This document provides information on using LinkedIn to recruit nonprofit board members. It outlines 3 things organizations should do immediately: complete their LinkedIn profile, connect with existing board members, and establish a company page. It then discusses improving individual profiles, connecting within the network, and setting up a company page to engage supporters. The document also describes LinkedIn's Board Member Connect program and volunteer marketplace for posting board opportunities. Finally, it shares the success story of an organization that recruited a new board member within 2 months of targeted outreach on LinkedIn.
4. 3 things you should do TODAY!
1. Complete your LinkedIn profile
2. Connect with existing board members
3. Establish your nonprofit’s LinkedIn Company Page
5. Step 1: Improve your LinkedIn Profile
Profile picture
Summary & skill set
Education
Volunteer Experience
& Causes
Detailed work
experience for at least
3 recent positions
7. Step 2: Connect with Existing Board Members
Your Connections
YOU
Your 2nd degree Connections
Your 3rd degree Connections
OON
Out of Network
Connect with…
Board members
Staff
Donors
Volunteers
9. Step 3: Establish your Nonprofit’s Company Page
1. Create your nonprofit’s company page
2. Add an image, logo & short description
3. Encourage your board members & supporters
to follow you
4. Use updates to communicate with your board
members & supporters
Over 170 k
nonprofits have
company pages
on LinkedIn
16. Join… the Board Member Connect LinkedIn Group
Ask… questions
of other program
members and
LinkedIn staff
Share… stories,
experiences, and
tips
Connect… with
other members to
build out your
network
21. BERKELEY FOOD AND HOUSING PROJECT
CASE STUDY
Challenge: Berkeley Food and Housing Project provides housing and
food programs to the homeless. They wanted to find an architect who
could advise on affordable housing and commercial tenant
improvement issues. Search criteria included:
– Local: within 10-25 miles of Berkeley, CA
– Skilled: Architect with land use, urban development experience
– Diverse: Young or mid-career professional / female
Solution: Board member was recruited in less than two months.
– Reviewed top profiles in-depth and circulated for board input.
– Sent 20 InMails for a variety of board profiles; one InMail was
targeted at the architect role to which the candidate responded
enthusiastically.
– Met individually, then with the board and toured the agency.
– Elected onto the board within 2 months of the initial InMail.
“We would have never known each other without LinkedIn
– she didn’t know our organization and we didn’t know she
was looking for a board.”
Terrie Light
Executive Director
Hello Everyone,My name is Alison Dorsey and I’m on the LinkedIn for Good team. I am here today with Meg Garlinghouse, head of LinkedIn for Good. We are so excited to present today on the LinkedIn Board Member Connect program. I’ll spend the first 20 minutes of this session presenting some material on the program and products, and then I’ll switch over to Q&A.Now to get some logistics out of the way.If you want to ask us questions along the way, please post them in the webex Q&A module. We will try to answer them along the way and once the webcast is over. Please send them to all participants or all panelists, not just the host, so that our panelist, Meg, can also see your questions. If you are having trouble hearing us, we suggest you listen to the webcast through headphones connected to your computerLastly, and most importantly- we will send everyone on this webcast an email a few days from now with your link to the free talent finder product, as well as a recording and PDF of this session. The email will go to the email address provided when you logged into webex, so if that’s not the right email or the email you want tied to your Talent Finder subscription, please jump out of this session and log back in with the right email address. I’ll give you all a moment to do that if you want.
Alright, Let’s get going!We are going to do a quick review of nonprofits on LinkedIn, touch on why LinkedIn created this program and then dive into the LinkedIn network and the steps you should take today to put your best foot forward on LinkedIn. We’ll then spend the bulk of our time together going through the Board Member Connect program. then we’ll jump into Q&A
We’re about to get startedSo just to pause for a second.We’ve given you background on linkedin and why we’ve developed this programLet’s move onto you using LinkedIn to find board members
Here are three things you can get going on right now.To effectively use LinkedIn, you’ll need all three. Create a strong LinkedIn profile to establish your identity on LinkedIn. Connect with your existing board members so that you can see into their networks while you’re looking for new board membersAnd establish your nonprofit’s company page on the site
We’ll start with your profile as Step 1.You have a profile. Let’s talk about how to improve it. All of these aspects dramatically improve your LinkedIn profile: a profile photo, a summary of your experience and aspirations, your educational information, your volunteer and causes, and your work experience.Here’s beth’s profile2 things that stand out: her photo and her summary. She has a great memorable photo. And a strong summary. She also has the volunteer and causes field filled out. This is where you can tell the world the ways in which your volunteer, the causes you care about, the organizations you support, and in what ways your would like to donate your time and talent, be that skills based volunteering or nonprofit board service.It’s so important to add your volunteer and causes field because the information shares with your network. So if one of your board members adds your organization to her profile, her network will learn about that. It also shows up in keyword searching, so if someone searches for the name of your organization on LinkedIn, all of your supporters who have added your organization to the volunteer and causes field will come back in the search results.
