Policy Vs Paperclips: Selling the Corporate Model to Your Nonprofit Board - Softcover

Policy vs. Paper Clips shows how to transform your organization by optimizing:

Strategic Planning

• Focus on organization strategic issues over operational minutiae
• Encourage directors to bring their own special expertise and cultural values to board decisions

Board Structure

• Develop or enhance a mission focused board structure for growth
• Use task forces more efficiently to obtain time results
• Designate the senior operational manager as the President/CEO to give the position the prestige that it deserves
• Establish a framework for separating policy/strategy development from operational activities
• Make effective use of an executive committee
• Make wise use of volunteers' time to make board recruitment easier
• Reduce or increase board size
• Operate effectively with only three standing board committees 
• Make major board structural changes with minimum disruption
• Develop effective audit committee procedures
• Keep board involvement high when developing policies & strategies

Board-Staff Relations

• Create a partnership between board and staff built on trust
• Pinpoint management's  responsibility and clarify its accountability
• Allow more management flexibility to develop a more entrepreneurial culture
• Increase focus on productivity at the expense of bureaucratic processes
• Develop a more professional and self-managing staff
• Build a working relationship between the volunteer board chair and the CEO
• Evaluate the senior manager fairly, despite only having some imperfect metrics for qualitative outcomes
• Improve the CEO's fund raising capacity to drive development productivity

Operations & Compliance

• Sharpen the organization's client focus to improve mission impact
• Obtain greater efficiencies through lower costs
• Establish a system of organizational checks and balances
• Use the board to provide responsibility for -- and oversight over -- fraud prevention
• Understand the implications of compliance requirements such as IRS Form 990, the Sarbanes- Oxley Act and the Intermediate Sanctions Act
• Understand the  need for -- and implement -- rigorous assessment of operational outcome 

Eugene H. Fram, Ed.D, professor emeritus, E. Philip Saunders College of Business, at Rochester Institute of Technology, is an authority on the Corporate Model. His experience with nonprofit organizations—as consultant, author, volunteer, board director, and board chair—dates back more than thirty years. In addition, he has extensive experience working with business boards of directors. He pioneered the development of the Corporate Model for nonprofit organizations. A frequent lecturer on the Model, Dr. Fram continues to publish articles related to both nonprofit and for-profit governance in professional journals such as MIT’s Sloan Management Review, The Wall Street Journal, Corporate Governance, Leader to Leader, and Nonprofit World. Dr. Fram formerly served as J. Warren McClure research professor of marketing at Rochester Institute of Technology and is the author or co-author of more than 125 published articles and six books. Vicki Brown is associate director of the Center for Governmental Research (CGR), a nonprofit and nonpartisan consulting organization based in New York, where her work encompasses research, analysis, and writing for both nonprofit and government clients. Prior to joining CGR, she owned a consulting firm for twenty-eight years, and directed research, writing, and editing projects for consulting groups, medical centers, major universities, governmental organizations, and businesses ranging in size from one-person firms to Fortune 500 companies. Previously she was a newspaper reporter in Rochester, New York, and a university writer/editor in Atlanta, Georgia. 3740517814569ISBN 978-1456374051