Why we decided to create a blog on Governance

We’d been thinking for a while about sharing our experiences, thoughts and ideas from our work over the last 7 years with the boards of directors of the non-profit organisations we have partnered and partner.

This is a job that has developed gradually, as the Voluntary Sector has evolved and strategies have been planned that target sustainability, but necessarily involve other areas of the organisation to achieve their goal.
We are well aware that, in practice, fundraising is a truly “pervasive” activity, one that influences (and is influenced by) various components of an organisation system.

So board coaching has turned from sporadic requests for consultancy into one of the pillars of our strategic consultancy work on fundraising.
We often hear people expressing an interest in and a need to examine the question of governance in greater depth, and it got us thinking about creating a flexible public tool, one that could be used to share and discuss related issues. The result is this blog.

People familiar with our work know that, professionally, we provide services in and outside Italy. And whereas there are a number of international blogs and portals on “board management” offering a source of inspiration for day-to-day activities, in Italy so far nothing of this kind has been set up, so the idea of looking into the subject here appealed to us.
The blog will be bilingual, in Italian and English, because that’s the world we work in – many of the campaigns we follow, even for Italian organisations, are bilingual and target international supporters.
It will also give us an opportunity to retrieve our earlier professional experiences before we began our fundraising and philanthropy consultancy; a lifetime ago (how time flies) we both worked in academia, in the field of human resources and organisational development.
So it will be interesting to close a circle of research and experience acquired in a completely different context.

We intend to share experiences and cases we are working on, presenting everything in a practical, concise way so that readers can use the blog as a source of ideas.

We shall open the blog to colleagues – internal fundraisers and consultants – to hear what they have to say about governance.

We shall publish interviews and analyses with people who experience the Voluntary Sector from the Governance viewpoint: although boards of directors are often in the sights of fundraisers, we think it is important to listen to the other side too.

We shall also draw on our personal experience as board members – in 2017 I was appointed Vice-President of a non-profit organization and I was an International Advisory Panel Member of Rogare, the fundraising think-tank at Plymouth University for 3 years.

We have decided not to publish the blog at fixed regular intervals. First, because we want to publish meaningful content, and we realise that we may not always have something of value to say; second, because the blog is in addition to our other commitments, and we don’t like to think that we might not manage to meet our commitments.
We shall also put our blogposts on our social channels, so you will find them on the ENGAGEDin page on Facebook, and on our personal Twitter and Linkedin accounts.

We hope you find the blog useful, and of course we welcome your suggestions, comments and requests.

Thanks for reading this, we’ll be back soon!