We recently updated the volunteer and causes field and added the ability for our members to share the ways in which they would like to donate their time and talent. You can signal this information yourself and you can also use it to gauge the potential interest level of a professional who you’re considering contacting. You can also reference this in your inmails when you contact professionals, saying something like “I see on your profile that you’re interested in joining a nonprofit board” and using that to start a conversation. In the last few months, 600,000 members have added this signal. We’re really excited about that number, but we also know the number I shared with you earlier, that 78% of professionals surveyed are interested in board service, so I would definitely encourage you to consider a broad range of professionals and not limit your search to the ones who have filled out this field.
Step 2. Connect with existing board members. This might be the most important step in this entire process. The Taproot Foundation did a bunch of research that shows that board members are often the best connections to people and resources. And as you know, they are the ones who are responsible for helping you identify additional board members for your organization. We strongly recommend that you connect with them, your staff, your donors and your volunteers. Let’s talk about these degrees of connections for a moment. I’m the green bubble Meg and I are connected, so she’s in this dark grey circle Meg is connected to Joe, which makes Joe my second degree connection, and means I can reach out to Joe and anyone else in Meg’s network. Joe’s connections are my third degree network And there’s no need to count beyond that.
These 2nd and 3rd degree connections are extremely important. Connecting with your board just increases your second and third degree connections and your total connections overall.To recap:Your 1st degree connections are people you connect with directly.Your 2nd degree connections are when you have a shared connection. 3rd degree connections are once removed from 2nd degree – in other words, it is a shared connections’ connection. It’s not just your network when you search, it’s also your second and third coming up in search, allowing you to go beyond your immediate network
OK so we’ve talked about your profile, we’ve also talked about the importance of connecting with your board, now let’s talk about the final step you can take which is creating or improving your company page. Just one point of clarification here, Company Page is really just a name for the tool. All organizations have company pages, including nonprofits, so don’t let the word “Company” throw you off.Create your nonprofit’s company page. This is a very important step because professionals on LinkedIn will look to your company to learn about your nonprofit. When organizations don’t have company pages, LinkedIn members frequently question the legitimacy of the organization. So you’re best off avoiding that by building a strong company page. To do that, be sure to add an image, your logo, and a description of the organization3. Your community of supporters, the number of followers on your company page, also shows the world that you are a real organization. And the strength and networks of those followers also say a lot. So definitely invite your board members and supporters to follow your company page. 4. Finally, you should post frequent updates on your page, and ask your members and supporters to re-share those updates. Most action on LinkedIn is driven by one member seeing the updates of another member. So when your board members re-share your updates, they are increasing the chances of their networks learning about your organization and potentially following your page as well.
LinkedIn Board Member Connect is a program that helps nonprofit leaders find high quality board members.It was built on the premise that by leveraging your network and those of your connections--you can identify quality talent interested in helping you achieve your mission.
This is something we are extremely excited about! - How can LinkedIn empower you to find the right talent for your organization – including board members & pro bono talent? LinkedIn Board Member Connect was built for exactly this purpose. It was built to empower organizations with the tools, skills and network needed to find and connect with the right talent.The program includes:Talent Finder (expires 2018)LinkedIn Group – tips and tricks Webcast – right now! Stay tuned for others Best practices
Starting with Advanced SearchIf you are in front of your computer, and on LinkedIn.com, you can see the word “advanced” next to the search barI think advanced search is our best, least appreciated, tool. You can click there now to see some of the great search facets.Advanced search includes some of the basic facets you all have now, like location and title.With Talent Finder, we’re opening up the advanced facets, including group membership, years of experience, and company size.
Here you can see an advanced searchI wanted to search for designerswho works at Google, live my area, and are interested in board service.So I filled out those fields here.I’m especially excited to show you the “nonprofit interests” section that I have in the orange box here. Golden boxes, you’d see these are premium facets. Those indicate fields in this image that are not part of your basic account but will be available to you when you upgrade to talent finder.If you’re wondering what to search for, think about your board composition. You want to search for professionals who will bring a skill set that meets a need of your board. You can also visit the board source website, where they have tons of free material to help you assess your board composition.
Here are search results.Let me walk you through some of these areas of the page. On the left hand you can change the search criteria – see just like booking a flight on Kayak– by area industry, seniority and company. search facets with the gold icon are the premium search facets that you only have access to with premium accounts like Talent Finder. You also have management tools that allow you to save and organize the searchesYou can also see full profies for 3rddegere connections so you can really get a sense of who they are before messagingAnd finally, one click inmail – to either contact them directly or ask to get introduced through the mutual connection.
The second part of the Board Member Connect tool box is the LinkedInBoard Member Connect Group. This will be a fantastic tool to share information and best practices, to ask questions, and to give us feedbackIt’s a place for you all to support each other in using this tool. I strongly encourage you to join and to be active participants. We will be actively monitoring the group and answering questions as they come up. This s a community and a forumn and we want to hear from you. I know many of the callers here today are from the group. We really appreciate your participation and hope you are enjoying the group. Please let us know if you have thoughts on how we can improve it.
On Wednesday, January 15th, LinkedIn launched a volunteer marketplace in partnership with taproot, catchafire, volunteermatch, and board source.
One quick example hereBerkeley Food and Housing is a nonprofit using Board Member ConnectThe wanted to find a local architect to join their board to advance their work on afforable housingThey reviewed many profiles in depth and selected 20 to inmail. One of those 20 inmails was targeted at a local architect named Caroline NassifShe was thrilled to be approached by Berkeley Food and Housing and has since joined their board.
