How to Choose a Meaningful Topic for Your Board Retreat
Posted by Elizabeth Krause on September 03, 2025
Planning a board retreat for your nonprofit? It’s a valuable opportunity to bring your board members together for focused, strategic thinking but without a clear theme, the retreat can easily become a series of disconnected conversations. To make the most of your time, choose a central topic that encourages deep discussion and sparks actionable ideas.
Why a Central Topic Matters
Board members are often pulled in many directions during regular meetings, leaving little time for big-picture thinking. A retreat offers the rare chance to step back and explore a topic in advance, one that’s broad enough to inspire creativity, yet specific enough to yield concrete recommendations.
By focusing on a single theme, you’ll help attendees stay aligned, dig deeper into challenges, and emerge with solutions your nonprofit can realistically implement.
Topic Ideas to Inspire Your Retreat
Here are five impactful themes to consider:
1. Risk Management
What are the biggest risks facing your organization? These could include a limited donor base, unstable investments, volunteer shortages, or legal threats. Use the retreat to identify who monitors these risks and explore mitigation strategies, such as insurance or enterprise risk management programs.
2. Financial Reporting
Are board members receiving the financial insights they need? Discuss what data would be most useful, how it could be presented more clearly, and whether affordable tech tools could enhance reporting. Consider including a session on how to read nonprofit financial statements to build financial literacy.
3. Program Optimization
As community needs evolve, so should your programs. Evaluate which initiatives are thriving, which need improvement, and which may no longer serve your mission. Talk about benchmarking performance, reallocating resources, and measuring impact more effectively.
4. Employee Satisfaction
Staff morale is critical to your nonprofit’s success. Explore how the board can support employees through better communication, flexible work options, career development, and thoughtful compensation. A happy team is a productive team.
5. Attracting New Donors
Sustainability depends on expanding your donor base. Use the retreat to brainstorm new fundraising strategies — from social media campaigns to corporate partnerships and event-based outreach like Giving Tuesday.
Set the Stage for Success
Whether you choose one of these topics or another that’s uniquely relevant to your organization, notify board members well in advance. Give them time to research, reflect, and come prepared with ideas. Encourage them to investigate how peer organizations are tackling similar issues or what experts recommend. A well-chosen retreat topic can transform your board’s time together into a catalyst for growth and innovation.
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As a member of the audit department, Liz is responsible for conducting and supervising audit fieldwork. She has expertise working with nonprofit organizations, human service agencies, health care institutions, and governmental entities in the areas of audits, Single Audit, reimbursement, tax and information returns, and financial reporting. Prior to joining Lumsden McCormick in 2013, Liz worked at such places as for the City of Buffalo in the Department of Audit and Control.