We use a constituency to track board members, and another constituency to track former board members. However, this does not allow us to reflect situations such as someone was on the board for nine years, then off for one, then re-elected to the board. Does anyone have a good way to store this information in Tess? We've considered Research Notes and Activities, but neither of them is very helpful. We'd like, for instance, to be able to answer questions like, "who was on the board in 2010?"
We recently started using an Attribute called "Board Member FY" which allows users to type in the fiscal year a person was on the Board. The Attribute is set-up to allow for multiple values so we can track each year the person was on the Board. We still use constituencies similar to the ones you do, but now we've got definitive detail as well.
A couple organizations I've worked with use Relationships to track trustee tenures - creating affiliations of 'Board Member' between the individual constituents and an internal 'Board of Trustees' constituent, with start and end dates reflecting the length of service. The advantage is that you can easily create multiple affiliation rows to reflect this scenario of a trustee taking a window of time off and then rejoining the board again. To pull lists of trustees based on a specific time window (i.e. fiscal year 2010), you can use criteria for relationship start date <= the first day of fiscal year 2010, and relationship end date >= the last day of fiscal year 2010.
It's quite a heavy data entry lift to start with, especially if you want to go back and backfill this info for previous years - but once it's in place, it's a really smooth system and I've yet to find a downside!
We use a local custom table and InfoMaker data-entry custom tab to track Board history, with data going back over the whole of our org history. I might have done a Mini-Magic presentation on it a few years ago, I forget. Would require import/entry of old data. Happy to share if interested.
We have the added joy of having 3 Boards involved with our organisation.
We have created a Constituent record for each Board and use the Affiliation type of "Board Member". We also have an Affiliation type of "Board Chair". We also track which other boards they're on - we've found it most enlightening to see how some Board members (past and present) are also on other boards together.
As Evan noted, initially the data load (to play catch up) is a bit of work but well worth it.
Hi Jane,
We created a constituent file for each of the boards and committees associated with our organisation and link the board members using relationship types ‘board member’ or ‘chair’, ‘secretary’ ‘former committee member’ etc. and use the relevant date range.
For external organisations we use the same procedure.
Brenda