Is The Name of The Board Important?

Very often, it’s important for an organization to form a new group (in addition to its Board of Directors) that has the responsibility of fundraising and raising friends for the Institution. Long ago, I stopped calling the group a Board of Advisors or the Advisory Board.

Those terms are so overused, they’re trite. More than that, they provide no status to the men and women you wish to recruit.

Trish Sanderson poses an excellent question. Trish is Director, Major Gifts at University of Kentucky, Chandler Medical Center

Question: “If you don’t call them an Advisory Board, what do you call them?”

Here’s what I’ve done in the past. In many cases, I formed a Foundation Board. The name somehow has more stature than an Advisory Board. The group, by the way, does not have to be a separate 501(c)3. It can function as if it operates as a committee of the Board of Directors (or Trustees).

In a number of organizations where they have a Board of Directors, I helped the organization form a Board of Trust. (We did not want to call it a Board of Trustees— because that has a totally different meaning.)

What we found in studies we’ve conducted is that the word “Trust” has an extremely positive connotation. And because it is not used in many organizations, it seems to carry a lot of weight.

In one mid-size community where a number of organizations had an Advisory Board— I recommended to our client, the largest hospital in town, they call the new group we just formed— the TRUST. Perhaps it was just unique to this community, and that organization, that everyone loved the term. (And some of the other organizations in the community started changing the name of their Advisory Boards !)

- The Partners