It involves decision-making on key aspects of your business and preserving the interests of your stakeholders as well. These processes are time-sensitive, complex, and come with high stakes. Board management demands clear-cut communication, scheduling periodic meetings, and documentation. Such responsibilities have the power to make or break a business. But don’t worry; there is a good solution for this – board management software. It is a must-have tool for your organization to address all those concerns and helps your board of directors to collaborate with unification and security. It will save you time that goes undetected on communicating through emails while helping managers ensure organized and streamlined board management. Sounds interesting? Let’s find out all about board software and what it can do for your organization.
What Is Board Management Software?
The virtual platform where board members can communicate and collaborate on certain strategic matters can be referred to as board management software. These strategic matters can include drafting policies, taking care of stakeholders, hiring executives, reviewing performances, and more. The tool helps to consolidate organizational workflows and expedites your board in decision-making while staying organized for better productivity. It also works as a comprehensive database to store and manage critical information and documents that your board may need anytime. Board software can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud, whatever works fine for you. These days, more organizations are inching towards cloud deployments due to easy, on-demand scalability and lower investment in support and maintenance.
How can it help your organization?
Here are some of the typical features of a board management tool that can help your business big time.
Scheduling board meetings: comes with simpler automation tools for sending or receiving proposed meeting emails and other visual aids, including calendars. Member directory: information of every board member such as name, address, contact, the position held, etc. Virtual room: conducting online discussions and meetings, and for permission and access controls. Committee management: promotes smooth communication and organization of board committees such as executive committees, audit committees, committees for acquisitions and mergers, etc. Collaboration tools: Using tools such as task assignment, commenting, file version history, tracking changes, etc., stakeholders can collaborate on proposals and documents. Document management: It is a better and secure alternative than sharing files through emails and allows you to upload documents and facilitate selective sharing during, after, or before a board meeting. Guest management: Its features allow you to create guest accounts and manage them to extend access privileges and rights to non-board members, auditors, other permanent or temporary executives. Feedback collection: equipped with tools to automate the feedback compilation and solicitation process.
Why does board management need specialized software?
The technological advancements and increased competition in the market demand organizations to conduct their business differently. Offline meetings are no longer the only option available, plus you can’t afford to waste time and resources. The majority of us are working from home. Hence, board management software seems like a wise choice for you. Let’s look at the benefits that scream you must have this software.
Easy and quick access to board data
The documents and information are placed centrally in board meeting software. As a result, it facilitates easy and quick access to those data to help members make decisions faster. It saves you time instead of asking your admins to provide all those materials.
Reduced preparation time for scheduling meetings
The software reduces the preparatory time on scheduling meetings, which can be done within minutes rather than hours. You no longer have to go through the pains of assembling documents or shipping and printing their copies. Everything is available in the cloud for you to help expedite the meeting arrangements, systemize committees, request votes, share files, ask for feedback, and conduct surveys.
Data access control and enhanced security
You have the full control to add members, remove them, share information with specific people, control passwords, and so on. Everything is also secure with industry-grade encryption used by most service providers that also comply with the regulations. Besides, if anything goes south, you have the option of data recovery. You can schedule automatic backups to prevent your organization from losing out on important data.
Cost-effectiveness
Board management software saves your resources invested on travel, accommodation of members, plus the expenditure on printing or shipping the documents. It also saves you a lot of time that you can invest in growing your organization. Apart from that, cloud software also comes at an affordable cost while saving extra expenses on maintenance. Next, let’s find some of the decent board management software for your business.
Boardable
Are you looking for an affordable and easy-to-use board management software? Try Boardable. This software is great for non-profit organizations that can equip their team with the right set of tools to focus on managing and leading. Built for non-profit leaders by non-profit leaders, Boardable centralizes the communication between your board and you. With intuitive tools, you are more empowered to work with better efficiency and collaborate with committee members and your board. Find the most preferred meeting times, store your document securely, participate in productive discussions, and a lot more at a single place. Boardable uses strong browser encryption, which is why your data remains safe, including any files you may download or upload. In sensitive documents, restrict their access only to certain designated users, and prevent unauthorized access. Customize their dynamic templates or start creating them from scratch to directly help your committee with a private note annotation from the board portal. After having created your agendas, you can email the same to your board members in PDF format with a single click. The communication feature in Boardable helps you save time in scheduling meetings or digging deep to manage attachments. Boardable allows you to integrate with multiple tools seamlessly, such as Google Sheets, Excel, Outlook, Google Calendar, and more. In addition to all these, the software is affordable that starts at just $79/month.
BoardManagement
Collaborate with your board members from anywhere across the globe using BoardManagement. To help you manage your board members in every aspect, the software simplifies the entire process, keeping everyone in the loop. It comes with a comprehensive, secure, and simple portal so you can conduct meetings, collaborations, document management, record keeping, etc., with ease. The service provider adheres to stringent security policies to protect your data, including files, credential records, personal information, and conversations.
