A Board Member’s Guide to Mergers

This booklet is designed as a practical guide to help nonprofit board members, executives and funders think through a merger. Over the next pages, you’ll take a quick trip through a merger’s terrain and get a rough guide to expectations, processes and obstacles often encountered in a merger experience. Think of it as an annotated map of the merger journey that will give you a sense of the adventure before you actually embark.

What this guide won’t do is convince you that a merger is the right choice for your organization. Merging independent organizations into a single entity is a complex venture that does not always increase financial stability or enhance community benefit. Rather than encourage or discourage a merger, this booklet provides information to help you make that determination for your own situation.