Around half of all UK charities at any one time have a vacancy on their board, according to research by the Governance Hub back in 2006 – that’s 90,000 unfilled trustee roles.
This figure is still quoted everywhere today, suggesting that little progress has been made on filling these vacancies over the past 13 years. In fact, Penny Wilson, chief executive of trustee development charity Getting on Board, believes this estimate is too low: “I would say at least half of charities have one or more vacancies, and we regularly come across charities that have three or four.”
Research by the Charity Commission two years ago found that 92 per cent of trustees are white, nearly two-thirds are male and the average age is 61. Our charities are overwhelmingly governed by older white men.
Research by Getting on Board in 2017 found that three-quarters of charities find it hard to recruit trustees; the Charity Commission study revealed that seven in 10 trustees found their way into the role through an informal process based on personal friendships and connections. Just 5 per cent were appointed after answering an advert.
So while tapping up your mates seems to be charities’ favoured method of recruiting trustees, it’s far from the most effective if we consider how many vacancies there are. This practice also leads to boards being populated with people from the same backgrounds, putting them at risk of groupthink and an absence of challenging debate. So what can the sector do to expand the pool of talent and build boards that are more diverse?
Targets and quotas
One possible answer, according to Inclusive Boards director Samuel Kasumu, is for the sector’s regulator to enforce quotas. He cites the diversity transformation that has recently taken place in the sports sector, after Sport England’s new Code of Sports Governance decreed that every recipient of its funding must have boards comprised of at least one-third women. In just four years, 42 per cent of members of those boards are now women, and LGBTQ people are also much more highly represented than they were, says Kasumu.
But the Charity Commission says it does not have the power to set such targets. Neal Green, strategy and insight manager at the Commission, says that Sport England has a compelling advantage in that it can withhold grants if sporting bodies do not meet its required targets. The Charity Commission has no comparable incentive – for example, it cannot, by law, withhold or withdraw charitable status from charities that do not have diverse boards, and nor would it want to, given the difficulty that many charities have in finding trustees at all. Green adds that rules-based approaches tend to result in “tick-box compliance and tokenism, rather than really understanding why having a range of life experiences and different ways of thinking on your board will benefit your organisation”.
Why does diversity matter?
While we might hope that all charities now acknowledge that filling their board table with elderly, wealthy white men is not desirable, it’s a fair bet that some trustees still need to be convinced of the dangers of homogeneity. If this is a problem at your charity, the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT, formerly known as the Nudge Unit) has some help to hand.
Rony Hacohen, an adviser at BIT, has been working on a project to improve the evidence base and demonstrate the business case for diverse boards in all sectors. She has collated and analysed numerous studies from across the world on how differently composed groups operate, and says all the results show that diverse groups are more rigorous, more likely to consider evidence and more creative, and therefore tend to arrive at better answers.
Hacohen explains: “Imagine a room with a homogenous group who are all used to each other’s views and, indeed, probably hold very similar views. What happens is, if a new piece of information comes their way, they are much less likely to consider it, for a number of reasons. The first is confirmation bias – if everyone has the same view, nobody really has any incentive to go ‘wait, let's genuinely look at this new information’. Some of this is an unconscious process – it happens to all of us without us really knowing. If you have a strong belief in something and I show you some information that contradicts it, your unconscious reaction is to disregard it or not notice it.
“What diversity does is put another person in the room who might have a different view and therefore an incentive to look at this information in a different way and interpret it more accurately. Diverse boards will make decisions that are more evidence-based because they are taking into account more information, and information that contradicts what they are already doing or thinking.”
But even if the benefits of greater diversity are accepted within your charity and there is no objection to seeking trustees from different backgrounds or with different skills, this is seldom easy to achieve. Some charities, for instance, are based in locations where there is a very low proportion of black and minority ethnic (BAME) people, while other charities serve client groups that are overwhelmingly populated by one sex or another. Even charities which don’t have these issues can find it hard to attract interest from outside their usual constituencies. So what’s the answer?
