Customer Stories
Higher Learning Commission
OnBoard’s Board Assessments, Notes and Annotations, and Minutes Builder capabilities help this agency streamline its board’s decision-making process.
Customer Stories
OnBoard’s Board Assessments, Notes and Annotations, and Minutes Builder capabilities help this agency streamline its board’s decision-making process.
Industries: Higher Education, Associations
Headquarters: Chicago
Board Management Goals
Results
The Higher Learning Commission serves as an independent accrediting agency for institutions of higher learning. It is an institutional accreditor representing colleges and universities across the United States.
“We accredit a wide variety of institutions, from research 1 schools to very small, rural community colleges, private colleges, and institutions of theology,” says Mary Claire Millies, Executive Assistant to the President and Board Professional. “We accredit the entire institution, so it’s not just one specific program. It’s the whole school.”
HLC’s mission is to “advance the common good through quality assurance of higher education as the leader in equitable, transformative, and trusted accreditation in the service of students and member institutions.”
In the process of accrediting institutions, HLC is comprehensive. “Our Peer Reviewers dive into financials, they look at the institution’s physical footprint, ,” Mary Claire says. “They talk to students; they talk to the board.”
“HLC really cares about our member institutions,” she adds. “ We are interested in helping them and their students succeed.”
The 19-member board’s duties include deciding if an institution is in danger of not meeting HLC’s Criteria for Accreditation and if a sanction is warranted. “Before each board meeting,” Mary Claire says, “we ask our trustees to take a deep dive into the institutional case materials, and sometimes it can be thousands and thousands of pages. OnBoard handles it beautifully.”
Before OnBoard, Mary Claire’s predecessor served in her capacity for over a decade. The board used a different board management solution at that time.
“There were endless numbers of spreadsheets for every little thing, and it was just too much,” Mary Claire says. “[Once we discovered OnBoard] we made the switch.”
Mary Claire proceeded cautiously. The HLC board used the previous solution and OnBoard simultaneously for about year before finalizing the change. She was also deliberate about utilizing OnBoard’s free trial to ensure she — and the board — got the most out of the experience.
She says she appreciated the opportunity to “test-drive” OnBoard before purchasing it.
“I used a committee where I had a mix of tech-savvy and not-tech-savvy members, and lots of documents,” Mary Claire says of her free trial usage. “I made sure to use a committee that was a fairly good representation of our board in terms of skills. I did an assessment of how they felt about OnBoard, and it was all positive. The questions I got were good questions, and by getting their feedback, we were able to have more buy-in.”
The committee approved OnBoard. But that wasn’t the only positive feedback Mary Claire heard about the switch.
“We have three trustees who are on other boards that use OnBoard,” she said. “When we brought it up, they were so excited. They weren’t even in the test group.”
Mary Claire remained deliberate and made sure everyone involved agreed with the switch throughout the process.
“Change is always hard, especially when you’re createing something new,” she says. “We try to be gentle when we make those kinds of changes.”
— Mary Claire Millies, Executive Assistant to the President, Board Professional, Higher Learning Commission
Whenever boards change how they manage their meetings, it will affect everyone from the directors to the corporate secretary. OnBoard’s clear communication helped HLC’s board manage the switch seamlessly.
“I don’t think at any point I was confused about what was going to happen next,” Mary Claire says. “We consider ourselves an agile organization. Being agile enabled us to introduce OnBoard incrementally, and everyone at OnBoard was extremely helpful as we brought folks into the new platform. It was a wonderful process.”
The OnBoard Academy, a series of training videos that users can take and earn certifications, also assisted a couple of the board members.
Mary Claire adds that she will occasionally refer to the videos for her own reference as well as sharing with trustees
“A trustee was on a plane, and they just watched the OnBoard videos to get up to speed,” she says.
The results? Everyone is comfortable with the technology — and if they aren’t, they know who to call.
“The trustees don’t have trouble with the technology anymore,” Mary Claire says. “I tell them, ‘Anytime you are confused about something, call me.’ But I’m not sending PDFs.”
The Higher Learning Commission board was already sold on OnBoard once it completed the transition. But there were more pleasant surprises in store afterward — particularly as they related to board assessments, a vital process in the higher ed industry.
“In higher ed, continuous improvement is key,” Mary Claire says. “We hammer this home to our membership regarding assessment of students, of programs … we would be remiss if we weren’t working to continuously improve ourselves regularly.”
HLC uses the board assessment capability after each trustees meeting to perform individual assessments, along with assessing the board as a whole. They also assess special board trainings.
“We were [previously] just using yes-or-no answers, which really doesn’t give you any kind of gray area,” Mary Claire says. “I had a trustee say, ‘This doesn’t really tell me anything.’ I used OnBoard to help redo our questions. The questions are so much more robust, they’re more detailed questions. Some of these things have led to policy changes, and I credit the questionnaire.”
Mary Claire also cited the notes and annotations capability as a favorite among the board members. “They’re taking notes, writing questions like, ‘What does this mean?’ ‘Are we concerned about this?’” she says.
Finally, as with most organizations, HLC appreciates the Minutes Builder capability, which enables boards to create, review, and share minutes in real time.
They haven’t used the Automated Minutes capability much yet, but Mary Claire anticipates they’ll work with it more in the future.
“Minutes are always the bane of any board professional’s existence,” she says. “I would love the option of having them summarized for me … sometimes you miss nuances.”
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