Committee Nomination Form

This form will help you manage the committee member nomination process at your AGM.

Authored by: iClick2Learn Team

You may want to read the article that discusses membership applications as the information we’re talking about here relates to that article also. You’ll find this article HERE:

Introduction

Once someone has been approved as a member of an association they may be eligible to apply to be on your committee (or board. We’ll use the word committee in this article). However, you may have separate eligibility requirements that need to be met by the member for them to be eligible to be a committee member.

Let’s use the example we talked about in the last article which discusses membership application forms. We were using an example constitution which was the Western Australian model constitution.

Okay, let’s just stop for a moment and recap.

In the membership application form article, we discovered that membership eligibility criteria were ‘An individual who has not reached the age of 15 years is not eligible to apply for a class of membership that confers full voting rights. So we could have someone who is a member that is under 18 years of age.

We then discovered that there were some significant eligibility criteria for a member to be appointed as a committee member. Whilst this example highlighted Section 39 of the Act (this is the WA Associations Incorporations Act, 2015 they’re referring to), the constitution also mentioned that in order for someone to be a committee member, they must have also ‘reached 18 years of age.

So in this case, if a member is over 15 years of age but under the age of 18, they can’t be nominated to be a committee member. This is a simple example of where you can include additional eligibility criteria in a constitution to ensure that the right people are appointed to the committee. Other examples of eligibility criteria could be a geographical requirement or an industry requirement.

The template form

In the template we’ve provided to you, you’ll see that we’ve included reference to this here:

I confirm that I meet eligibility requirements to nominate for a position on the committee/board as per clause (insert clause number) of (your organisation) constitution.

In some cases, you may wish to conduct your own investigations or seek evidence to ensure they do comply with requirements. For example, a driver’s license showing residential address or a check to see if they’re banned from being a director.

Some constitutions also require existing members to support a nomination. In the template, we’ve provided a space to include this if this applies. We’ve also included a checkbox in the admin checklist section to validate that they’re current financial members, which is an important point. Most constitutions will state that a person must be a member of an association in order to first nominate so it’s one of the first things you should validate when you receive nominations.

One other area that can hold up the process and create conflict is if you have specific timelines around when nominations have to be received. If this is the case, you should also include the date and time the nomination was received, as well as how it was received. This will help prevent disputes about if a nomination should be legally accepted as per the rules of the constitution, or if a nomination is outside those rules and should not be accepted.

Conclusion

Here’s the big takeaways:

Check your constitution. If the following things apply, then consider adopting this template and customise it to your needs.

If you have different membership eligibility criteria than you have committee nomination eligibility criteria.
If you have nomination timelines for when nominations should be received by before the AGM

Big tip: Refer to the clause from your constitution, rather than any specific dates etc. This way if the clause changes there won’t be forms with incorrect information on them.