I know what everybody wants! Another spreadsheet!
In this one I got the names of the top 100 nonprofit organizations in the US by revenue and then I looked up how they selected their boards of directors and how many of them there were.
Right off the bat, I know that this is a very flawed spreadsheet to base 100% of our decisions on. First off, even though a lot of my reasoning for grabbing the top 100 nonprofits by revenue was that if they're that big they must be doing something right, the needs and ideal structure of a large organization might be different than ours. Just going by revenue, the smaller organizations on here are about 100 times bigger than us, which means that any lessons we can draw from this might not apply very well to us.
Second, more than half of the organization have "unknown" governance types in this spreadsheet. For each organization I did about 5-10 minutes of research using the top few results on a Google search. The organizations which I couldn't find information on had a lot of things in common with each other, and the types of organizations where I could easily find bylaws or other evidence of how they select their boards also had a lot in common with each other. So we're getting a pretty skewed look at governance types, along with a pretty incomplete one.
As always, if anybody knows more about any of these organizations or wants to contribute to the spreadsheet, please do.
Third, there's reason to believe that these boards have different functions. If a board has more than 50 members and a lot of them are celebrities, that board's function is probably a lot different than the food bank with 15 members who are also listed as volunteers. Which of these boards use the super-volunteer method was impossible for me to figure out given how much time I was willing to put into the research, even though my guess is that very few of them are really doing that.
Still, there's a lot to learn here.
First off, Ken's proposals where the affiliates choose the board is more widely used than I had assumed it would be, and it seems to function well enough. I no longer think that it would necessarily cause more dysfunction than we already have. I'm less certain that it's a bad idea now, even though I still have some problems with it.
Next, regardless of whether it works well or not, we should not attempt the internal selection model.
Third, I had heard many times and from many places before that our 25 member board was way out of line with what any sane organization would have. It turns out that 25 members is on the larger end, at about the 62nd percentile, but it's not anywhere out of range.
Pretty much this research has given me more questions than answers.
Not reflected in the spreadsheet but just something I noticed, is that a lot of these organizations had advisory boards. In fact, pretty much all of them except the local food banks did. I wish I'd taken notes on that now. The members of the advisory boards, from what I can tell, don't get to make decisions but do get to offer input and have prestige. If we're going to think about members of the convention electing people based on subject matter mastery, we might think of doing that instead.