Social Media in the Board Room

Photo by Beth

A few months ago,  I wrote about a report from Charlene Li that discovered that deep engagement with social media correlates with financial performance.  The report suggests that in order to scale this engagement, social media needs to be part of everyone's job, making the argument that a few minutes each day spent by every employee adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.

In order to scale, nonprofits will need to develop a social media policy as well as operational guidelines.   The Red Cross is one of the better nonprofit examples.  Their handbook provides a good blueprint for staff, affiliates and volunteer to serve as ambassadors for the organization on social networks. 

If we're talking about scaling engagement of a nonprofit by allowing all staff and volunteers to participate, why should the board be exempt?  And let's take that a step further, why not use social media as part of the governing process.  

Networked governance or peer-to-peer governance has worked well in the development of open source software projects.  (You can learn more about that in a new book from O'Reilly, called "The Art of Community:  Building the New Age of Participation" by Jono Bacon.

Social media is blurring boundaries for all functions within an organization, and eventually it will impact governance.  Networked governance was of one of the chapters in the book, The Networked Nonprofit, that Allison Fine and I have been working on. It was difficult to write because live tweeting their board meeting minutes or nominating committees looking for a slate of officers on LinkedIN or getting feedback for strategic plans isn't necessarily a common practice in our sector. Sounds like science fiction doesn't it?

I think you have to crawl before you fly.  So, maybe the first thing you would do is education and training, maybe a live demo showing how social media works and why it is important.   The OnLine blog published an intriguing post called "Social Media and Accountability" where Zachary Wales imagined a couple examples where social media might be injected into governance of a nonprofit.

How can boards effectively incorporate the use of the social networks and social media to govern?

Comments

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your post is helpful and informative

[Zach Wales]

Thanks for the insightful post, Beth.

On Monday I had a thought provoking discussion on this subject with Outi Flynn over at at BoardSource.org. She reminded me of the sober reality that "if you know one board, you know one board." In other words, you can't reap the benefits of peer-to-peer, social media-powered board accountability overnight. Each board is its own culture, and with gradual baby steps, you have to make social media a part of that culture. A great litmus test is the paperless (online) board meeting -- it's efficient, progressive and innocuously pre-social media. From there (or after several of those), you can introduce more sophisticated, interactive systems.

[Bigguyd]

Collaboration and feedback from investors are the two easiest ways to use SM in the board room.

[Bill Rice]

Beth,

You are so right on. We are helping several companies "socialize" themselves online and it is always a bad assumption that everyone even knows what you are talking about. At first we would rush in with policy and how-tos. Then we realized executives didn't even know what this was (typically). As a result, a feeling of ignorance and/or mythology around social media made them reject it out of hand.

"Start with a demo"--this was the key to changing the tide.

[Hispanic Media buying]

Social media greatly affects a big part of the business. I'm sure social media will be optimized for that.

-Daniel

[Melinda Lewis]

I would just add that, of course, a nonprofit Board has to WANT to be transparent and accountable--in other words, the tools are only that, tools, and we have a challenge, within the sector, to get Boards to adequately buy in to the ideas of Board transparency and accountability, as goods, so that then we have, I think, the 'easier lift' in getting them to adopt some tools that will take them towards what they agree is a valid goal.

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A great litmus test is the paperless (online) board meeting -- it's efficient, progressive and innocuously pre-social media.