A free board self-assessment for your nonprofit.

A board self-assessment is a short set of questions your board answers about its own work. Does everyone understand the mission the same way? Is the budget getting the attention it deserves? Do meetings make good use of everyone’s time? Does the board still reflect the community it serves? Answering honestly is harder than it sounds, and it might be some of the most valuable work a board ever does. It is how a board gets better at the one thing it exists for: serving the mission.

Most governance experts recommend doing this every year or two. Almost no small nonprofit actually does, and it isn’t for lack of caring. Building a good self-assessment from scratch is its own project: writing the questions, second-guessing the wording, wondering if you are even asking the right things. That alone is enough to make people put it off. The established tools cost $549 to $975 per use, and the free alternative usually means starting from a blank page. So the reflection that would help the most gets skipped, year after year, at exactly the organizations doing the hardest work with the least.

This tool exists so neither of those has to stop you. The questions are already written by people who thought carefully about what a board actually needs to ask itself, tested, and ready to use today. You do not have to draft your own or wonder if you got the wording right.

Start with the board. Add the rest when you’re ready. Two more groups, each optional, and each can be added at any time, even to an assessment that is already running.

Add either group, and the report gains something a board-only assessment cannot show on its own: the places where the board feels sure of something that people outside the boardroom do not feel at all. Those gaps are not failures. They are the honest starting point for the next conversation, and most boards never get to see them. If your organization has a chief executive, their view is shown alongside the board’s too, because where the two differ is worth talking about as well.

A board that sees a gap like this usually does something ordinary with it: they talk about it at the next meeting, and they try something. Next year, if you ask the same questions again, the assessment shows whether that work actually moved anything. That is the whole point of the wording never changing.

The questions here are carefully worded, and once published, the wording never changes. That is a promise, not a limitation. Improvement is something you compare over time. If you ask the same questions next year, you can see whether the work you did in between actually changed anything. Change the wording, and that thread is cut.

Shared wording also means you are not alone with your numbers. Once enough similar organizations have taken part, you can see how boards like yours, by budget and focus area, answered the same questions. A 3.4 means a lot more once you know what is typical.

Plenty still fits your organization specifically. You can add a handful of your own questions, private to your report and never compared with anyone else’s. You choose who to hear from, which optional topics to include (things like committee effectiveness, equity practice, or preparing for a leadership transition), and when each survey closes.

That isn’t a policy we are promising to follow. It is how the data is stored. A response carries no name, no email, no login, nothing that could be matched against who was invited or when they answered. We built it so that even we couldn’t undo the anonymity if someone asked us to. A section of the report only appears once enough people have answered it to protect that anonymity. Below that, the report says plainly that it is withholding the section rather than showing a thin one.