Item: Diligent Boards
Rating: 9
Author: Cheryl Spicer

Overall Satisfaction with Diligent Boards

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company uses Diligent Boards to manage all documents pertaining to our quarterly board meetings, as well as an special meetings and AGM documents. Diligent Boards allows us to avoid using email to send meeting materials to our board members and allows us to easily upload additional documents or make changes to materials at any time. The ability to link documents to our agenda and create tabs for easy navigation is also much appreciated!

Pros and Cons

Pros

User friendly
Ease of document replacement
Ease of reordering tabs in board books as needed

Cons

At times can feel a little "clunky"
Directors report that they can't always easily see what tasks are there for them to complete

Most Important Features

Resource Centre
Voting capabilities
Ability to make changes in real time that is viewable immediately by the board members
Questionnaires

Return on Investment

I don't have data on this.

Support Rating

Customer support reps are very knowledgeable but at times the response time can be slow and I have often had to follow up with my rep several times before receiving a response.

Diligent Boards Security

We appreciate the security of documents in the Boards platform and prefer it to using traditional non-cloud methods

Alternatives Considered

Diligent Entities

We have not used or evaluated other platforms.

Key Insights

Do you think Diligent Boards delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Diligent Boards's feature set?

Yes

Did Diligent Boards live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Diligent Boards go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Diligent Boards again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Workday Payroll and Workforce Management, Diligent Entities, Adobe Acrobat Sign

Likelihood to Recommend

Diligent Boards is great for companies that have multiple board meetings in the year and where many changes are often made to meeting materials (often at the last minute). I would say that if a company only does one meeting per year, the platform may be more costly than is necessary for the small amount of use it would get.

Using Diligent Boards

Users and Roles

20 - Directors, Senior Executives, Legal team members

Directors & Senior Executives use the portal to review meeting documents. The legal team members use the portal to upload documents pertaining to all board & committee meetings.

Support Headcount Required

3 - 3 members of our legal team are the Diligent Board Admin users. We are responsible for all functions in the portal including board book creation & publishing, user changes and permissions.

Business Processes Supported

Board Meetings
Committee Meetings
Disseminating confidential documents to board members on an ad-hoc basis
Obtaining required signatures from Board members on documents

Innovative Uses

Portal allows us to keep our Board of Directors Manual in the resource section for ease of reference
Permission setting allows us to only show specific people certain confidential documents

Future Planned Uses

Meeting minutes
Integrating Boards with Teams to allow for ease of sharing of board book materials
DocuSign integration for ease of signing vs. "voting'

Likelihood to Renew

We find the Boards portal to be an effective tool for our board meeting documents.

It is user friendly and allows for amendments, additions as needed without compromising documents that have already been uploaded.

Additionally, our Board members are comfortable with the platform and confident in their ability to navigate it.

Evaluating Diligent Boards and Competitors

Products Replaced

Key Differentiators

Other

I was not involved in the decision to purchase Boards. This system was in place at the time that I joined the organisation. We have been utilising it for approximately 10 years.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

We would consider doing a variety of "sandbox" testing with multiple platforms to ensure that Diligent Boards is the right fit.

Using Diligent Boards

Usability

Very user friendly and easy to navigate

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

Board book creation
Vote creation
Amendments in existing board books
Linking agenda items to pages

Difficult Tasks

Exporting board books to PDF - document exports with a random file name instead of the board book name (need to manually rename)
Would be nice for the PDF exports to reference the various tabs that are in the online board book as well

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Yes, but I don't use it

Comments

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