Benchmarking works by recruiting a number of organisations who agree to share like for like data on a confidential basis.  To ensure confidentiality it helps to have an independent third party to ensure clean data and a confidential approach to data management.  Participants in the process each receive a report comparing their positions to the rest of the group – or a subset of that group.  The aim is to help them identify areas for development and to agree how to develop in those areas based on evidence.

Benchmarking is about learning from others to help identify development or performance improvement priorities.  Often confused with league tables, it is in fact an aid to improved understanding about performance, so you can ask better questions and create more focussed developmental goals that will make the biggest difference for your organisations.  Indeed, in an environment such as governance when there are few easy right answers, it helps to learn about what good practice is from how others do things.  This is what BoardsCount™ helps you do.

When we have built up an even bigger ‘library’ of governance data, we hope in the longer run to offer an on-line process where you put in your data and get a quick report instantly.  But we believe that we will always have to have a broad recruitment process.

Our reports are structured in the same way we collect the data from you. This structure was designed to facilitate a self-assessment approach to board performance by asking a set of simple high-level questions which are grouped in ten major topics (plus two other general topics on support for governance and ideas about the future). Each of these topics help answer three fundamental questions.  And finally, these question aim to help you understand the extent to which your board provides the organisation with leadership and appropriate mechanisms of accountability.  This structure is as follows:

To what extent does the board provide leadership & accountability?

1. To what extent does the board working on the right things?

1. Planning & envisioning
2. Holding to account

2. To what extent does the board work well together?

1. Constitution
2. Gov. & committee structure
3. Meetings
4. Board performance

3. To what extent does the board have the people it needs?

1. Recruitment & selection
2. Retention, support
3. Induction, training & development
4. Support, recognition appraisal & conduct
   

There are two interactive and online fact-finders to be completed:

1. A factual questionnaire for the senior staff member closest to governance to complete. This takes quite a long time, probably about four hours, depending on how near to hand some of the data is
2. An opinion questionnaire for the members of your board and your senior management team.  This is much shorter and takes about half and hour

As you complete the questionnaire online, data is stored accurately and instantly.  But you can change things you’re not happy with later if you need to.

You get two core reports with options:

The individual scorecard report

This is your main report and shows you how you compare with the others against each of the benchmarks for which you provided answers by means of tables.  

As a new feature, this year, your report will also include summary graphs to indicate how you compare:

• overall with the other participants
• against Code of Good Governance

The National Overview Report

This report is common to all and provides an analysis of all the data to give you a clear picture of each performance indicator (PI), showing what’s typical, where the issues are and what good practice looks like, providing specific examples of how others have done things.  This report also includes a detailed statistical appendix, so you can ‘drill down’ into the detail of the trends and patterns in the data when you need to explore a specific area in more detail.

Peer Group Report

This is an option unless you are a member of a pre-arranged club.  It shows you how you compare with a specific peer group of your choosing.  This report is included within your individual score card report so you can spot the differences and similarities between your peer group and the data from all participants.  During the process, we’ll invite you to select your peer group if you want to take this option.

BoardsCount™ provides comparative information on areas of practice and performance in governance.  This information helps organisations ask better questions about how well they are doing in the area of governance.  But organisations have to use their own good judgement about what is important for them because what works well elsewhere may or may not work just as well for you.

Some organisations present their BoardsCount™ reports in their entirety to their boards so board members can work out what’s important for them.  Some organisations use the reports as the background to an away day that focuses on governance performance and development.

We would recommend that one or more board or staff member goes through the information and draws out the principal areas where your board may have grounds for celebration (i.e. you appear to be using good practice) and the principal areas where your board may have need either to improve or to explore whether and how it can improve.  A report with a table like this can help

We have prepared a model report which is available as a subscriber only download on our website.  You can contact us for details.

In our follow-up survey, half of respondents had implemented changes on the basis of their BoardsCount™ reports, while others had presented the report as it came to their boards.

A quote makes the point better than our statements:

"We found this very useful as an independent source of data to guide our board into areas they may previously have not considered e.g. self-assessment on board performance"
Survey participant

Sure, we need to collect data with which to make comparisons.  But the process of completing the factfinders is in itself a great opportunity for each participant to reflect on how things are.  And the fact-finders are constructed in that way, with pauses and comments, so you can think about the issues in hand before providing the information or giving your view.  Indeed, the process is also designed to provoke reflections and reactions in you that you may wish to share with colleagues and thus start to process of comparing and challenging what you do and why you do it.  So the report is the concrete output, but it’s a tool to facilitate better governance and that process starts at the point of data collection.

