Should Your Advisory Board Be Online?

Innovation has long been a buzzword in the marketplace and continues to be a relevant one today. If you want your business to stay in the game, you must continuously push the envelope and differentiate from your competitors.

When it comes to advisory boards, the opportunity for innovation is no different.

Below are a few reasons why taking your advisory board online could save you money, enrich your data and drive business success.

Online Advisory Board and Competitive Edge

For many businesses, the days of board meetings and Excel spreadsheets are fading quickly in the rear-view. Many corporations today run online and in the cloud and their advisory boards do too.

Taking your board online demonstrates to your members that you’re conscious of their time. Plus, an online advisory board encourages mobility and allows you to recruit members from diverse geographic locations.

Agility and Responsiveness to Marketplace

An online advisory board facilitates snap-decision meetings should they be needed. Members gain access to cloud-based portals where they can view meeting requests even by mobile devices.

Insights can then be gathered online through questionnaires, discussion forums and web conferences. Capturing this data is effortless and instantaneous. Meeting your advisory board members where they are and engaging them conveniently will encourage the sharing of worthwhile opinions.

The analysis of data is also improved as most platforms include an automated reporting feature.

Time and Money Saver

Perhaps one of the most significant benefits to an online advisory board is alleviating the travel, accommodation and food and drink expenses associated with bringing your board members together. By taking your meetings online, you significantly reduce expenses and save your organisation (and your members’) time.

An online advisory board also allows for a busier meeting schedule. Wrangling your board members on the internet is far easier than getting them in the same room in person, so you’re given room to increase the scope and volume of your board meetings.

While in-person meetings may afford an extra sense of intimacy and trust, the pros of online appointments far outweigh the cons.

Online Advisory Board – A Case Study

Three pharmaceutical companies who trialled virtual advisory board meetings found additional value in several areas. The businesses, each located in the United States, were frustrated with the long lead time required to reserve meeting venues, costly travel and accommodation costs and the administrative hurdles involved in ensuring each member arrives.

Having conducted virtual board meetings, the key benefits they noted were immediate access to a detailed transcript, highly convenient platform with 24-hour accessibility, increased compliance through engagement capture and more meaningful discussions.

They also experienced cost savings of between 15 and 30 percent.

Within3, a provider of virtual advisory boards, also studied the results of online sessions for 50 global organisations. The most telling insights they gathered included;

• 34% increase in collaboration over live meetings,
• 83% of advisors preferred virtual meetings over live meetings,
• 98% of advisors planned to participate in an online board meeting again.

Online advisory board meetings benefit both the businesses holding them and the members participating in them.

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Neil Parker

MANAGING DIRECTOR

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