"If your board was abducted by aliens, would the organization notice they were gone? Would anyone pay to get them back?"

These are the questions posed by Hildy Gottlieb in her introduction to Board Recruitment & Orientation: A Step-by-Step, Common Sense Guide. This no-nonsense manual, with a wonderfully humorous tone throughout, is a must-have for any nonprofit leader looking to improve or create an effective recruitment and training program for the organization's board members. Board service can be a vital aspect of philanthropic expression.

A well-experienced practitioner, Gottlieb is masterful in addressing the most common pitfalls of the board recruitment process. She provides sound alternatives to practices she considers to be ill-advised, but that, unfortunately, are ingrained in the nonprofit world. Dispelled are the myths that potential board members need to be wealthy individuals, or that those with expertise in accounting or nonprofit law are the most desirable prospects. Dismissed is the notion that small or rural nonprofits should aim no higher than using "warm blood and a pulse" as the sole criteria when recruiting board members.

Board Recruitment & Orientation is divided into the five steps that comprise the recruitment and orientation process: Establishing Qualifications, Board Member Job Descriptions, Identifying Prospects, Application Prospects, and Preparing the New Board Member to Govern. The prose is engaging and refreshingly candid. Gottlieb uses a series of real life stories to illustrate the common scenarios and dilemmas in which nonprofit boards may often find themselves. Woven into these stories is pragmatic advice, reflecting the author's wisdom and real world experience about what she considers to be the oft-neglected aspect of board development. Throughout each chapter, Gottlieb's suggestions are those that can, in most cases, easily be implemented to improve the performance of an existing board, and/or alter a negative mindset associated with the board member recruitment process.

Board Recruitment & Orientation is a practical workbook, packed with "brainstorming" worksheets for board members, checklists, forms and sample application questions. Though the book is not indexed, the table of contents is more than adequate for readers to efficiently locate the information in each of the five main sections of this "common sense" guide.

For additional citations on this topic, refer to the Literature of the Nonprofit Sector Online, using the subject headings "Board members" or "Nonprofit organizations — —administration."