[Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from a case study that first appeared in the March 2011 issue of NTEN:Change. Read the entire case study in NTEN's new quarterly journal for nonprofit leaders by subscribing to the journal for free!]
By Chris Bernard, Idealware
When [NTEN Member] Andy Wolber worked for NPower Michigan—first as a consultant, then later as executive director—the organization had a geographically spread-out board of 10-15 members. “They were relatively tech-savvy,” he said. “More so than most, but a mix, definitely.”
Board members were accustomed to communicating electronically, met by telephone conference call, and exchanged information by email without any technical difficulty. “It was a standing practice that at board meetings, we always had a dial in number,” he said. “Sometimes it was so rudimentary that someone would put a cell phone on speaker, and folks would dial in, and everyone could participate, but it worked.”
He began exploring various tools to make meetings easier and more efficient. What he envisioned was a single place for board members to go to find and add information, collaborate, schedule meetings and access reference materials, but he didn’t want the expense or effort of building a private portal like a larger organization could afford to do.
“I also didn’t want to make everyone sign up for a Gmail account and use Google apps, or something like that,” he said.
That’s when he found MyCommittee.com, an online meeting management tool. The site lets users create agendas, invite and notify members, and attach documents in advance of the meeting, and create minutes and task lists and give members the ability to view and update them during meetings.
“It had nice agenda and minutes features, and good document sharing,” Wolber said. “I started playing around and putting content into it, and testing it before sending it to the board to make sure it was an appropriate tool.”
Once he was confident that it would meet his board’s needs, he launched it to board members—slowly—using it in conjunction with free conference calling. “We started using it, nudging people toward it, but I continued emailing agendas out, too,” he said. “At some point I switched over and put it all on MyComittee.com.”
After that, the site became a central document repository where board members could access standard bylaws, plans, budgets, report and other materials. “It worked pretty well for that,” Wolber said. “What was interesting was, because we had the culture of remote work and access, in meetings I’d pull up the projector and log into MyCommittee.com, and folks present in the room could just glance at it, and folks dialing in remotely could look at the same thing over the web. It’s not a web meeting tool (like WebEx or ReadyTalk), but if you get people to hit refresh on an agenda or minutes, they can see the changes. It’s not real time, but you can use it that way.”
He said the document-sharing capabilities of the site are limited, but sufficient for formal board book type collaborations. “Google Docs will win out for collaborative document capability every time,” he said. His board used them for quarterly and monthly financial information, budgets, annual reports, bylaws, strategic plans and other daily work materials. It also offers some communications abilities, with a rudimentary forum.
Wolber’s experience highlighted that it often takes time and effort to get people to use new technologies. “The thing that was interesting was that, even being a very tech-savvy group, it took a few meetings before I could get board members fully onto MyCommittee.com, and I had to throw some staff time at it,” he said. “I took some time during a few board meetings to walk them through logging in, to get them oriented to the online environment, and then had one staff member work with a couple board members who I could tell hadn’t logged in.”
That additional custom training was what finally got all board members up to speed, he said.
[NTEN Member] Gavin Clabaugh was on the NPower board at the time, one of many he’s sat on over the years. “Good technology gets out of the way,” he said. “To date, all of these ‘meeting’ tools don’t hit that mark, they put a barrier in place instead. All in all, as a board member, it’s not an entirely pleasant experience to have all these different tools to use—I can’t remember my password, there are too many sites to log into, there’s a not-entirely-wonderful design."
Clabaugh said many of the tools in this space are “relatively immature. The whole ‘cloud’ idea is a little fraught with you’ve got to get there and see what you’re doing. Maybe I don’t think through the cost, but it’s easier to have all that paper in front of you and to make notes and scribble through pages than it is to use some of these tools to do the same thing.”
On various boards, Clabaugh said he’s used screen sharing tools like Ready Talk, Skype and GoTo Meeting, which are easy to use—“even for the technologically bashful”—as well as collaboration tools like Google Docs and collaborative portal sites, like Sharepoint, where you can store and access archival information.
“All these things work well, there’s no real technical barriers, but once you put up a password, it’s another kind of barrier, and those add up,” he said. “Varying degrees of comfort with that stuff still translates to a little barrier.”
(Note: You can read the full article in the March Issue of NTEN:Change. We'd love to hear YOUR tips, strategies, or #FAIL stories about getting your nonprofit board collaborating with technology. Leave your feedback in the comments!)