BoardEffect Board Software Overview: Features, Pros and Cons

About BoardEffect

BoardEffect is one of the modern governance solutions optimized for the needs of nonprofits, higher education, credit unions, and healthcare. Notably, the BoardEffect board portal is a Diligent brand, which confirms the excellent quality of the solution, as Diligent is a leading provider of virtual board software.

BoardEffect is an agile board management solution that supports more than 3,500 customers, giving them seamless access to data, features for secure governance and managing documents.

In this way, the board of directors benefits from easy and safe access to documents and automating time-consuming processes. As a result, leaders have time for more important tasks to maintain a steady stream of profits and achieve their primary goals.

What is BoardEffect best for?

The purchase of Board Effect is an investment that guarantees savings in time and money, while simplifying overall board management. Here’s how such a great tool works for each of the industries.

Banking and credit union organizations

For banking, BoardEffect staff provide support for managing best practices, minimizing risk, and maximizing ROI. All this works well with board management solution optimized for protection against hacker attacks. This is essential for banking, as this industry is highly vulnerable to data leaks.

Secondly, BoardEffect, with its class online board management tools, provides a cost-effective scale to adapt to a dynamic banking environment.

Healthcare

Since managing healthcare organizations requires effort, the BoardEffect company aims to make it easy. In such a way, the solution makes communication secure through protection mechanisms and board management efficient through specific tools.

In addition, BoardEffect is HIPPA-compliant, allowing industry workers to expand the possibilities of planning, sharing board materials, and other tasks related to board meetings, agendas, and more.

Nonprofits

BoardEffect’s adaptation to the needs of a nonprofit board and over a decade of experience of working with nonprofits significantly eases board service. For example, board members love working with data, making updates, and staying connected with other members across devices and locations. In addition, they point out that user-friendly design speeds it all up.

Higher education

The BoardEffect team speeds up meeting preparation and interaction through communication services designed for the industry. Thus, leaders and administrators can conveniently manage board resources and board members through user-friendly features, devoting more time to best educational practices promotion.

The main features of BoardEffect

The BoardEffect features primarily work to facilitate collaboration, making it easier for boards to make informed decisions. For this and other purposes, the board portal offers a sufficient number of options.

Features for day-to-day meeting preparation

In the first group, browse the functions for meeting preparation.

  • Planning. BoardEffect software has a dedicated meeting scheduler through which the top level administrator can set the date and time — and the participants, in turn, can respond with one click. Thus, the organizer optimizes attendance through convenient calendar management.
  • Approvals. The tool allows directors to view and approve documents with a digital signature. They can also make comments about which the program immediately informs relevant persons.
  • Task management. With this, the members of the board of directors better monitor the implementation of tasks. So, they can set deadlines and reminders or mark completed assignments for themselves and other members.
  • Archives. The BoardEffect storage holds board books for as long as users need them. Access is open at any time through any device. It applies not only to board books but also to other essential documents.

Tools to prepare for the annual board meeting cycle

The next set of options provides tools for the annual board meeting cycle. One of these is Policy Handbooks — a reliable place to store policies, procedures, strategic plans. This repository is available even without a network, and, besides, board members can annotate handbooks. 

This group includes surveys that clients use to organize and provide feedback on meetings, assess conflicts of interest, and create self-assessment for directors. It is important to note that the templates on the platform allow board members to retake surveys and make updates at any time. 

BoardEffect also took care of the new board members. So, BoardEffect keeps all the information they need assembling board materials, which is easy to view.

BoardEffect security for board members

Board management comes with risks and high stakes. Therefore, BoardEffect strives to provide top-notch security and guarantees consumers robust data privacy, unlike some BoardEffect alternatives:

There are three levels of protection for the contents. Also, a robust infrastructure prevents both accidental and intentional data theft attempts. The BoardEffect client has protection from emergencies and consequences in the Data Recovery feature. That is, their information is safe and sound in any case. 

The provider applies a unique BoardEffect login and permissions procedure for internal security. The first allows only authorized persons to log in, and granular permissions help control the activities.

Compliance with HIPAA and HITECH is proof of adhering to generally accepted safety standards.

Start of BoardEffect’s usage

Before you become a user of the BoardEffect board portal or any other board portals, you need to make sure it is suitable for your team. Also, pay attention to the cost to understand if this is a reasonable expense for your budget.

So, BoardEffect offers a demo first. To request a demo, fill out the form on the official website. As for the free trial, you should contact the provider since there is no information in the public domain and on BoardEffect pricing either.

The main benefits of BoardEffect

With BoardEffect, organizational leaders can easily prepare for meetings and hold them in a highly secure virtual environment. The BoardEffect login is very intuitive and is possible via a social media platform. 

Regardless of where you are in a board meeting cycle, you can manage approvals, tasks, and archives. BoardEffect provides real-time updates to all materials, which you can access from anywhere. You can check shared content on your phone, tablet, computer — online and offline. 

BoardEffect offers an intuitive book builder and an annotation tool for your meeting materials. What’s more, the platform offers unlimited storage, so there are no restrictions on the number or volume of files you can keep there. 

With the help of a scheduler, you can choose a date for upcoming gatherings and share it with others to optimize attendance. An easy-to-use voting system is a great helper to approve board meeting minutes, new members, and policies.

Pros of BoardEffect

  • The system ensures ultra-secure data transmission and storage. 
  • The ongoing product support is highly responsive and always ready to help. 
  • The fairly intuitive interface is adaptable to your needs, saving time. 
  •  BoardEffect regularly provides numerous webinars to keep users up to date with all platform innovations. 
  • The tool for building a meeting book is very easy to use.
  • This is one board portal covering all the possible board members needs.

Cons of BoardEffect

  • It’s impossible to download an agenda PDF with no formatting.
  • When adding current documents to an annotated agenda, it looks quite messy. 
  • Board members are not allowed to format email content.
  • Zoom add-on works only with automatically generated links.