the way a good board should function. Thought-provoking questions end each chapter. If you have a non-profit with a board, or you are on such as board, BUY THIS BOOK!

Gayle Gifford must have been an inquisitive child, because she asks a lot of questions. Really good questions -- the kind that ought to have obvious answers, but then you think about them and realize the answers are more complex, and more important, than you first imagined. Her new book, How Are We Doing?, includes 34 questions that all nonprofit boards should be asking themselves. Questions like, "Do we appreciate our directors for what they do?" and "Are we prepared to respond to a changing world?"

Each of these topics could fill an entire book -- and several have -- but none is this concise: you can read the entire book in an hour. If you serve on a nonprofit board and you're unclear about your role or your impact, read this one -- it might be the most productive hour you spend on board governance issues.

I loved this book. It's more than a book about evaluating performance... it's a great how-to for creating a board of any organization's dreams. Broken down into short chapters, it's well written and easy to read. The ideas contained in this small book are BIG and important - definitely on the cutting-edge as related to where the field is going.