Product Review of AGB OnBoard

AGB OnBoard software provides boards and leadership teams with AGB-trusted content that can be used to transform meetings from operational presentations to strategic working sessions. It helps leaders use technology to make intelligent and informed decisions in pursuit of their institution’s strategic goals.
Website: https://agb.org/onboard/
What Users Love About the App
“Overall, the simplicity of OnBoard is its strongest feature. With minimal training, our admins were able to quickly begin creating meetings and board packs. Simply put, OnBoard is a highly effective system that does exactly what we need it to do, without a mass amount of unnecessary features.”
“We used to produce a printed/bound board book for each meeting, which required materials to be submitted far in advance and last-minute changes could not be included. OnBoard gives me the flexibility to continue to make changes right up to the meeting date. Board members are able to access the virtual board book from wherever they are using the device that they prefer. We are also able to use OnBoard for committee/cabinet meetings and capture any votes that take place directly in OnBoard.”
“OnBoard is easy to administer and easy to use. It allows me to configure the different areas as I need to and grant granular permissions. It is a great value for the non-profit business that needs to be agile with reliable access to all the items board members could need.”
“The ease of use of OnBoard is great. The flexibility of the tools allow us to use the software for surveys, signatures, and document storage. This places all of our materials in one location.”
“OnBoard is user-friendly and quite intuitive; it has been a life-saver when making last-minute changes to meeting agendas and materials; it’s compatible with both Apple and Android devices. Also, going paperless has saved us a significant amount of time and money.”
“I have been surprised with how quickly OnBoard became an essential tool for our organization and how quickly our Board of Directors embraced this new technology for not only distributing our meeting materials, but also as a secure platform that allows our Directors to access information and records. Prior to using OnBoard, we were compiling our meeting materials into binders for each individual Director and every attendee to the meeting; not only was it time consuming and costly to produce these binders, but we would often incur an expense to print something that would be outdated by the time the meeting occurred. With OnBoard, we can update information in our Board Book with a few clicks of the mouse. I have heard from multiple members of our Board how much they appreciate OnBoard and feel the platform has enabled us to create a cleaner, more appealing, and more streamlined presentation of our meeting materials.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“The data collection from meeting analytics continues to be a concern for us. From a legal standpoint, it increases exposure to our users and we feel very strongly that it should be an optional feature. The essence of this concern comes from a scenario where our board of directors becomes subject to litigation that centers around whether the directors met their duties. If OnBoard is retaining data about a director’s usage of the platform, including, among other types of data, how much of a meeting book a director read or did not read, then that data is something that a plaintiff could try to use to show that a director failed to meet his or her duties, even though a director may have actually met their duties in some other way. This must be an issue for other users as well and should be at the forefront of OnBoard’s improvement developments.”
“1. Honestly, it’s a bit on the pricey side. 2. When an agenda item (title, time, position on agenda, presenter, supporting document, etc.) changes, the software rebuilds the entire board book and any annotations/notes a user makes then disappear—even if their annotations were made to a section that wasn’t changed. It would be great if there was a way to retain an individual user’s notes/annotations. 3. In the Analytics section, instead of just an Aggregate Count of Book Views by Role and an Aggregate Count of Meeting Views by Role, I would LOVE to be able to see exactly who has viewed board books and meetings so we can track who is engaged on the portal and reach out to those who are not to see if they need additional training or assistance navigating the portal.”
“OnBoard constantly wants to send out updates on behalf of our organization when I make updates to a meeting agenda, visibility, or materials. The mandate within our organization is to have communication directly with our Directors so we know what is being communicated. It would be great if I could set a default to not be asked about notifying our members as often as I am; however, I think it is important to note that when I do encounter an issue or want to provide feedback about how we want to be able to use the platform, everyone I have encountered with OnBoard has been extremely open and welcome the feedback.”
“There is very little to dislike, however, the left to right menu layout can be slightly confusing to some users who may be more familiar with a traditional top-down/webpage layout.”
“The only item I wish could be better is the integration with Zoom. The feature works fine but when board members or hosts use the Zoom link inside OnBoard they lose some functionality. To get around this I have taken to posting the Zoom link for the meeting in its title and ask the board members to copy and paste the link into their browser. If they don‘t want full use of all Zoom options they are welcome to use the link provided inside the portal.”