Farland Group’s Expert Guide to Powerful Customer Advisory Boards (and its accompanying readiness assessment) helps you decide whether your company is ready to launch a board. Once you’ve decided yes, a few operating choices shape how the board runs: who staffs it, who sits on it, what it costs, what its charter covers, and how often and in what format it meets.
The short answer: many, if not most, customer advisory boards run on a small internal team, a budget the company can sustain year over year, a charter of a page or two, and one or two in-person meetings a year with virtual sessions in between.
Who runs a customer advisory board day to day?
Running a customer advisory board takes a small team, rather than one person carrying everything. The executive leader or sponsor, often the CEO or president, chairs the board and gives it its weight. A program champion, frequently the CMO or a chief commercial officer, owns the program between meetings. A program manager handles recruiting, agenda development, meeting logistics, and the follow-through that keeps the board moving.
Related: Creating a Customer Advisory Board? Your Internal Team Matters · Who Owns and Governs a Customer Advisory Board?
Should you run the board in-house or with an outside partner?
Some companies with adequate resources staff program management and facilitation entirely in-house. Others bring in an outside partner, like Farland Group, to share program management and facilitate the meetings, which can make candid conversation easier for members and executives alike. Either approach can work well when the people doing the work have dedicated time, executive-facing experience, and the standing to hold the organization to its follow-through. An outside partner doesn’t replace the internal team, though. You still need the right people inside the company to get full value from the board’s advice.
Related: Can I Run a Customer Advisory Board Internally?
What’s the most common staffing mistake?
Companies often put more care into recruiting members than into building the internal team that will run the board. None of these roles has to be full-time. Most clients we work with fold them into broader marketing or client experience responsibilities, and one person may cover several. What matters is that someone is clearly on point for each part of the work, and that the program champion has enough seniority to move things forward with the executive team.
Can the program manager role be added to someone’s existing job?
Yes, and in many programs it is. The role is easy to underestimate, though. The program manager coordinates everything behind each meeting and keeps follow-through moving between sessions, which calls for strong program management skills and good organizational knowledge. The workload rises and falls with the meeting cycle, so it helps to protect real time for it around each meeting. When the role has that time and clear ownership, the board gains continuity, members feel the relationship is being looked after, and the insight they share has a clear path into your organization.
What budget does a customer advisory board need?
The budget depends on the shape of the program, but companies tend to plan around the same categories:
venue, member travel, and hospitality for in-person meetings
member gifts
program management time
facilitation, if you bring in outside help
Board size, the number of meetings a year, the mix of in-person and virtual sessions, and whether membership is global or regional all move the number up or down. In Farland Group’s experience, the right budget is one you can sustain year after year. That often means starting with a format you can commit to consistently and growing from there.
What should a customer advisory board charter include?
A charter doesn’t need to be long or legalistic. A page or two covering the board’s purpose, what’s expected of members, and how confidentiality is handled is usually enough. Most Farland Group boards use the Chatham House Rule. The charters that serve boards best are revisited each year with members, so the document keeps pace with the relationships.
Related: Customer Advisory Board Charter: Do You Need One? · 3 Customer Advisory Board Charter Templates to Jumpstart Your Program
How often should a customer advisory board meet, and in what format?
A format we’ve seen work well is one to one and a half days in person, once or twice a year, with 60- to 90-minute virtual sessions in between. Virtual sessions are useful for keeping momentum between in-person meetings, taking up a narrow topic quickly, or convening a geographically dispersed board. They work best alongside in-person meetings, since much of the relationship-building happens face to face.
Related: How Often and For How Long Should Our Advisory Board Meet?
What happens when a board runs too leanly between meetings?
Every board needs a rhythm the organization can sustain, and much of a board’s value builds between meetings. The boards we’ve seen do best plan the time between meetings as carefully as the meetings themselves.
A 90-minute virtual session can continue a conversation or go deeper on a topic members raised. Brief member input calls let you hear how the last meeting landed and what’s on members’ minds before you set the next agenda. Those calls are also a natural moment to report back on what you heard and what you did with it, which keeps members engaged more reliably than adding meetings.
Related: Sustaining Customer Advisory Board Engagement Outside the Meeting Cycle
How do you know when a board’s cadence or format needs to change?
The signal is usually a recurring pattern rather than a single off meeting. Internal attention drifts, discussion topics feel less current, recruiting and retaining members gets harder, or the board’s input stops turning into action. As one board member told us, “If the meeting is exciting and I never see action taken on our advice... it feels like I wasted my time.”
Most boards can be renewed, either through recommitment or through a redesign when needs have shifted. And when a board has done what it set out to do, retiring it with care and thanks makes room for what the relationship needs next.
Related: What If Our Customer Advisory Board Isn’t Working? · Sustaining Your Customer Advisory Board
What helps when member attendance starts to slip?
Members have plenty of competing invitations, so a board has to earn its place on their calendars. In our experience, a few habits make a real difference. Secure dates early: some boards we work with start choosing the next year’s dates the summer before, and we request RSVPs about 12 to 14 weeks out. Build each agenda with members, around topics they’ve said matter to them. And show members what the company has done with their advice, since that’s what brings them back. If attendance keeps slipping meeting after meeting, despite all these efforts, it may be time to take a bigger step back with all involved and recommit, redesign, or retire.
Related: Checklist for a Successful Advisory Board Meeting · What If Our Customer Advisory Board Isn’t Working?
How do you choose members and set the agenda?
Start with an “ideal member” profile grounded in the relationships you already have, and give recruiting more time than you expect. Then build the first agenda with your members, around the advice your company needs most.
Who should be on a customer advisory board?
The strongest boards bring together peers: senior decision-makers with the authority and influence to drive change in their own organizations. A useful first step is an “ideal member” profile that realistically matches your existing relationships. Your day-to-day clients may be loyal and smart, but the question is whether they’ll be strong partners on strategy and growth.
From there, balance the mix across customer segments, industries, roles, account tenure, and geography. A varied group surfaces insights that a like-minded one won’t, as long as it still holds together. Decide how many members you want at the table for a good conversation, then recruit enough beyond that number to keep attendance strong.
In our experience, securing an initial group of members can take four to six months. Building that time into the plan from the start makes it easier to hold to your criteria, rather than filling seats with delegates who don’t fit them.
Related: Building a Strong Membership Is Key to Customer Advisory Board Success · Criteria for Success: Define the Right Customer Advisory Board Membership
How do you build the first agenda?
Begin with outcomes. Know what would make the meeting valuable for your organization and for your members, and which topics are must-haves. Then co-create the agenda. Ask your internal executives where they most need advice, and talk with members one on one, or at least by email, to learn what’s top of mind for them. An agenda built from both sides gives everyone at the table a stake in the conversation.
Fewer topics usually work better. For a full day, or two half days, one or two substantial topics plus one or two shorter exploratory sessions leaves room to go deep and keeps members wanting more. Varying the format helps too: facilitated roundtables, member-led case studies, and company presentations that invite discussion rather than a pitch.
Related: Customer Advisory Board Agenda Development: It’s a Balancing Act · Why Co-Creating a Meeting Agenda Matters
Bringing it together
A small team with clear roles, the right members at the table, a budget you can sustain, a charter that stays current, and a meeting rhythm that carries the conversation between sessions are what running a customer advisory board comes down to. They give members a reason to keep coming back and give their advice a clear path into your organization.