BOARDPRO SOFTWARE DELIVERS BOARD EFFICIENCY
on boards, or run your own board meetings, BoardPro is a cloud-based software platform designed to instantly produce greater efficiencies and better governance.
Bruce Sheppard, who set up the New Zealand Shareholders’ Association, sits on multiple boards and uses BoardPro for five boards including BoardPro itself.
“Instead of emails flying back and forth with attachments, now all information is in one place on the portal,” he says. His previous experience with board meetings was that they were often unproductive and lacked direction. “Typically a meeting would wander all over the show.
“[With BoardPro] the agenda is structured and standardised around best practice. You can see and manage action points you’ve been tasked with online,” he explains.
“The prompts and reminders mean you only have action points that will drive behaviour, and that’s what a board should be doing.”
Minute taking is also streamlined through the portal, he says, so minutes are available directly after a meeting and directors have more time to work through what is needed for the next meeting.
Brett Herkt, co-founder and CEO of BoardPro, says the platform is designed to make lives easier.
“Managers and administrators save between 25 to 75 percent of the time taken to manage the board process. Gains range from cloning agendas, to ‘drag and drop’ board pack compilation and automated notifications and reminders.”
These are significant wins for the typical small to medium enterprise (SME) or non-profit administrator who juggles multiple day jobs around the board cycle, says Herkt.
“Those savings alone typically pay for the product and we’ve seen 100 percent retention of active customers since the Beta launch in May 2016.”
Board members also get significant convenience with an online, centralised document repository; there’s no need to record or remember their action items and there’s minimal lag between a meeting and having draft minutes in their hands. “We are now approaching 1,000 active users on the software," says Herkt. With BoardPro, SME and non-profit boards can now streamline board administration – freeing directors to focus on making a more powerful contribution.
And without such a resource small, medium and non-profit boards will often run less effectively, despite the quality of the directors, Herkt says.
“BoardPro has taken best practices from professional boards and simplified and automated them for boards of all sizes.
“It’s not rocket science,” he adds. “Its good principles and common sense, wrapped up in clever technology to make good governance more accessible.
“Success for us is making your board punch above its weight, look brilliant and succeed.”