Let’s be honest. It’s in your best interests for your board to like you. Without going into why, that means it’s also in your best interests to consistently deliver effective and well-received presentations to your nonprofit board.
You want your presentations to do a number of things:
- Communicate important information
- Inspire confidence
- Provide context and detail that helps them make better decisions
- Be interesting
- Keep moving and not drag the pace
When your nonprofit board presentations can hit these notes at every meeting, your board will look forward to hearing from you, have a favorable impression of you, and see you as an essential and valuable part of the organization. You are an asset, a strength, an effective partner.
How do you deliver nonprofit board presentations that shine? Here are ten tips.
Know Your Audience
Some nonprofit boards experience a lot of turnover. Others keep most of their members active for several years. The more time you spend with them, the more you’ll get to know their personalities, interests, strengths, weaknesses, and quirks.
But even if it’s your first time presenting to the entire board, or if there are new people who recently joined it, it’s worth it to put some effort into researching them before the meeting.
Go on LinkedIn and see what they say about themselves. Talk to other board members you already know, or the CEO, or someone else who knows them and may have played a role in bringing them on.
The more you know before the meeting, the more effectively you’ll connect with them.
Specify Objectives
Figure out the key item or items you want to communicate, the goals you want to achieve, and why. Most board presentations will not be very long. In ten minutes, you can only do a really great job communicating a handful of ideas, points, and concepts. Like, two or three. Or one.
Do you want to update them about a recent campaign or event? Share new data about a particular
Fundraising metric? Get their input on a problem you’re facing?
Whatever it is, make sure it’s clear in your mind so you know what information you’ll need to share, and what to leave out. You can’t talk about everything.
Plus, if you know your main goals, you can keep the board from chasing rabbit trails and getting stuck on side issues. Redirect them back to the main goal of the meeting.
Prioritize Key Points
With your one or two objectives in hand, you can begin planning out your key points in order for the board to hear what they need to learn. All your points will serve the objectives they are supporting.
If you find yourself getting too far into the weeds, go back to the objective and ask yourself how much of this detail they really need to know. At the end of the meeting, you will ask them to do something. Share whatever you think they need in order to do that, and nothing more.
Use Visual Aids and Data Visualization
You can cover a lot more ground with effective visual aids. If you’re discussing fundraising metrics, creating graphs to help visualize the data makes it much easier for everyone on the board to grasp what you’re discussing.
Yes, creating visuals can take quite a lot of time. And here too, you can get lost in the weeds of trying to make them all look ‘pretty’. A visual aid is never really ‘finished’, right?
The Fundraising Report Card generates all the graphs you’ll need for an array of the most valuable and informative fundraising metrics. So if you’re talking about metrics at your board meetings (which you should be…), our platform offers an extremely valuable and time-saving tool to aid in your board presentation planning. You can get graphs in seconds that could take you hours to create on your own.
Prepare an Executive Summary
This is internal language. Don’t use the phrase ‘executive summary’ in your actual presentation. That’s lawyer talk. They get enough of that elsewhere.
But it’s helpful to open the presentation with a clear expression of the main topic or topics you want to focus on. Include a quick run-through of the key points you’ll be using to help discuss that topic. And if you’ll be asking the board to do something at the end, you can hint at that here too.
The approach described here has been described elsewhere as a three-part plan:
- Tell them what you’re going to tell them
- Tell them
- Tell them what you told them
For example, suppose you want to get their opinion on whether to do a fundraising event this year or not. To help them decide this, you might bring in fundraising metric data for donor acquisition, donor retention, average donation amounts, and revenue growth data.
In your opening summary, you might say:
“Today I’d like to get your thoughts on if we should do the spring gala again this year, or do something else instead and perhaps return to this next year. To help you make an informed decision, I’ll be showing you graphs of some of our metrics over the last few years so you can see how previous events have affected our growth. I’ll share my opinion, and then we can have a guided discussion where you can express your thoughts.”
That’s it. That’s your opening summary. Notice it doesn’t even name the metrics you’ll be showing them. Because at this point, it doesn’t matter. The summary fixates on the goal you want to achieve, what you need from them if anything, and broadly speaking, how you’re going to get there.
Be Brief and Amazing
If you’re concise, the board will feel like you’ve polished this and really know your stuff. With rich depth of detail, you can still practice brevity by sticking to the meat, and not over-explaining things or getting off topic. Three points discussed in depth is better than ten points just lightly touched, even if both presentations are the same length.
Practice your presentation out loud. Hone it down. Get clear about your visuals and the aspects you will focus on from each one. And time yourself.
And remember, this isn’t something to stress about. Your job is not at stake here (we hope!). It’s just one presentation. But it matters, and you want every part of it to have value for your nonprofit board.
Anticipate Questions
If you find yourself having a tough time cutting your presentation down to a good amount of time, one way to figure out what to remove is to consider what questions your board will probably ask.
You may decide to cut something out of the talk, knowing they’ll ask about it anyway, and you can bring that stuff up during the discussion phase.
Beyond that, there are other questions you can probably count on people asking. If you do well in the first board presentation tip in this list and know your audience, you may even have a fair idea of who will ask which questions.
So, have visuals and other information on hand you suspect might come up, even if you aren’t including it in the presentation. And, look at your graphs. You are focusing on particular aspects of them. But what might someone else ask? The more you can anticipate their questions, the better prepared you’ll be and the more knowledgeable you will come off.
Give a Call to Action
We mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating. In most presentations, it’s good to give the board something to do. The reason is because it will help them remember your presentation since they have to come back to it in order to complete the task you’re giving them.
Now, the call to action might take place right in the meeting, such as the previous example. In other cases, you might ask them to spend time studying a topic and get back to you with a decision or opinion by a certain date. You might ask them to call someone. You might give different board members different calls to action.
However the details work out, do your best to give them something to do.
If your presentation feels like it’s mostly just helpful information, and you struggle coming up with a call to action, you can still find something for them to do. It might be that you’ll follow up in a week and ask if they have had any additional thoughts.
Or, if this seems like a problem, it could mean your presentation needs a new objective because your current one isn’t strong enough or relevant enough for your board.
Provide Supporting Materials
In some cases, it will be extra helpful to send out supporting materials in advance of the meeting. Send out a couple of your graphs a week beforehand and ask them to study them and come prepared to discuss.
At the meeting, you’ll still use those same graphs as part of your presentation. But now it won’t be the first time the board members have seen this, so you’ll have fewer of the “ooh that’s interesting” kinds of comments, and can focus more on the substance.
You may bring other supporting materials too such as printed materials summarizing key information or explaining more about your call to action.
Follow-Up
Last, make sure and follow up. Have an email or text planned out. Or have time set aside to call them if that’s a better way to communicate regarding your call to action.
With a planned follow up, your objective and their call to action will be even more focused, because there really is a decision to be made, a task to perform, a question to get answered. And the follow-up ensures it gets done.
Plus, following up lends an air of importance to what you’re doing. You didn’t just make a presentation to sound impressive. This is work, and you are partnering with them in that work to help advance your mission.
Use These Tips with Fundraising Report Card Visuals
Put these ten tips for presenting to nonprofit boards into practice, and you’ll deliver satisfying, informative, helpful presentations that respect everyone’s time and make your meetings feel productive and professional.
And with the Fundraising Report Card tool, you’ll be able to create incredibly clear and relevant graphs for all your most actionable fundraising metrics.
This will be an invaluable and time-saving aid that will take your nonprofit board presentations up to the next level.
It’s simple and easy to use.
