Everything You Need To Know About A Board Portal

Reduce costs, improve efficiency, enhance security, and ensure robust corporate governance using a board portal software.

Background Information

You might already know what a digital portal software solution is or heard about one, but given the pace of their advancement over the last few years, there are still a lot left to be learned. This is especially true if your organization is planning to use a board portal in the near future.

Do you know why many organizations are opting to use a board portal? In summary, it is because a board portal solution makes all the deficiencies, redundancies, and flaws of a paper-based meeting more obvious than ever. It is true that we have been holding paper-based meetings for centuries – but with a better, technologically advanced and easy-to-use option now available, it is high time to make that obvious change.

There’s an interesting history behind board portals that not only makes for interesting reading, but will also give you a deeper understanding of corporate governance and its role in an organization.

What’s Wrong with Homegrown Systems?

Some board directors, senior executives and administrative staff or executive assistants may want to try out a homegrown system first before entrusting a third-party board portal vendor with confidential documents and information pertaining to their board meetings. While it is a reasonable consideration in theory, it is much more difficult to execute in reality.

To create a homegrown system, you will need to use different solutions, integrate them, and make sure the resulting solution is comprehensive, seamless, and all components are compatible with each other. For example, you can use email for sending out invitations, WebEx to facilitate online meetings, Evernote for taking down notes, Penultimate for making annotations, and Dropbox for storing files. But does not this look like a laundry list of solutions to you that need to be operated separately and have no commonalities? Moreover, even when combined, they are incomplete because they do not provide other important features like enterprise-grade security and 24/7 support. Your IT department can only do so much, after all. Hence, a couple of important questions that beg to be answered: Can your IT department develop such a homegrown solution? Can they take on the added responsibility of managing the system and its parts?

A homegrown system has a tendency to be too inconvenient or worse they are inadequate to address all the business needs of your corporate board. The better option is a turnkey solution in the form of a full-featured board portal – a complete service ready for immediate use. As long as you choose a reliable board portal vendor as your provider, you can be assured that you will get an effective solution – and with the necessary support – that your corporate board can easily adapt.

Benefits

Many organizations opt to use a board portal to cut their overhead costs, but that is not the only benefit they get when they choose to go paperless.

Other benefits of a board portal include streamlined and automated meeting processes, real-time dissemination of information, efficient agenda creation, facilitation of remote meetings and virtual collaboration, digitized documentation of meeting files, and enterprise-grade security. In turn, these benefits contribute toward clearer communication channels and better sustainability practices within the organization.

Considerations

Making the decision to go paperless is a great first step. Implementing that decision, however, involves many intersecting processes, each of which has their own set of steps. It’s easy to get confused and overwhelmed with the things you need to do for your organization’s transition to a board portal if you go about it without proper guidance.

Usage

Though a board portal makes a big positive difference in how organizations manage their meetings, there’s no escaping the fact that the transition stage can be challenging at times. Going paperless with a digital solution is not an overnight decision; rather, it’s a step-by-step process that calls for adjustments and behavioral change from people who have long been used to paper-based practices.

It is likely that there will be some things that will not go as perfectly as planned at the transition stage. But this doesn’t mean your organization cannot learn from the experiences of others to avoid big and costly mistakes. Arm yourself with knowledge beforehand so you will know how to handle common challenges once they come your way.

Vendors

Out of all board portals in the market today, Convene is the most usable and versatile solution. It supports multiple platforms, but the intuitive user experience remains the same across all of them. Its many useful features sound good on paper and work better in action. If that is not enough, Convene is also competitively priced for its capabilities to give you the best value for your money.