Alice Korngold's blog

Sophisticated and experienced NGO/nonprofit board members and CEOs routinely ask me to explain the role of the board. It's not surprising and I'm glad they do. So let me share my four essentials for effective governance.

1. Achievement: The role of the board is to achieve the organization's greater potential as well as its mission.

The role of the board must be crafted specifically for each and every organization. The role is determined based on what you seek...

Given financial threats and opportunities and a passion for their missions, a growing number of NGO/nonprofit boards are seeking to assess how they can become stronger and more effective in maximizing their greater potential.

Business executives and professionals and people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives who serve on NGO/nonprofit boards can bring valuable expertise in helping boards consider new revenue models and opportunities and explore ways of increasing the organization's impact through new partnerships.

In my work with hundreds of NGO/nonprofit boards, they...

To begin with, many of you did plenty. If you’re reading this post, then it’s likely that you’re active in social media. Public attention to recent nonprofit board scandals, as well as robust participation via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media has been influential in the cases of Penn State, University of Virginia, and the Komen Foundation. There were financial and reputational consequences for organizations led by people who made bad decisions.

Beyond these three cases, you are having an exponential impact because two messages are loud and clear: 1) Boards of nonprofit...

According to surveys by the Nonprofit Finance Fund, nonprofits face growing financial pressures while also experiencing greater demands for services. At the same time, there are new funding opportunities for nonprofits, including corporations seeking to advance social and environmental purposes as well as investors and new philanthropists. The smartest NGOs/nonprofits will weather the financial threats while capturing substantial new revenues in the next several years....

"Business strategy and social impact are a powerful combination, especially when companies fully align and integrate the two," says Barry Salzberg, the newly named chairman of the board of United Way Worldwide (UWW) and global chief executive officer at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL).

If you’re as surprised as I was to hear United Way described as a global NGO, this is actually recent and big news. In...

“We will have achieved success when people at the ‘base of the pyramid’ have access to quality products at competitive prices,” said Alvaro Rodriguez Arregui, managing partner at IGNIA, an impact-investing venture capital firm based in Monterrey, Mexico. "When so many entrepreneurs see thriving companies in emerging countries that they set up competing enterprises, thereby creating entire...

If your board is absent a person with expertise in a certain area -- like finance or law, go find and recruit the right person. If your board needs a bit of training and inspiration, bring in a terrific expert for a lively, illuminating session. In some cases, however, the board can't be fixed by simply adding a board member or two, or featuring a governance seminar.

Nonprofits face greater financial challenges than ever before; studies from the...

“In spite of there having been a translator to help facilitate conversations, I have never been so keenly alert to my client’s body language and every nuance of expression, as well as my own,” explained Susan E. Wedge, partner, IBM’s Global Business Services Public Sector, about her experience as a member of a pro bono consulting team deployed by IBM to help Bucharest, Romania’s civic government to create a...

How many students does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? Tony Anderson, Morehouse College ’08, can answer that.

Together with college friend Marcus Penny, they founded Retrofit A Million (LRAM) for the purpose of capturing and replacing 1 million incandescent light bulbs with compact florescent bulbs in homes in low-income neighborhoods. So far, 1,000 student volunteers from several universities have screwed in 40,000 bulbs.

The bonus is that these student volunteers have also installed water-...

Whether or not you filled out your NCAA basketball tournement brackets, you have a chance to fill out an even more important bracket for another competition of talented college students. This bracket features 16 student Commitments to Action that will be presented at the fifth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U), which will be held at George Washington University in Washington D.C., March 30-April 1. President Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart will announce the winner on March 31....