Kim Fennebresque was burned out on boards. A veteran of several nonprofit boards, including those of community-television station Channel 13, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the American Lung Association, he was looking for a charitable opportunity he’d feel more personally engaged with. After asking around for recommendations of interesting organizations with compelling missions, a friend told him about Justine Stamen Arrillaga, the founder of the TEAK Fellowship, a Manhattan-based program that provides scholarships and support for underprivileged New York City students at top high schools and colleges.

Intrigued by Arrillaga and the program, Fennebresque, the chairman and C.E.O. of Cowen and Company, a New York-based investment bank, hired seven TEAK fellows as interns at his firm that next summer as a way of supporting the group and of finding out more about it. In 2005, he joined the board.

“I had to think about” taking that step, says Fennebresque, who was jaded from previous board stints where he’d observed that board members were removed from the daily workings of the nonprofit. “With the Channel 13 board, one of my best friends was the chairman, and that’s why I was on it. It was a classic businessman, society-guy board to be on, but I didn’t care about that.” In the end, he joined TEAK’s board, too excited about the mission to say no.

Joining the board of a nonprofit organization is a time-tested way for successful executives to burnish their social profiles, network with one another, and give back to the community—in other words, to signal that they’ve made it. But it’s not an insignificant commitment. Most boards meet several times a year, usually once per quarter, and most also ask for a minimum annual financial commitment, from as little as $1,000 to well over $10,000 Also, board members may be responsible for raising money from friends and employers. For businesspeople with large, preexisting demands on their time and money, finding the right nonprofit board to serve on—a board they feel merits the commitment—can be a challenge, simply because there are so many choices. New York City alone has more than 27,000 registered nonprofit organizations, according to a 2002 study done by the New York City Nonprofits Project. And few official channels for getting information on and comparing boards exist.

So what’s an executive looking to give back to do? Some, like Fennebresque, do their own research to find causes and organizations they’re excited about and then approach executive directors themselves. Others take the advice of work associates, or let a board-matching service do the leg work. And still others find themselves serving on boards that have picked them, rather than the other way around.

In 1997, Jackie Adams, then a prominent correspondent for CBS News, got a surprise invitation from a friend, the president at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, to receive an honorary degree from the school. A few months later, Adams got another surprise call telling her she’d been elected to the college’s board, even though she didn’t even know she’d been nominated. Flattered and looking forward to spending more time with her friend, she said yes, although she now suspects that the honorary degree was part of an effort to cultivate her as a potential member. This wasn’t the last time something like that would happen to Adams, either—in 2001, she was invited to join the board of Off the Record Lecture Series, a foreign-policy forum that had previously invited her to speak at several of its events. Again, she didn’t know she’d even been nominated for the board, but once again, she assented.