At the start of the webinar, Maxwell ran a poll to determine what attendees’ current board processes look like. About half have started to use a third-party board portal. The other half use paper-based processes, email, shared drives, or a homegrown solution.

Clearly, boards are all over the map in terms of digital transformation. 

According to Fehn, The College of New Jersey started switching to digital processes quite a while ago. 

“I’ve been in the president’s office for over 27 years now and I’m proud to say I don’t have a trustee on our board who remembers our paper processes,” she said. “We used to kill trees all the time. We’d make piles around our conference room table, bind them, and ship them. Very early on I said, ‘there’s got to be a better way.’”

Initially, the board started scanning materials, burning them onto a CD, and then mailing the CDs to trustees. Then, they began using a homegrown portal. Eventually, the organization started using a dedicated board portal.

“I looked at all of them and I compared it to what I was using,” explained Fehn. “Most of the board portal companies just had too many bells and whistles. It was very clear that trustees needed to get into a product, access what they needed, and get out.” 

Ultimately, the College of New Jersey board chose AGB OnBoard. “We’ve been really pleased with AGB OnBoard,” said Fehn

Kaiser, on the other hand, explained that the Indiana University Foundation continued to use paper-based processes until fairly recently. They eventually started using a board portal, but it wasn’t driving the efficiencies they had hoped for. “I just found that our board members were using it to collect and print,” said Kaiser. “It wasn’t saving the paper I was hoping we would save.”

The Foundation’s board of trustees went in search of a new portal and ultimately chose AGB OnBoard. “It has the best features for me as the administration. And our directors have zero tech issues.”