Five Benefits of Paperless Board Meetings
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My readers will recall my three-part series (some of the most popular on my blog) titled: Why I Went Paperless and You Can Too. I am still paperless and even more proficient than before. I’ve elevated working without paper to the next level.
My school board meetings are now paperless. No more emailing documents, making copies, creating binders, etc. Everything related to school board business is at our fingertips—all of the time.
Our board members are delighted. For a year now we have been using DirectorPoint for our school board paperless workflow. It has revolutionized the way we prepare for board meetings and communicate before and after the meetings. We are saving time and money.
I asked John Peinhardt, President of DirectorPoint, and a new sponsor of the Christian School Journal (thank you!), to share the benefits of paperless board meetings. Here is his guest post.
Guest Article by John Peinhardt, DirectorPoint
Binders and emails simply do not address the communication requirements of modern, progressive, boards. In a move to improve board communications, increase board member engagement, and streamline board administration, all types and sizes of organizations are adopting board software. This article highlights five key benefits of board software.
1. Easily Access Important Board Information
With board software, board members can easily access all the important information necessary to effectively govern. While traditional boards are confined to the information provided for a specific meeting, board members using board software can instantly access everything from past meeting materials to strategic plans, policy manuals, orientation materials, audit reports, and more.
2. Streamline Administration
Board software allows administrators to easily create and organize committees, meetings, votes, surveys, shared files, and private discussions.
Meeting preparation time is reduced from hours to minutes. Agendas can be created once and saved as templates for future use. Meeting books are built by simply dragging and dropping files into the system. Files automatically convert to PDF as they are uploaded. Administrators can save draft meeting books until a final version is ready to publish.
Board software eliminates a number of administrative headaches; like printing, binding, and emailing multiple PDFs. Also, with board software there is no more concern about last minute revisions to meeting materials, since updates can be make quickly and shared instantly. With board software, board members always know to look to the software – not the board secretary – for the latest version of a meeting book.
3. Increase Board Member Engagement
Intuitive vote, survey, and discussion tools allow board members to be engaged in new and exciting ways. No longer is member collaboration confined to the boardroom. Vote and survey tools allow members to provide candid feedback at their convenience. The discussion tool allows members to privately share thoughts and collaborate with other members outside of board meetings. These tools help organizations leverage board member knowledge, feedback, and connections in ways that provide considerable advantages over traditional boards relying solely on meetings.
4. Control Access to Information
Board software provides granular controls over information. Administrators can easily add or remove members, edit profiles, and assist with forgotten passwords. Members can be assigned to one or more committees. Committee information is private and can only be viewed by the committee’s members.
Meeting materials can be scheduled for automatic archival or deletion. Permissions can be set at the document level, allowing administrators to share documents with specific individuals within a committee. Administrators can configure settings to suit their organization’s security requirements; such as enabling or disabling printing, emailing, and annotations.
5. Reduce Costs
In the past, labor and materials were expended to create volumes of paper to be distributed for meetings. With board software, information is shared instantly and securely with members, significantly reducing costs and speeding up the distribution process. Organizations using board software experience a significant return on investment from materials and labor savings alone. Additionally, with the current trend toward green initiatives, reducing the use of paper helps the environment and generates goodwill among key stakeholders.
The advantages of board software are clear. Board software streamlines administration, eliminates key pain points, improves communications, increases engagement, and enhances organizational governance. With these benefits, it makes perfect sense that the majority of Fortune 500 companies and other progressive for-profit and non-profit organizations are adopting board software.
With a diverse, global, client base ranging from international public corporations to small non-profits, Directorpoint is an established leader in the rapidly growing board portal software market. For any organization seeking to obtain maximum value from their board of directors it is well worth contacting Directorpoint for a brief demonstration.