A Consumers Guide to Board Portals

A Consumers Guide to Board Portals May 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS Considering Board Portals ............................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................4 What Do These Systems Do? ..............................................................................................................6 How to Choose ..................................................................................................................................... 10 Recommendations ...............................................................................................................................12 Comparison Matrix ............................................................................................................................. 14 Index of Board Portals .....................................................................................................................15 Reviews of the Board Portals .........................................................................................................18 Accelus BoardLink .............................................................................................................................. 19 BoardEffect ...........................................................................................................................................24 Boardvantage ...................................................................................................................................... 30 Diligent Boardbooks .......................................................................................................................... 36 Directors Desk ..................................................................................................................................... 42 Passageways OnBoard .......................................................................................................................47 Appendices .......................................................................................................................................53 Appendix A: Methodology ................................................................................................................ 54 Appendix B: How We Evaluated the Systems .............................................................................. 55 Appendix C: Other Ways to Collaborate ....................................................................................... 58 Appendix D: About This Report ...................................................................................................... 64 PAGE 2 A Consumers Guide to Board Portals • May 2015 CONSIDERING BOARD PORTALS INTRODUCTION A foundation’s board of directors requires a lot of collaboration—with other board members, committee Board portals are tools members, and foundation staff. That collaborative work requires the ability to review, comment on, and even vote designed specifically on an enormous amount of material. Everyone involved wants that information to be easily accessible, readable, for organization staff and actionable. Historically, preparing it could put a burden on foundation staff. to manage and create Board members are often spread out geographically, add- board documents ing another challenge to successful collaboration. Even if board meetings are held face-to-face, much of the work and to help board between meetings is done virtually. Software can bridge the distance and unite dispersed collaborators by making members share, read, it easy to present, review, and comment on information. The software market is full of tools designed for collabo- and annotate board ration, from email and document sharing apps to online conferencing and project management systems. Many of books and other these can be tailored to meet the more specific needs of a board. But a breed of tools has been designed specifically meeting documents for the board environment. electronically. At its core, this type of tool—called a board portal— helps organization staff manage and create board documents and lets board members share, read, and annotate board books and other meeting documents electronically. Almost all of these systems provide streamlined, easy- to better meet the needs of foundation and nonprofit to-use interfaces to let even the least tech-savvy board boards. However, while there are more tools than ever member collaborate and mark up documents on a before for smaller foundations and larger nonprofits, the mobile device. Since most of these tools originated in the more fully-featured tools can still cost tens of thousands of for-profit sector and were designed for banks and corpo- dollars a year. As a result, there are several distinct classes of rate boards subject to stringent regulations, they provide tools available, each suited to boards of different sizes and robust permission and security settings that make it easy with different needs. to ensure the appropriate users or committee members How do you decide which is right for your organization? are accessing sensitive documents. The first step in choosing any software tool, of course, is As the pricing of these tools has come down in recent understanding your own needs. In this detailed report, years, the nonprofit sector has become increasingly we provide a glimpse into the features and functionality interested in them. Vendors have responded by adapting different systems provide to help you get a sense of what PAGE 4 A Consumers Guide to Board Portals • May 2015 to look for in a board portal. We then dive in for a closer look at specific systems and do an apples-to-apples comparison of features to help you understand what might work for you, as well as what differentiates each system. We began our research by conducting nearly a dozen interviews with foundation staff and board members who had recently gone through the board portal selection process to learn about the features and functionality most needed in such a system. From those interviews, we developed a list of 89 requirements against which we re- viewed the systems. We chose to review six systems most commonly used by foundations—Accelus BoardLink, BoardEffect, Boardvantage, Diligent Boardbooks, Direc- tors Desk, and Passageways OnBoard—and conducted two-hour demos of each. For more information about our selection process or other research methodology, see Appendix A beginning on page 54. In the next section, we’ll look at the different features and functionality each of the systems we chose provides to meet your foundation’s particular needs. If you’re not sure your foundation even needs board portal software, you might consider some of the more general tools designed to facilitate collaboration. There’s a whole host of options available. We’ve included an article about them called Board Portals and Other Tools for Collabora- tion beginning on page 58—consider starting there. PAGE 5 A Consumers Guide to Board Portals • May 2015 WHAT DO THESE SYSTEMS DO? As you assess your own needs, it can be helpful to Some board members may want the ability to print understand the typical features and functions that out hard copies of documents. When considering a are available in the different systems on the market board portal, it’s important to make sure it allows both and compare the functionality between basic and print and online versions of documents to use the more advanced systems. Based on our interviews with same formatting and images. foundation staff and other subject matter experts, we compiled a detailed list of requirements. Generally, Calendars those requirements fall under a handful of categories of features and functions described below. Board members are busy people. They want to easily see upcoming meeting schedules and to RSVP for Reading and Annotating board and committee meetings. Most board portals make this functionality prominent and easy to use. Documents Some tools also allow users to assign or view tasks and A lot of work goes into creating board books and due dates directly in their calendars—for example, other materials. Making it easy and intuitive for board to set a due date in the system for when the board members to read and comprehend those documents is secretary should have the previous meeting’s minutes essential. Consider how the system handles the Table ready, or to assign documents or sections for an of Contents for a document. Is it just a listing of upcoming board book to particular users. sections and page numbers, or does it support a drill- down model where users can click an item to jump to Creating Board Books a specific section or document? Does the system create those links in the Table of Contents automatically, Assembling a board book and related meeting materi- or does an administrative user need to manually link als is among the most important roles of a board each section or document individually? portal. You may need to create, upload, and organize hundreds of documents for every board meeting, Documents should also be easy to search through and which is why it’s essential that the system make this navigate. Most board portals will let you search for a process as smooth and practical as possible. You could specific word or phrase within an open document, but always compile multiple documents and assign page can you search all documents at once? In addition,

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