Building your board
Chair, trustee and treasurer recruitment
Perhaps you’re looking for new trustees, a treasurer, or thinking about your own succession plan as chair.
Here are some tips and resources to help you, available to non-members. Members can log in to the members’ area to find more relevant resources on this and other topics.
Chair recruitment
Recruitment materials
Chairing is an extraordinary volunteer role. We want to do more to showcase the value of chairing, the challenges and benefits of the role, and the impact you as chairs make across the charity and voluntary sector.
We’ve created these two downloadable resources with an overview of the impact and benefits of chairing. Please feel free to use them for your own chair recruitment.
Role description and person specification
The role of chair can vary widely across organisations, because the role can and should adapt to the organisation’s needs. For this reason we don’t have a template for a role description.
However, in our publication A Chair’s Compass, you can find guidance on putting your role description and person specification together.
Co-chairs and vice-chairs
When you’re looking to recruit a chair, it’s also a good time to think about whether or not creating a co-chair role would be suitable for your board. Co-chairs can share the load and can make the role more attractive to a wider, more diverse range of candidates. You may want to think about the role of a vice-chair too. Working on the role descriptions jointly helps to clarify any areas where there would be potential overlap and make sure the boundaries and expectations of each role are clear.
The Future Charity Chair report 2024
This research report contains many useful insights about securing the pipeline for future chairs, with suggestions about recommended qualities and attributes that a chair may need.
The research was under the lead sponsorship of the Centre for Charity Effectiveness (CCE) at Bayes Business School.
Useful resources
and places to advertise
Designing your process
There are some excellent resources and services to help you with trustee recruitment. Rather than creating new resources we signpost you here to some free and low-cost resources that we think you will find useful.
- Getting on Board – How to recruit trustees for your charity
- Reach Volunteering – Trustee Recruitment Cycle
- Lloyds Bank Foundation – Trustee Recruitment, Selection and Induction Toolkit
Equity, diversity and inclusion
Please visit our page on EDI for more information, useful resources, and signposting.
Skills and competency analysis
It is important to start with understanding what skills and competencies you have on the board and what you need. Here are two resources that may help:
- NCVO – Skills audit tool
- Reach Volunteering – Guide on how to complete a skills audit.
Advertising for chairs, trustees and treasurers
- Reach Volunteering – The single biggest source of trustees with professional skills in the UK (over 9,000 volunteers available).
- Honorary Treasurers Forum – Offers a service to promote treasurer vacancies.
- Third Sector Lab – A great platform to help find digital trustees.
- Advocate – Offers a service called Bar in the Community for charities that need to appoint legally qualified trustees.
- Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAEW) – Free advertising for people with specialist finance and business skills.
- Action for Trustee Racial Diversity provides charities with knowledge, resources, toolkits, networks and specialist advice to increase the diversity of their boards.
- LinkedIn – Post your role and use the advanced search tool to find your ideal trustee. Tag people and ask them to share with their networks too.
- Young Trustees Movement – Can help to advertise roles to attract younger trustees.
- Women on Boards – Advertises board roles, starting from free but with paid-for packages for matching services.
- Trustees Unlimited – Paid-for advertising to find trustee candidates.
- Don’t forget local networks and businesses: churches and places of worship, solicitors, your local Council for Voluntary Service (CVS), newspapers, and Facebook forums.
Other
relevant pages.
Equity, diversity and inclusion
Information and resources related to building inclusive boards.
Resources
More resources available to members and non-members.
Blog
Check out our blog for more inspiration and ideas.