What You Need to Know About D&O

  • By: OnBoard Meetings
  • October 27, 2021
Everything You Need to Know About D&O
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Everything You Need to Know About D&O

Webinar recap: Directors & officers questionnaires can be a simple process if your board attacks them the right way. OnBoard Growth Manager Mike Butler demonstrates how.

OnBoard Growth Manager Mike Butler stated one primary goal during his webinar, “Everything You Need to Know About D&O”: “Transform a cumbersome task into a simple, automated, and replicable annual process.”

Butler used most of the 30-minute presentation to demonstrate how OnBoard’s D&O Questionnaire solution works, but he also discussed the program’s benefits, which include:

  • Capabilities uniquely tailored for directors and officers like pre-filled answers, eSignatures, and attachments
  • It’s perfect for sensitive governance surveys like conflict-of-interest questionnaires, financial disclosures, and more.
  • The ability to clone the previous year’s survey and add new questions or attachments to save time
  • The new mobile app, which lets directors answer questions from any device

“It’s a lot of rinse-and-repeat once you get the questionnaire built,” Butler told webinar attendees. “It should save you a lot of time and heartaches, especially when it comes to tracking responses.”

Watch the Everything You Need to Know About D&O webinar On-Demand Now

“It should save you a lot of time and heartaches, especially when it comes to tracking responses.”

– Mike Butler, OnBoard growth manager

How Board Members Can Use D&O

Boards can use the features within D&O several different ways, including:

  • D&O questionnaire: Provides effective identification of relevant individuals’ background information; easily track and manage responses
  • Conflict of interest forms: help identify potential conflicts of interest within your board; secure and confidential submission; easy year-over-year submission
  • Code of conduct: Provide clarification around your organization’s mission, values, and principles; allows respondents to agree and add signatures to completed forms.
  • Advanced questionnaires: new board member information, committee forms, aggregate responses, affix signatures, and import questions and answers from a previous year

“You can use this [solution] for new board member information, loan committees, or any kind of advanced questionnaire,” Butler said. “You can use it to aggregate responses into a single spreadsheet.” He added that users can export responses into an Excel spreadsheet or a zip file.

What’s Coming Next in D&O

Finally, in addition to the demo, Butler covered several features that aren’t yet available, but will be soon. They include:

  • Skills tracking: This feature will include insights to help your succession planning and recruitment efforts. Users will save time by creating and managing skills tracking for their boards; identify skill gaps within their boards, make informed decisions to bring a balance of skills to their boards; streamline member succession planning; quickly find board members who have expertise when events or issues arise; and save time and minimize complexity by storing board composition data in a central, secure location.
  • Board assessments: Users will be able to leverage templates built by governance experts, collect anonymous responses to create open, honest feedback, save time analyzing data with automatic visualizations of results, and reuse and store this information securely in OnBoard.

How Does D&O Work? Is it Secure?

During the demo, Butler showed attendees how to build the questionnaire from scratch, manage permissions, format questions (true/false, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank options), make questions required or optional to answer, attach supporting documents, attach custom messages, notify respondents of an upcoming deadline, and show status of questionnaire (not started, in progress, submitted, reviewed), among other options.

He assured participants that OnBoard’s platform is the most secure they’ll find. “We use Microsoft Azure, which is the highest rated security platform,” he said. “Everything’s in one spot, it’s a secure platform. If someone leaves the company, we have the ability to wipe the information on their OnBoard app remotely.”

Directors & Officers questionnaires can be a simple process if your board attacks them the right way. We show you how.

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About The Author

OnBoard Meetings
OnBoard Meetings
At OnBoard, we believe board meetings should be informed, effective, and uncomplicated. That’s why we give boards and leadership teams an elegant solution that simplifies governance. With customers in higher education, nonprofit, health care systems, government, and corporate enterprise business, OnBoard is the leading board management provider.