Revolutionising boardrooms across the world

Business Leader recently spoke to Paroon Chadha, Founder of OnBoard, a digital management platform, used by industry-leading brands such as Gousto, Breitling, Starling Bank and MoneyCorp to help them streamline their meetings. Chadha talks about the unique features of the platform and why businesses should look to use their service.

Could you give an overview of the company?

OnBoard is a board management platform that’s been providing businesses, non-profits and other organisations cloud-based board management since 2011. The goal of our solution is to bring board intelligence into those boardroom conversations.

We built OnBoard specifically for the unique challenges that board leaders face, with a platform that streamlines and integrates all parts of board operations. Everyone involved in making a board work, from administrators to senior directors and executive leaders, needs a collaborative platform with up-to-date data and analytics, security and intuitive workflows.

The goal is this: Make board meetings more informed, more effective, and less complicated – so boards and the organisations they lead can accomplish more.

Why is OnBoard different from the competition?

When we endeavoured to build the most modern board management platform, we started by designing around the goals of being mobile first, cloud only and with a user experience that’s clearly more intuitive and thoughtful.

Legacy board portals and management platforms typically can’t be real-time like OnBoard. Previously, businesses retrofitted older, disparate platforms to be able to integrate all the tools, data and analysis that board work requires – OnBoard has been built from the ground up as a single, holistic system.

Our customers’ success using OnBoard speaks for itself: if you look at rankings on Apple’s App Store, for example, we are the highest ranked application and OnBoard is consistently rated as the leading board management solution on software review sites like G2 and Capterra.

Can you talk about some of the unique features of OnBoard?

We built OnBoard with the needs of a modern board in mind. Every aspect of activity within the platform creates discrete anonymised data that can be analysed and optimised; this is how we create actionable board intelligence. For example, when you send the board packet ahead of the meeting, OnBoard provides a heatmap of what content directors are spending the most time with and what elements receive the most annotations.

This data can then be used by meeting organisers to determine what agenda items need more, or less, discussion time in the actual meeting. The OnBoard platform is designed specifically to enable boards to improve interaction and engagement before, during and after the board meeting.

Another data-based feedback loop we’ve created to optimise board meetings is measuring participant feedback about the effectiveness of the meeting itself. Most organisations assess the board’s collaboration and effectiveness through an annual board assessment process. While this is important work that should continue, we believe more frequent feedback can help boards improve their effectiveness more quickly.

To accomplish this, we’ve introduced a meeting ratings feature so every meeting is an opportunity to receive anonymised feedback from board members. This is another way OnBoard creates data points to better answer questions like, ‘Are there too many agenda items for the meeting?’ or ‘Are we addressing the organization’s strategic needs?’.

OnBoard provides a seamless experience across mobile devices, where a single app can manage everything. If you switch devices, there’s a seamless, secure experience with all the updates reflected in real-time.

How has the company grown in recent years?

We began in the USA and we’ve moved steadily into new markets in the last few years, including the UK and Ireland. We’ve recently expanded into Australia and New Zealand. In 2018, we received some funding that allowed us to reach more customers and we’ve been growing as a company rapidly since, going from about 50 employees to nearly 200. This year, we’ve had the opportunity to take advantage of a $100m investment that will allow us to grow at scale at an even more rapid pace.