The point of The Governance App isn’t just to get a score on each area for your organisation, it’s to help you to have targeted conversations about which areas of your governance need to be improved and how to do it.
Whether you work through all of the sections in one go, or break it down and tackle one section at a time, the most important thing is to schedule time to talk as a group about the results. Our top tips for doing this are:
1. Focus on the obvious areas: if there are areas where you’ve collectively scored below five, prioritise those. Talk through the specific questions or related elements of The Charity Governance Code together, identify the specific areas where you’ve lost points and come up with a plan to address them.
2. Talk about the range: The Governance App is specifically designed to give you the range of responses for a specific question. In our experience of doing similar assessments with boards in face-to-face discussions, conversations about the range of responses from different trustees is where the most helpful conversations arise.
3. Schedule time for reflection and action: depending on your results, the size of your board and many other factors, it may not be reasonable to address everything at once – that’s OK!
Prioritise and schedule time at future board meetings to address things on an ongoing basis.
If you´re finding the conversations challenging or are struggling to address any of the issues that come up as a result of those conversations, there’s a whole host of additional governance support available here.
To help you to plan your conversations and capture the actions we´ve created a simple conversation template for you to use.
