We're always here to help. Here are answers to questions we've received from charter school trustees and CEOs just like you.
By setting annual goals, boards empower their organizations to achieve greatness.
Boards that set clear goals each year achieve results.
Effective boards prioritize goal setting and monitor progress throughout the year.
Your BoardOnTrack Champion is the one who drives the strategic connection points in the BoardOnTrack platform — including your board’s goals, assessments, and evaluations.
Your Champion is quite literally the person championing the strategic side of good governance for your team, partnering with BoardOnTrack's experts to do so.
For example, at board meetings, you might be the one to fire up BoardOnTrack and walk the board through where you all are with each of your goals. This keeps your goals — and your tools for tracking your progress — top of mind for your team.
And, you're the one participating in quarterly Accelerator Sessions, getting coaching directly from BoardOnTrack's experts on your highest-value goals and how your BoardOnTrack membership can help you reach them.
Can I assign a task to all of my board members?
There are 2 options we can provide and you can decide what would be the best one for you.
1) The Post. Go into the Board Goal, click Board Post > New Board Post and add this to your post. Although, if you paste the URL it will not be a link you can click on, but will be presented as an ordinary text so you would need to advise people they need to copy and paste the URL.
2) Board Goal. Go into the Board Goal, create a Goal by adding this as a task. Once the Goal is created, you can edit the Goal and assign the task to multiple people.
Both options will result in an action item (link) in the "My Action Items" panel.
Is there a difference between board goals and committee goals?
In short, your board's goals are organized by committee. While the full board shares responsibility to ensure the board meets its goals, each goal must be assigned to and championed by a committee. That's the only way to ensure that your goals actually are achieved. And the goals dashboard is designed to help you here.
However, if needed, you certainly can create a 'committee' for your overall board, and place overall board goals there. This would be the most appropriate to track certain new initiatives and your progress towards them.
Can BoardOnTrack help us track our CEO's goals alongside our board goals?
The Goals dashboard in BoardOnTrack is designed to help your board organize, track, and achieve its goals.
We recommend you utilize the CEO Support & Evaluation process to manage your CEO's goals.
However, the dashboard can be customized to fit your needs. You could create a new "committee" to track your CEO's goals by adding it in the "team" section, the same way that you would for a new board committee.
How do I remove or delete a goal?
In order to delete a goal, open the committee goal page and then click on the goal you would like to delete.
Once you're on the specific goal's detail pate, you'll see a drop-down arrow in the upper right corner. Once you click the drop-down, you'll see the options to Edit, Archive, or Delete the goal.
It's that simple!
How can I download or print my board's goals?
Great question. This isn't yet a capability built in to the Goals dashboard tool, but it's something we're planning for a future upgrade.
How should we address goals that are promised in our charter?
Your charter likely includes a number of promises regarding academic achievement, financial performance, etc.
This can look overwhelming, especially if you're new to setting board goals. Would every charter promise be incorporated into the committee-level goals? Should academic achievement be turned into a board goal, or kept at the management level?
The short answer is: Yes! Your charter promises should be translated into board goals, and every board goal should be assigned to a committee.
We find that board goals don't get accomplished without having a specific committee to work on them. So, the Goals section of BoardOnTrack is designed to be as configurable as possible, to fit your board's structure and goals. Create new committees in the "team" section to fit your needs.
Could BoardOnTrack lead us through a goal-setting exercise?
BoardOnTrack's governance experts can be available to provide in-person or virtual training directly to your board. These services are in addition to your annual BoardOnTrack membership.
We recommend you also make full use of the ever-growing library of expert articles, templates and samples, and on-demand training videos available right here in theBoardOnTrack resources library.
Can BoardOnTrack help me communicate with my committee about our progress towards our goals?
Yes! You can share posts with a committee in the 'Board Goals' area for that committee.
Each committee gets a Goals 'home' and in there you can add posts that go only to the committee members (as set up in the 'Committees' page).
New posts added in the committee goals home page will be displayed in that page and will also show up in the 'Post Activity' page.
These posts work in a similar way to the 'Board Posts' except they are only seen members of the committee.
That includes the posts shown on the main 'Posts' Post Activity page.
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