They're at every meeting. On time, even. They nod in the right places. They might occasionally say something like "that's a great point" or "I'd support that."
And then the meeting ends and they vanish into the void until the next one.
No emails answered. No tasks completed. No sign of life whatsoever, until they reappear, right on schedule, seven minutes before the next meeting starts.
Every board has one. Most boards have three.
Before you spiral into frustration, it helps to understand why this happens, because it's almost never laziness.
Most volunteer board members joined with genuinely good intentions. They cared about the mission. They wanted to contribute. And then real life showed up: the job got harder, the kids got busier, the commute got longer and somewhere in the shuffle, board work became the thing that got deprioritized.
They're not bad people. They're exhausted people who haven't been given a reason or a clear enough path to do more than the minimum.
That's actually good news. Because exhausted and unclear is fixable. Checked out is harder.
Guilt. Passive-aggressive agenda notes. Announcing at meetings that "we really need everyone to step up." Sending the same follow-up email for the fourth time with increasing exclamation points.
These approaches share one thing in common: they treat disengagement as a character flaw instead of a solvable problem.
Make the ask specific and small. "Can you help with outreach?" is easy to ignore. "Can you send three texts to neighbors about the meeting on Thursday?" is not. Specific asks with clear boundaries are harder to say no to and easier to actually do.
Match the task to the person. The board member who works in marketing but never volunteers for anything? They're probably not going to show up to stuff envelopes. Ask them to review your flyer copy. Make the contribution feel connected to something they're actually good at.
Find out what they actually care about. People engage when the work connects to something that matters to them. Take ten minutes before the next meeting cycle to have a real conversation. Not "we need help." More like - what brought you here and what would make this feel worth your time?
You might be surprised what you find out.
Lower the barrier to entry. Sometimes people opt out because they don't know how to opt in. If your board's workflow is a mystery - who's doing what, where things live, how to contribute without stepping on toes, people will default to doing nothing. Clarity is underrated.
Sometimes a board member has genuinely aged out of their commitment. They're not going to re-engage. They're staying because leaving feels awkward.
In that case, the kindest thing you can do is make it easy for them to exit gracefully. Thank them for their service. Mean it. And create space for someone who has the bandwidth to actually show up in all the ways that count.
You can't want it more than they do. But you can make it easier, clearer and more connected to something real.
That's the whole job. If you know, you know.
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