RNIB: Using the BoardsCount™ data collection process as an aid to reflection

"I found the whole BoardsCount™ process to be very useful. It was helpful to look at how we are placed to compare with others, but for me, the questioning of our own processes was especially valuable. Completing the questionnaire really made me stop and think about 'what exactly do we do with our Governance and why do we do it?'  It's also helped to forge links with other people who work in Governance across the sector and I don't know whether some of those informal discussions would have happened without BoardsCount™ as a starting point."
Lucie Dutton, Governance Manager, RNIB

With BoardsCount™ you can:

• Position your board to be more effective for the future 
• Support your efforts in developing and retaining great board members 
• Provide early warning signs of potential challenges 
• Give reassurance on what is already working well 
• Help determine priorities for action 
• Motivate board members by seeing what is possible 
• Set meaningful and realistic targets 
• Gain new insights on good practice

If you use BoardsCount™ more than once, you can also see how your organisation has changed in relation to others.

Firstly it will give you evidence of how ‘good’ you are, so you can celebrate that.  but, because no organisation is great at everything, it will also give you pointers as to where you may need to develop, so you can evidence your governance development plans.

Here are three short case-histories: Diabetes UK, Severnside Housing and Beacon Counselling.

Diabetes UK – ensuring a good process to build on the BoardsCount™ Results

Diabetes UK is the charity for people with diabetes.  It has a membership and active supporter base of 300,000 people.  Its membership comprises two main groups: health care professionals and people living with diabetes.

Ensuring that such a large and diverse group of people has a voice in the governance and direction of the charity is therefore challenging. Following a governance review, the charity set up a UK-wide assembly which has oversight of strategy and elects the Board.

Governance staff at Diabetes UK prepared their own analysis from their BoardsCount™ reports, using the standard template.  They found a number of areas to be positive about and a few where more reflection or action was required.  But as always in organisational life, there were a number of initiatives on governance that the board needed to consider, e.g. work on the Code of Good Governance.

So, the agreed process was to present the internal report to the Board’s Governance Committee before feeding it into discussions at the Board’s away day session on governance development, ensuring that the areas for development were appropriately considered along other streams of governance development work, and the proposed solutions woven into an agree governance development plan.

BoardsCount™ showed that Diabetes UK's assembly, its UK Advisory Council was very large in comparison with similar bodies of other charities.  In respect of the Board itself, BoardsCount™ indicated that much of what Diabetes UK does is 'ahead of the pack', while its processes in respect of appraisal, board member development and succession planning may not have been.  BoardsCount™ also pointed to the possible need to examine certain administrative aspects of its Board and committee meetings.

Following discussion, the approach to individual board member appraisal and to succession planning has been re-developed.  The size of the UKAC has also been reduced significantly, while questions of board member development and meeting administration are under consideration.

Severnside Housing – Using BoardsCount™ to gain board commitment to action an away day session on governance

Severnside Housing is a housing association and Registered Social Landlord.  It provides accommodation for the people of the Shrewsbury area in the country of Shropshire.

The results of BoardsCount™ timed well with a planned Board away day.  Severnside used a facilitator to lead the day and to prepare an external analysis of the BoardsCount™ report, using the model report.  At the session, the Board were able to develop together a balanced view of where they were strong and where they had areas for potential development.

Having the discussion together helped board member feel proud of the areas that were working well and this gave them the energy to commit to changing the areas that needed to change.

Severnside intends to repeat the process by taking part in BoardsCount™ again.

Beacon Counselling: gaining board agreement to a set of changes

Beacon Counselling is a registered charity established in 1984 to provide counselling. It now offers counselling to anyone living or working in the Stockport area.

Following their participation in BoardsCount™ in 2007, the findings were summarised and used to have a more focussed discussion at a board meeting around a set of specific proposals for change in the charity’s governance arrangements.  The board agreed a set of changes to their governance arrangements on the basis of the BoardsCount™ work and they have now been implemented.  They intend to do BoardsCount™ again to check up on progress.

“I guess the main area highlighted was the need for the board to monitor, review, and manage its own performance - a bit like 'who will police the police' - which was a new area of awareness for Beacon.  This has led to improvements in the recruitment and retention of trustees, along with a vastly improved governance structure that gets the trustees more active and involved in the charity's work.  An unexpected knock-on effect of this is that Board meetings are shorter (because the trustees now know a lot more about the organisation, so we're not starting discussions from the very beginning each time).  This has all led to a more effective decision making process at the top.

“By participating in this year's BoardsCount™, we're really keen to mark our progress since 2007, and also to clarify the goals within governance for the next three years.  And because of BoardsCount™, we are confident that we can achieve all this.”
James Harper, Manager, Beacon Counselling

Another new feature for this year is a kite-mark to show that you have taken part in BoardsCount™.  From now on, you will be able to put into your annual reports or on your website a new official logo:  ‘Governance Benchmarked by BoardsCount™ 2009’.  We will inform participants about how they can access and use the kite-mark.

...about questions that could be on this list of common questions, do get in touch.