Customer Stories

St. John’s Grammar School

Efficiency, access, accuracy, and collaboration were among the benefits St. John’s Grammar School experienced when it partnered with OnBoard.

Industry: Private Education/Primary, Secondary

Headquarters: Adelaide, Australia

Board Management Goals

Increase ease of use, time savings
Boost accuracy
Serve a range of technical expertise

Results

50% more efficient
Up to 70% improvement in accuracy
Greater access to information; better collaboration

A focus on the fundamentals: efficiency, accuracy, ease of use

St John’s Grammar School is a private, early learning, primary and secondary school founded in 1958 that has long prided itself on offering students a high standard of education. The school’s 12-member volunteer board meets monthly, excluding December and January, and includes a mix of educational professionals and parents. The board also collaborates with four committees that meet monthly.

Samantha Ellis, Executive Assistant to the school’s Business Director, manages board meetings and sought a board management software that would bring greater efficiency and accuracy to the process. “The main thing for us is that our board members have very different levels of technical expertise,” Ellis says. “So, the first thing I was looking for was ease of use and a nice clean interface. And we needed something that worked across as many platforms and devices as possible.”

“I would definitely recommend OnBoard to other educators. The functionality, ease of use, and devices you can use it on—those are the things they should be looking at. Not bells and whistles.”

— Samantha Ellis Executive Assistant to the Business Director

OnBoard stands out among other board management platforms

Ellis researched about a half dozen board management platforms and interviewed several short-listed companies. She chose OnBoard in mid 2021, and has worked with it almost daily since. “I loved the OnBoard demo,” she recalls. “I did have another demo with a competing company, but the OnBoard interface was a lot better for us.

“Another reason the school selected OnBoard was purely financial, Ellis says. “We wanted to make sure it was value for the money.”

She also wanted to make sure the platform would encourage greater collaboration—messaging and shared notations, for instance—which some of the other competing platforms didn’t offer. “That was critical for us,” she says.

Easy Implementation, and a noticeable improvement in efficiency, accuracy

Implementing OnBoard took only a couple of weeks. “From signing up to using OnBoard live was a pretty quick process,” she states, and she immediately noticed it was a lot quicker and easier to put board packets together.

“It now probably takes me half the time it used to,” she notes. While an efficiency gain of 50% is impressive, Ellis says it is the increased accuracy of the information that has really stood out. She estimates at least a 70% improvement in accuracy.

“We had a lot of issues with versioning before,” she explains. “The system we were using often wouldn’t save a new document over, and I spent time double-checking. It was very easy to make mistakes. Now I am more confident that what I’m putting out is accurate. That is critical.”

“Now I am more confident that what I’m putting out is accurate. That is critical.”

— Samantha Ellis, Executive Assistant to the Business Director

Features that ‘make life a lot simpler’

One of Ellis’s favorite OnBoard features is the agenda builder, which brings simplicity and ease to what could be an arduous process. “I like the fact that I can just drop and drag everything. I just love that feature. It makes life a lot simpler.”

She also enjoys OnBoard’s analytical capabilities, which enable greater accountability by helping her track which board members have viewed the board materials prior to meetings. “We can see when people have looked at the packets and when they haven’t,” she says. OnBoard even lets her filter out those administrators she already knows have reviewed the documents.

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