Valparaiso University, a private, Lutheran institution located about an hour southeast of Chicago, boasts a 25-member board of directors. When Rebekah Arevalo joined Valpo as a board professional about eight years ago, she said the board “thought we were being a revolutionary.”
The board was using a board portal at the time that was built for banking systems. “With some love and duct tape and glue we made it perform like a board portal … it was a series of parent pages and uh subpages that I had to create from scratch and then just link to one another to give the appearance of a board portal.”
Fast-forward a few years, and Valpo, thanks in part to Rebekah’s research, purchased AGB OnBoard, but they didn’t implement it right away. In 2020, the university promoted Rebekah to Chief of Staff, and she decided it was time to make the switch.
“(With AGB OnBoard), we weren’t working in three different systems, and it was just going to make their experience much better,” she said of the other board members. From there, the transition began. “We ran both systems simultaneously and we ran those for a couple of meetings and every committee meeting that is held in advance of our board meetings was held remotely. Part of the agenda was for me to go on and talk to them about AGB OnBoard and give them a quick tutorial.”
During a recent AGB OnBoard webinar, Rebekah shared her experiences with AGB Program Coordinator Rob Wilson, OnBoard Account Executive Matt Maxwell, and other OnBoard attendees.