BoardManagement devotes itself to provide you with the best practices for governance to maintain your organization’s sustainability and health. Collect attendees, track events and meetings, add materials, etc., with in-depth details, timely notifications, and 1-click RSVPs. Post proposals and updates, organize discussions based on topics and synchronize communications using your personal email. Store board documents safely, create member directories, connect with them through personalized profiles, follow their activities, and whatnot. Furthermore, you can also create tasks, assign them to people, add documents, set deadlines, and communicate to ask about the task progress. Drag and drop files, keep them organized in folders, upload a file from comment, event, or discussion; organize your documents by tags, and a lot more.
BoardPaq
The paperless and cost-effective solution to centralize and manage your board information and data is BoardPaq. This next-gen tool offers an easy-to-use cloud service to facilitate seamless communication and collaboration among your board members during, before, and after your meetings. BoardPaq prioritizes maintaining the confidentiality and security of your board data. You also have the option to adjust the security features of the software to meet your exact needs. They provide straightforward apps for web browsers, windows, and iPad with one-touch options for faster execution. Irrespective of your skill level, you can use the simple layout of BoardPaq for navigation in a matter of moments. The intelligent admin center of BoardPaq allows you to manage or organize everything in one central place. You can split up the tasks across your groups using multi admin permissions. The platform also allows you to manage last-minute modifications and update them in real-time. Save your time using tools such as agenda builder, reporting, minutes builder, and more. BoardPaq is great for organizations, including banks, K-12 schools, healthcare, profit, and non-profit organizations, local government, and more.
BoardPAC
BoardPAC is an award-winning solution for board management that can simplify, secure, and digitize meetings for a board of directors. It is available to use in around 40 countries across the globe. And offers the highest security and confidentiality standards with user-friendly functionalities. It supports cross-platform devices, iPads, Android, and Windows, and is a great software for corporate governance meetings. With easy-to-set-up agendas and uploading them and meeting and resolution, management is some of the key aspects that have attracted big companies towards BoardPAC. The software also provides you with the facilities of meeting minutes and tracking assigned tasks and actions. It allows you to incorporate board voting through the board portal directly and board approvals and surveys. You can also send automated reminders or follow-ups for better results. Another impressive feature of BoardPAC is the pre-board facility. It allows divisional heads to submit the documents seamlessly before the board meeting. You can also set up upcoming meeting dates plus get member confirmations for their availability.
Similarly, the post-board facility allows you to compile the communications through emails with interactive templates post-meeting completion. You can also include approvals and outcomes in those compilations, allow access, and track the communication between board organizers and divisions. BoardPAC lets presenters acknowledge that they are in the next slot with the system sending status alerts. This way, company secretaries and organizers could communicate easily with the lined-up presents via a message, without leaving their board meeting. The platform facilitates easy navigation and access to a meeting or resolution requiring their attention with a simple click. You can move new agendas that are under review or awaiting approvals. Get a 360-degree of actions through the agendas, including documents, annotations, version comparisons, comments, past papers, and more. BoardPAC also allows you to add videos in your agenda to put out important information or a person’s speech who could not attend the meeting. Include e-signatures as well as approvals, compare a page side-by-side for a better review. Leverage the presenter screen to share your screen with everyone or chosen members in a meeting. It allows encrypted chat between participants, groups, organizers, etc., during, before, and after a meeting.
Diligent
The simple, secure, and efficient platform of Diligent is built for executive and board meetings. It allows you to expand your reach beyond the boardroom and typical meeting needs like distributing materials in the board meeting inside a safe environment. Carry out board evaluations, view industry-leading thought leadership, and complete D&O queries. Get real-time analytics for your company and the industry you serve in, along with curated resources and news to stay updated with the current business scenarios. Use real-time insights to create customized reports and alerts for specific events or corporate health modifications. Leverage their artificial intelligence to improve your key insights, trends, and development while eliminating time-taking tasks.
You can integrate data from multiple business elements such as legal, finance, tax, compliance, and treasury in one record system. This wholesome integration conveys your subsidiary information and critical entities securely. Work on improving governance oversights like director interlocks or board diversity by accessing director data. Diligent Entities can help you centralize, structure, and manage your corporate record effectively to enhance entity governance while ensuring better compliance, decision making, and risk prevention. Diligent provides a secure, streamlined, and digital meeting process with agenda management, status updates, document collation, and material publication concerning the meeting within minutes.
Conclusion
I hope all the information on board management software and its features and benefits are helpful to you. Keeping this information and your exact requirements in mind, choose any one of the solutions I have explained above. It will help you expedite your meetings, facilitate smooth collaboration and decision making, and stay ahead in the race.