In this blog by Eastside People member Fiona McAuslan, she shares seven top tips and insights gleaned from panellists and attendees at Eastside People’s Festival of Trusteeship 2025 on how to run the best charity board meetings and how to get the most from the limited time that you have available as a group.
Board meetings are the nuclei of trustee interaction but for some organisations stale routine has made them a source of frustration where discussions are dull, decisions waved through and opportunities for growth overlooked. How can you galvanise your board meetings into a source of engagement, collaboration and joy?
Check out these tips and insights shared from our panelists at our Festival of Trusteeship Governance Hacks webinar on how to jazz up your meetings and make them more productive.
1. Encourage all trustees to engage
- Read the papers, but don’t rehash them. Use meeting time for discussion, not reporting. Come to the meeting with some questions and thoughts already prepared to shape the direction of discussion
- Start your meetings with intention, end with reflection. A good way of framing what you’ll be discussing is to ask “What do we want from this meeting?” at the start and “Did we achieve it?” at the end. This cuts through waffly directionless meetings
- Power of the Hour. Schedule focused deep-dives on meaty issues outside regular board meetings. This ensures big strategic decisions aren’t rushed
- Mix up your methods. Use post-its, breakouts, flip charts, walking discussions – not just sitting around a table. Different people respond to different methods; by having a mix you allow all board members to play to their strengths.
2. Build a good charity board culture
- Meet beneficiaries outside meetings. Ask your exec team to arrange a learning walk around your organisation’s services, or take a shift as a volunteer. It’s important that you can embody beneficiaries’ perspectives when discussing strategy. Better yet, make sure that you have trustees with lived experience on your board
- Disagree agreeably. Healthy boards challenge each other; harmony can mask dysfunction. Making comfortable challenge part of your culture is so important for rigorous governance
- Language flips matter. Ask “What questions have you got?” not “Does anyone have questions?” Starting with the assumption that everyone has questions is a deceptively simple way of facilitating and deepening discussion.
3. Get the balancing act right between board strategy and operations
- Consider using a RACI framework. Clarifying who’s Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed for each decision stops trustees (and the exec) from muddying the waters on who should be doing what
- Divide your agenda clearly. For smaller charities, it can be unavoidable that trustees play a greater role in operations. In these cases, clarity is even more important. Make sure operations are visibly separate from strategic items on the agenda.
4. Steady as she goes: ensures continuous board improvement
- Little and often beats boom and bust. Introducing regular small governance improvements are generally more successful than big periodic reviews
- Appoint a governance guardian. Have one trustee (not the chair) who champions governance improvements
- Evaluate after every meeting. 5-10 minutes reflecting on what went well builds better habits. You can do this via a quick email or Whatsapp survey but in person yields richer results.
5. Make your charity’s digital tools work harder
- Use what you’ve got well. Master the existing tools your organisation uses before chasing shiny new ones. Many software platforms – (have a look in Youtube) offer free training
- Google Workspace for nonprofits is free. Including tools that keep your data protected
- Create one-page summaries that contain key information for trustees. Large Language Model (LLM)/AI Assistant platforms like Claude are very useful for distilling your 20-page constitution into key bullet points for new trustees. It’s not a substitute for reading the full document at some point but it cuts to the chase and brings people up-to-speed much faster
- Think in-person for trust, online for frequency. Many trustees will rear back in horror at this; but consider shorter monthly online meetings vs. quarterly marathons. What would you gain? What would you lose? It’s worth playing it out as a scenario before falling back automatically on the traditional model.
6. Make diversity & psychological safety the cornerstones of good governance
- Slow down difficult decisions. Giving everyone space to speak without rebutting is essential; answers often emerge naturally
- Similarly, don’t seek premature consensus. Let people share thinking without declaring positions first
- Expect passion from lived experience. Diversifying means accepting different communication styles and different points of view. The value lies in the difference
- Debrief after heated discussions. Check in with other trustees after a meeting to reinforce that disagreement signals health, not dysfunction. This should be the chair or vice chair’s role, though there’s nothing to stop other trustees doing this themselves so long as there’s transparency.
7. What happens between meetings is just as important
- Check in individually. Build one-to-one relationships and trust outside group meetings by making time to chat with fellow trustees
- Train yourself on trustee know-how. Five-minute videos, bite-sized learning, not 78-page guidance documents all at once. Think of it as Duolingo for governance. Check our Trustee Hub for ideas and resources
- Read and share resources. Stay current without overwhelming yourself or others. Subscriptions to relevant sector news or setting up Google alerts for key topics are a great way to do this
- Plan your orderly exits. If life changes, give as much notice as you can that you want to step down from the board before your term is up; and hand over your “hats” gradually. This makes succession smooth and ensure continuity.
Many of the tips in this blog came from or were inspired by the Festival of Trustee 2025 session on Governance Hacks. You can listen to this recorded session and all the others on Eastside People’s Youtube channel.