Open, active recruitment
Getting on Board was set up to promote and encourage board-level volunteering in charities, and its research in 2017, which found that three-quarters of charities struggled to find new trustees, prompted it to pilot a project to help them do just that. Trustee Recruitment Pathways worked with 30 small and medium-sized organisations last year to identify and overcome the issues that were hindering their efforts to recruit. Getting on Board particularly wanted to test whether using open recruitment processes would be effective, so they supported participants to devise adverts and to think about where best to post them, how to do interviews and how to induct new trustees.
The pilot programme turned out to be highly successful, with three-quarters of the charities recruiting 60 new trustees between them during the project. In addition, at the start of the programme, only 43 per cent of participating boards felt equipped to deal with the future challenges facing their charity; by the end this had risen to 68 per cent.
Breaking down barriers
Open recruitment is not useful only for smaller charities, either – large charities can use it to improve the diversity of their boards. The first thing to look at, according to Oonagh Smyth, executive director for strategy and influence at Mencap, is what barriers you are putting up to prospective trustees. “You need to look first at what is stopping people from applying for your trustee roles or, if applications are coming through, what is stopping certain people from being successful.
“If you are finding that people aren’t applying, you need to look at where you’re advertising, what’s the perception of your charity and its board, and whether the arrangements of your board meetings are in some way a barrier to the types of people you’re hoping to attract.”
This turned out to be the case for Trust Links, an Essex-based therapeutic gardening charity that took part in Getting on Board’s programme. Its chair, Rick Olver, says that simply changing the time of trustee meetings from 4pm to 6pm made a difference to the type of candidate that applied. Another participating charity is experimenting with one-year terms, to test whether that might encourage more people to apply; another invested in new communications technology so that people could take part in board meetings remotely.
Smyth adds, however, that changing processes is often the easy bit: the tougher barrier to dismantle is unconscious bias. “If you’re getting a representative group coming through at application stage but they're not getting through to appointment, is there something to unpick there around unconscious bias? We're getting training as a whole leadership team around unconscious bias as part of our EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] strategy, and we’re including the board in that as the most senior leaders. This sort of training is useful to unpick some of the assumptions that can be difficult for people to surface and to realise.”
Last year, Mencap needed to recruit three new trustees to replace three whose terms were coming to an end, so it carried out a skills and diversity audit that included looking at the protected characteristics of all of its trustees and highlighting gaps. This process confirmed that the board lacked younger trustees and people from ethnic minorities. The charity then advertised the three roles and successfully recruited one BAME trustee and two younger, female trustees. Mencap has also committed to reporting annually on its board diversity in its trustees’ annual report, as recommended in the Charity Governance Code.
Tapping up for specific criteria
The success that Getting on Board’s programme participants had by using open recruitment processes should be sufficient impetus to convince other charities that it is an effective route to reaching a wider candidate pool. But, if that still doesn’t work, it’s perfectly OK to invest some time actively identifying people who might meet your person specification. Tapping up your contacts for suggestions of people with particular skills or protected characteristics is a far cry from inviting someone to join your board simply because they are an old buddy.
Shaw Trust chair Sir Ken Olisa chaired a panel on diversity at last year’s Trustee Exchange conference, and wrapped up the debate with this advice: “There’s nothing wrong with going out and finding someone who meets your criteria, tapping them on the shoulder and asking them to do it. If you need to fill a gap in your organisation and nobody is answering your ads, go and find them.
“The key thing is to be driven by your mission. I sat on the Parker Review [the independent review chaired by Sir John Parker into the ethnic diversity of UK boards] in 2017 and the most profound thing that came from it was this: why do we care about diversity? It’s not because it’s a social justice issue – it’s because having a diverse board that reflects your supply chain, your employees, your regulators and your customers gives you a competitive advantage. And every organisation, whether a FTSE 100 company or a tiny charity, needs to foster its competitive advantage and deliver on its mission.”
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