Boardable headquartered in Indianapolis offers their eponymous board portal and board management application.
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ActiveMeetings
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Wolters Kluwer offers ActiveMeetings, software to organise and manage in-person or virtual Shareholder, Board or other formal meetings by the book. ActiveMeetings is a meeting management tool used by legal departments to organise meetings.
Overall this is a solid board/volunteer portal. It allows staff and volunteers to have an all-in-one place for operations, votes, and meetings. It is also built to allow volunteers to operate without the need for staff to do the work. A committee chair needs to set up a meeting - no problem they can go in, poll committee members, set a date, and with the preset zoom integration establishes the meeting using the company's Zoom account. Tired of building huge board packets of materials with tabs and chapters? No problem the system allows you to build it easily with attachments. Then you don't kill trees to print and mail with the Board able to view the agenda with all attachments in order with a few taps. Overall very solid product and cheaper than many other board portal services. They have some things that can be better, but nothing that should keep someone from adopting the technology.
ActiveMeetings works well when you want to conduct pre-scheduled meets with a clear agenda and want to get inputs from stakeholders to close things quickly. It's not really so useful for general chit-chat or catchups with teammates as the extra features aren't useful in the scenario. It also has some friction when doing cross-org collaboration.
Streamlined agenda building: Instead of spending time sending emails and attachments, I can easily build and share an Agenda with documents appended to specific agenda items. This keeps everyone organized and informed.
Accountability: I can see when board members log into the platform and keep track of who has read which content for increased transparency and accountability.
Real-time edits and updates: As things change or need to be added to an agenda, I can easily make edits and share these changes with board members. I can send them an email on the platform to remind them of new documents or information related to the board meeting.
Boardable provides ample videos, information, and support to enable new members to learn how to navigate the platform. However, not all members are motivated to learn a new software system. Lessons learned with onboarding new members is to do a Spotlight meeting with them that utilizes as many of the popular features our board uses so that they shorten their learning curve. As with anything new, "practice makes permanent!"
We didn't look at other products. I used Boardable for another organization first (as its President) and was thoroughly impressed with the easy-to-use interface, the low cost, and the quick onboarding process. I introduced the platform to our Board Chairman who gave the green light to move forward in 2019, which was a great move to do before the pandemic and our board meeting became virtual for nearly 2 years.
ActiveMeetings offers much more power in terms of setting the course for the meeting, getting real-time inputs from stakeholders, and closing things on the go compared to Zoom or Google Meet. However the interface of ActiveMeetings isn't as clean as intuitive as it is with Zoom, and especially with Google Meet.
