Future-proof your public board with the right development
With our communities and schools changing at a rapid pace, you may feel uncertain about how best to set up your municipal council or school board to stay aligned, focused and future-ready.
The new Diligent webinar, Futureproof your board with essential skills, brings together a panel of civic experts to discuss setting your board or council up for success. Diligent’s Merritt Brooks is joined by three experts across the fields of public education and local government.
Watch the full 45-minute discussion here, and read on for some of the highlights.
Be clear on procedures
Dr. Audrey Young, Member, Texas State Board of Education: “It’s important to ensure that you understand the laws, rules and regulations under which you function. Ensure your board’s operating procedures documentation is always there. You might have something that happens in the future, and you may need to refer to something that happened in the past. It’s important with futureproofing to ensure that you have that backup data to go along with it as well.“
Alice Black, Executive Assistant to the Board of Education and Superintendent, Aspen School District: “We've established some governance operational norms that we have all agreed to as a team. Once we put these operational norms in place, it has been a game changer for the way we communicate with our board and the way they communicate with us and, more importantly, our staff and our constituents. It streamlined our operations and made it very clear about, for example, expecting a weekly communication from our superintendent.”
Having the entire board and staff on the same page, with the same information, is critical to keeping the board or council’s work flowing forward smoothly. Ensure your policies and procedures are up-to-date and shared across every potential user. Also, build regular training around them into your annual schedule. Store documentation in your board management solution to make it readily available to the whole team.
Encourage community participation
Stephen Powell, Assistant City Administrator, Leawood, Kansas: “Part of open and honest governance is encouraging citizen participation, being responsive to our constituencies and really listening to people with different viewpoints. That does a lot in building trust and transparency with as many people as you can. It's also important to focus on storytelling and explaining to people why you're making the decisions you're making and doing it using language that the layperson can understand.
“We have been really successful with our resident satisfaction survey that we do every two years. We use that data in almost every decision that we make as an organization. All of the results from the survey trickle down into our strategic plan and all of the projects that feed into that strategic plan.”
Encouraging citizens, community members, business members, parents and other stakeholders to participate is an important strategy for public board success. It shows the board or council is being transparent, gets valuable input from these audiences and makes certain the board is on the right path. Livestreaming meetings is an important way to ensure all community members can participate. Look for a board management solution with built-in streaming capabilities.
Encourage future member development
Alice Black: “In a school environment, we have school accountability committees and district accountability committees. We try to engage and have a lot of representation in those committees. Then we nurture people who are engaged in these committees and who express an interest in doing more, and we eventually recruit them for our board of education. It's almost like a little prep academy.”
Dr. Young: “It’s important that boards are open for people to come and see how they work and answer questions for people who might be interested in being part of a board, as well as helping prepare them in advance for the first board meeting or even the second or sixth. Some of those questions that they may have, the feelings that they may be feeling can be shared, can be worked through prior to being in an open public forum. That's not really the place where you want anybody to be experiencing a steep learning curve.”
Stephen Powell: “I also think once you get a new person and you publish your first agenda, maybe your first couple of months of agendas, call them and walk through what's on the agenda and what the voting requirements are and really invest that one-on-one time with your new folks so that they're comfortable before they take their seat to start voting on issues. That shows that you really care not only about them as part of your board, but it also just shows that you want them to be successful.”
Continuity of service is a concern for every local government group — and should be part of the board cheat sheet. Take a step beyond encouraging community participation by having a strategy to identify and encourage potential board or council members. Once they’re on board, make the honeymoon period a positive one by putting extra effort into answering questions. Having materials available through your board management solution demystifies service for potential and new members as well as active candidates.
Build a good online strategy
Stephen Powell: “Making sure our websites are up to date, have current information and it’s easy to find stuff. We use a web tool that, every quarter, shows us our top searches, and we put that information front and center. We just launched a brand new website last year, and that's made it so much easier for us to get information out to the public. Before it was an IT project, and now it's a communications department project. So I think making sure that whoever is controlling your website is the right person or the right department so that you can have more information pushed out more quickly.”
Your website is the portal to offer transparent access to agendas, minutes and documents supporting decision-making. It also ensures you are complying with open meeting laws and accessibility legislation. If there are hurdles to fast and accurate publishing, it may be time to take a look at your processes. Your board management solution should offer quick publishing of meeting materials as well as policies and policy updates.
Use the right tools
Alice Black: “When I build an agenda, it automatically generates the minutes, so it's basically full, fool proof and error-proof, ensuring that as things change — because we all know it happens — everything is recorded. It tracks our voting, the minutes are generated and the approval is seamless. Then we can send it to our board members electronically to review. One of my favorite features is that all of this gets translated into a public site that is available to our community to see. And it’svery easy to navigate.”
Dr. Young: “We need to keep up with what the students are doing and what the teachers are utilizing in the classroom. Soit’s a huge help to have everything digital and available to us to scroll through. You’re not flipping pages anymore. You can still make your notes digitally as well. It’s great for transparency, and it allows everyone to have access to the information that you’ve been provided.”
Stephen Powell: “We tracked our costs — how many pieces of paper we printed, how much time did it take to print 15 packets, how many miles did a police officer have to drive around our city delivering them. So we put a cost to it, and that won over the skeptics. When you compare the time it takes us to generate a digital packet versus the time it takes us to print 15 packets, that time savings is money, and it’s freed up hours per week to focus on other services.”
If your team finds itself struggling to keep up with the work, you may be using outdated tools. Ensure you have a supported, full-featured board management solution like Diligent Community to support all the board’s or council’s activity.
Alice Black sums up a smart approach: “I would say embrace change. I know not many people like change, but it’s not gonna go away. Technology is evolving at a crazy pace, so embrace it. There are so many incredible tools out there that make our lives easier.”
Want more tips and insights from Diligent’s experts? Watch the full webinar.
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