Customer Stories
APTA Geriatrics
APTA Geriatrics board members now have easy access to up-to-date board materials anytime from anywhere thanks to OnBoard.
Customer Stories
APTA Geriatrics board members now have easy access to up-to-date board materials anytime from anywhere thanks to OnBoard.
Industry: Health care
Headquarters: Madison, Wisconsin
Board Management Goals
Results
APTA Geriatrics is an academy of the American Physical Therapy Association that was formed in 1978 to address the needs of geriatric physical therapy practitioners. The Madison, Wisconsin-based group has 7,000 members, and is the second-largest academy under the larger APTA umbrella.
“We champion exceptional practices that empower every person to achieve what matters most,” said Christina McCoy, APTA Geriatrics executive director. “We’re optimizing the experience of aging. Physical therapy is more than just getting your exercises. It’s enabling people to move throughout their day.”
The APTA Geriatrics board of directors consists of nine members, who serve three-year terms with term limits of six years, unless the director is transitioning into an officer’s position, in which case they can serve nine years. The volunteer board meets once every two months, with every other meeting being a more comprehensive gathering that lasts a day to a day and-a-half. The other meetings typically last 90 minutes to two hours.
Board members are expected to devote seven to 25 hours per month on their board work. Most board members also serve on other boards, so it’s vital that their access to materials be easy, and pre-meeting preparation must be comprehensive.
Christina describes her role in her working relationship with the board as that of a strategic advisor. Prior to OnBoard, the board worked with PDFs and emails as its primary means of the communication. With up to one-third of the board turning over every year due to term limits, onboarding new members was a challenge under the old system.
“You want to have everything quick and easy to get everyone up to speed, so by the time they’re serving, they can have a quicker on-ramp,” Christina says. “Taking minutes and turning around board materials the traditional way was incredibly slow and painful. Even when I would get board materials out a week in advance, it was very hard for board members to get prepared for the meeting in time because there was nothing up until then. There would just be this drop of materials, and it was sometimes difficult to understand where the materials match with the agenda. The board books were quite long, so sometimes they’re reading something and not realizing where it met with the agenda.”
Christina sought a single source of truth, primarily to reduce confusion. “If something got changed last-minute, the board book got updated, but someone might have been preparing from Version 1. It didn’t give you the opportunity to have the most recent information, because I would prep farther in advance than I do now. Sometimes that means running reports three weeks out instead of the day before. I wanted a one-stop shop.”
— Christina McCoy, Executive Director, APTA Geriatrics
Christina has used OnBoard at three other organizations and introduced it to APTA Geriatrics in 2022. She took an unconventional, but effective approach in introducing it to board members.
“I got them excited about using this before I said, ‘We’re just using this tool,’” she says, adding the initial implementation process took about a year. “We picked the first meeting of a board transition to introduce it, so it wasn’t midway through a term. I started with the basic level with the full intent of adding features along the way and expect that to be the one source of truth.
“I wanted people to get comfortable with it and use that as an opportunity to tweak it along the way,” she added. “We still use board time once a year during our board orientation to give the board an opportunity to orient new board members to OnBoard. It’s the linchpin to the information.”
In addition, Christina shows an eight-to-11-minute “board prep” video during which they upload all the necessary meeting materials to OnBoard. Board members can then see some of the board materials before they’re all made available, and recognize focus areas during their board meeting prep, typically one week in advance of the meeting.
She also likes that OnBoard enables her to see who has viewed board meeting materials in advance, so she can check in with those who haven’t to see if there’s anything she can do to help.
“It’s an opportunity to reach out to those who haven’t reviewed materials and just touch base and be a human” she says. “It’s more than just being a guardian and making sure people are doing their jobs. You can’t be a good board member if you’re not prepared. How can I help you be better prepared?
“In today’s age, where volunteers’ time is stretched thin, you have to make that ramp for them to prepare for meetings and stay informed quicker, or you’re going to get people who glance through things, and then you don’t make good decisions,” Christina added.
With new board members constantly joining, Christina is constantly training new members on how OnBoard works. She said she was pretty sure none of the board members use OnBoard when serving on their other boards.
That puts ease of use at a premium for everyone involved.
“Every year, I need to remind myself that OnBoard is brand new to somebody, and that they don’t know anything [about it,]” Christina says. “I start from the basics, tell them what it is, give them an orientation that’s separate from the rest of the board.”
Start your journey and unlock unparalleled security, insights, and efficiency with OnBoard.
