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How charity can begin at work
21 March 2010
Boardmatch Ireland gets professional expertise on the boards of voluntary organisations. Catherine O’Mahony reports.
Not-for-profit organisations are in urgent need of professional skills at board level with marketing emerging as a key weakness in most voluntary groups.
This is the view of Kieran Loughran, the founder and chairman of a charity organisation called Boardmatch Ireland, which is matching up professionals keen to donate their time and expertise to charities in need of external support. ‘‘I can speak from first-hand experience here," said Loughran. who also runs Headway, a voluntary group for people with brain injuries. ‘‘We are all caught in a perfect storm here.
‘‘Large organisations that might want to support your charity as part of their corporate social responsibility programme are going to want something in return for that. You’ll need to have some kind of communications plan, some kind of marketing plan, people to put forward to promote your cause. People have to know who you are and what you are about.Otherwise you will have the haves and the have-nots of the charity world.
‘‘So marketing is a significant issue for most voluntary organisations, even if they don’t know it themselves." Loughran is keen to sign up more professionals to the Boardmatch initiative which has matched more than 300 individuals to the boards of voluntary organisations since it started in 2005. It already has 1,000 people on its books, and more than 500 organisations who need someone with a particular expertise to join their boards.
There would be more matches, Loughran said, but for the complexity and time-lag involved in appointing new board members to charities. Still, assuming that most boards meet 12 times a year, and that board meetings require at least three hours of preparation and participation, these 300 people are providing 100,000 hours of free service to the voluntary sector each year.
Skills that are in most demand from not-for-profit groups range from marketing to legal skills and strategic planning experience. ‘‘There’s a crucial difference between the origin and evolution of a not-for-profit organisation and that of a for-profit one," he said. ‘‘With a for profit company, you start out with everything in place, your financing, your board, your strategy, and then you may well go on and make a mess of it.
‘‘With a not-for-profit company, you start with a group of like-minded individuals with a passion for some particular interest. You don’t have a 20-year strategic plan.To get money to do anything, you need to form a company.This is the starting point for very many voluntary organisations." Boardmatch evolved after Loughran, a former banker who was operating as a consultant, was asked by Roger Acton of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants to help sort out management issues among the 100-plus organisations that belonged to the Disability Federation of Ireland. The problems he found were sometimes so complex that they required major structural change within organisations.
‘‘When people are not even aware of their own weaknesses, it is very difficult to remedy them," he said. He and Acton came across a Boardmatch group operating in Toronto and travelled to Canada to check it out. On returning, they decided to operate a similar system here and secured backing for the venture from a number of high-profile individuals, including Mary Davis of Special Olympics Ireland. They then set up the Boardmatch website and encouraged organisations and individuals to participate.
Interested individuals can use the site to search for suitable board positions according to their own personal interests (sport, arts or disability) and by location.They then submit their CVs to the site to be assessed by the organisations. Previous board experience is not required; professional expertise is. ‘‘If you are a professional who wants to volunteer, how do you go about it?" asked Loughran. ‘‘Make a phone call? Write an e-mail? To whom? We offer a route for professionals to volunteer their services in a way that makes sense for them."
Boardmatch is partly funded by the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht affairs and partly by the corporate sector, with backers including KPMG, Accenture and State Street Bank. Many large corporate organisations are keen to encourage their own employees to join the boards of voluntary organisations, Loughran said.
‘‘They have taken a very strategic view of it: if you are an aspiring executive, where do you get broader experience of business, of boardrooms? It makes a lot of professional sense to join a board." Loughran said he believed many voluntary organisations, despite their management deficits, were in fact better managed than regular businesses.
NGOs, he said, were the most trusted organisations in Ireland (according to the Edelman Trust Barometer). Maintaining this position was a big responsibility for these organisations, and required excellent professional standards.
‘‘Their aim is to do something for people and, while their infrastructure may show up weaknesses, their motivation is pure," he said.
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