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?"
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!