Vanguard University
When Vanguard University needed to replace a sunsetting legacy board platform, Chief of Staff and Board Professional, Shree Carter, used the transition as an opportunity to rethink more than the technology. Through early communication, stakeholder involvement, committee pilots, and hands-on training, Vanguard achieved 98% trustee adoption by its first full board meeting with OnBoard.
Industry: Higher Education
Board Management Goals
Results
OnBoard Capabilities Utilised
Shree Carter
Chief of Staff and Board Professional
Vanguard University
Shree Carter has spent more than 20 years supporting Vanguard University’s Board of Trustees. In that time, she has helped guide the board through five generations of platforms for delivering board materials electronically.
Earlier in her tenure, committee meetings could end with staff working until one or two in the morning assembling binders for as many as 50 people before returning for an 8:00 a.m. meeting the next day. That experience shaped a philosophy Shree has carried through every technology transition since: board materials should make it easier for trustees to receive and prepare for their meetings, not create more work for the people supporting them.
By the time Vanguard began evaluating OnBoard, the university was already working electronically. But its longtime board platform was showing signs of decline.
Shree noticed the warning signs before the formal announcement arrived.
Product development had slowed. Investment in new capabilities appeared to be declining. Communications were changing.
Approximately two years before the platform was officially phased out, she expressed her concerns with Vanguard’s president that another platform transition was likely coming.
This would be Shree’s fifth platform build.
She wanted to make this one count.
In previous technology decisions, Shree had largely researched the options herself and brought a recommendation to the president for final decision.
This time, she widened the circle.
Committee support staff joined the evaluation. Vanguard’s senior IT leader helped assess security and compliance considerations. Shree also brought in trustees with technology experience to provide an end-user perspective.
Vanguard was required to evaluate three vendors, but Shree needed a way to make sure the team was asking the right questions consistently across each option. The university used OnBoard’s Vendor Comparison Worksheet as a foundation for the evaluation.
“When I came across that document, I was like, oh, these are the questions I need to be asking each vendor. These are the things I need to be looking for.”
For Shree, the worksheet helped broaden the evaluation beyond her own list of priorities and gave the team a more structured way to compare its options.
Vanguard ultimately prioritized a platform that could work across devices and locations, support a multigenerational board, simplify meeting preparation, provide strong security and access controls, and deliver responsive support.
Support became particularly important during the evaluation. As Shree’s team compared vendors, they began treating responsiveness during the sales process as a preview of the experience trustees might have later.
“If they’re not responding to you during the vetting process, how do you expect them to respond to us or the trustees when we have questions regarding their platform?”
OnBoard’s combination of security and responsive support ultimately became two of Vanguard’s deciding factors.
Selecting a platform was only the beginning.
Vanguard’s board meets three times each year, so Shree used that cadence to introduce the transition well before trustees were expected to change how they worked.
Trustees received advance notice that a new platform was coming. Once the implementation was underway, Vanguard used September committee meetings as a training and testing ground before the full board convened in October.
The Finance Committee went first, followed by the Committee on Trustees and Executive Committee. That meant nearly half the board received practical experience with OnBoard before the first full board meeting. Additional training sessions brought the rest of the trustees along.
Shree also created a practice meeting where trustees could explore the platform without worrying about making a mistake.
“You’re not going to break anything. Get in there, test it, figure out what things do.”
That sandbox helped turn training into experience rather than instruction alone.
It also gave Vanguard a chance to find problems before they reached the boardroom. During the first Finance Committee meeting, for example, the team discovered that Zoom integration permissions needed to be adjusted. Vanguard worked with IT to correct the configuration before the full board meeting.
By the time trustees arrived for the October meeting, Vanguard achieved 98% board adoption.
The biggest obstacle had not been resistance. It was confidence.
Trustees were willing to make the change, but some were understandably unsure about learning another platform. Shree addressed that uncertainty personally, reinforcing the training and helping trustees build confidence through use.
As they did, she began hearing a different message: the platform was intuitive and easy to navigate.
Vanguard’s multigenerational board included trustees with different levels of comfort using technology. But those differences didn’t stand in the way of adoption. One of the trustees Shree had initially been most concerned about quickly embraced the platform, regularly reviewing materials electronically and coming to meetings without a printed book.
“I think what surprised me the most was how quickly everyone latched onto the new platform.”
The first meeting also taught Shree an important change-management lesson.
She had initially expected trustees to walk into the boardroom and work entirely without paper.
That proved too ambitious.
When the board chair struggled with the new process during the first meeting, Shree quickly adjusted. Instead of reverting to printing entire board books, she began preparing a limited set of flagged action documents specifically for the chair.
That small accommodation helped the chair lead the meeting with confidence while the broader transition continued.
Today, Shree says she no longer prints meeting materials.
It is a distinction she would carry into another implementation: successful adoption does not require every person to change in exactly the same way on day one.
Once trustees became comfortable with OnBoard, Shree began seeing opportunities beyond the original use case.
Vanguard’s President’s Cabinet and Cabinet Council already included many of the same people supporting the board. Instead of maintaining a separate process for those meetings, Shree began moving that work into OnBoard as well.
Today, she uses it for recurring leadership meetings and workflows including position control items, grant approvals, academic program approvals, surveys, and action items.
What began as a board-platform replacement became part of Shree’s everyday operating environment.
“Every day, one of the first things I do is open OnBoard and log in. I have it open all day.”
Before OnBoard, Shree was the only person uploading documents and launching meetings, spending at least 40 hours over the two weeks leading up to a board meeting collecting information and organizing materials. With OnBoard, she now spends about five hours over that same period because support staff can share the workload using the guidelines she established for board committee meetings.
That allows Shree to focus primarily on the plenary meeting, which reuses many of the materials already prepared for committee meetings.
Vanguard’s next phase is focused on AI.
The first practical use case was meeting minutes. Shree was often responsible for capturing a meeting while simultaneously being pulled in different directions to support it. She had previously relied on additional devices to record conversations so she did not miss discussions or action items.
Using OnBoard’s recording and AI-supported minutes capabilities gave her another way to capture that work within the meeting process.
Now Vanguard is considering a larger question: how should AI fit into board work at all?
Shree wants trustees and staff to benefit from AI without casually moving sensitive board materials into outside tools.
Her approach is pragmatic.
“Don’t be afraid of it, but…you need to be aware of where your information is going, because once it’s out there, it’s out there.”
Vanguard added the full OnBoard AI capabilities and is still early in that journey. At the same time, the university is developing a board-specific AI policy alongside broader institutional AI guidance.
For Shree, AI is the next chapter of the same work she has been doing throughout her career: finding better ways to support the board while keeping people, process, and governance at the center.
For other board professionals considering a new platform, Shree’s advice goes beyond choosing software.
Involve the people who will support it. Include the people who will use it. Communicate early and often. Understand what training and ongoing support will look like. Give trustees an opportunity to learn before the stakes are high.
And once you’ve chosen the direction, commit to the change.
Vanguard’s 98% first-meeting adoption did not happen because every trustee approached technology the same way.
It happened because Vanguard treated adoption as part of the implementation itself.
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