The responsibilities of Board administrators, members and secretaries are immense when prepping for a Board meeting. Board meeting materials must be prepared enough in advance so Board Members are given time to read them, as well as for edits to be made to Board packs and documents.

This is why it is crucial to be well-prepared for your meetings, as if the preparation is thorough, the meeting will be more productive. Preparing for Board meetings well enough in advance helps the entirety of the Board come to the meeting prepared as well. This means your meetings can be as effective as possible and meet your objectives.

To help you learn how best to prepare for a Board meeting, this blog will take you through the necessary steps and how a Board portal could help your overall Board meeting process. 


1. Schedule the Meeting 

The first part of your Board meeting preparation is deciding when and where the meeting will take place. In addition to this, you will also have to consider a location, and confirm that a potential meeting space is available, accessible, and has any equipment that your organisation might need.

If your Board meeting is going to be remote, administrators need to create the necessary channels for the meeting and add in the relevant participants within the platform your organisation uses. Calendar features can help to schedule meetings that align with the schedules of internal participants, and reminders can be sent out automatically.


2. Develop The Agenda

A clear and solid agenda is a framework for running efficient and productive meetings, and should be developed and prepared for as early as possible. Reviewing the previous meeting’s minutes is a good way to understand the objectives of the Board meeting ahead. 

The agenda should focus on actionable and relevant matters for the Board to discuss in the meeting, and there should be sufficient information on each of these action items. 

Each matter should have a specific timeline and purpose, such as providing information, gathering data, or reaching a decision, to help keep the Board on track and ensure the best use of their time when tackling problems.


3. Contact Necessary Participants

In the previous Board meeting minutes there should be the action tasks assigned to separate Board members from the last meeting. Contact those individuals to check in on progress so you know what to address in the upcoming meeting. This acts as both a reminder and a way to offer additional support for the assigned tasks.

Additionally when sending meeting materials, they should be sent at least a week in advance to the necessary participants. Board Members are often busy and may serve on multiple Boards and teams so it is important to also give them the time to prepare, as well as yourself.
 

4. Compile All Necessary Documents

You should prepare your Board packet well in advance of the meeting, to give yourself a good amount of time to make additions and change

A Board packet is a collection of documents providing all the information Board Members will need for your meeting in a single place.

The basic meeting materials will include:

In recent years, many large companies have been subject to shareholder activism, which has been a very visible part of the global markets and continues to evolve. Shareholder activists have been making news for their attempts to challenge some of the largest corporations in the world.

In the past, activists were seen in a very negative light; they were often thought of as people who would take over a company for their own benefit without regard for anyone else's interests. Now, however, it is a lot more complex. It is no longer as simple to consider activism as an immediate threat, but rather a more varied phenomenon.

Convene in Teams (CiT) offers you seamless integration and additional features in Teams to enhance your overall meeting experience, which in turn can greatly benefit your business.

Being able to run remote meetings with the quality of in-person meetings is vital in making sure your team can communicate and collaborate effectively.

From every stage of your planning, preparation, and participation, CiT provides a better meeting experience by embedding Convene’s powerful end-to-end meeting features within MS Teams, eliminating the hassle of switching between applications and maintaining separate tools.

Here’s how some of the key features of CiT can strengthen your online meeting process and benefit your business in the short and long term.


1. Notes and Annotations

During a meeting, it is important that your team is able to make notes and annotations on documents all while staying within your meeting application. With CiT, you can share annotations in real time to collaborate with fellow participants on the meeting documents while engaging in the video call. 

Participants can also take meeting minutes and notes for documentation and reference all while on the call, enabling productive discussions and helping your team and business in its collaboration and communication.

Additionally, CiT makes it possible to edit documents in real-time during active meetings. Once opened, documents can be annotated, edited, and commented upon by meeting participants. This can be done without ending or pausing an ongoing video meeting, to help your meeting process and workflow.


2. Document Collaboration

Organising structured meetings requires accessing and compiling various documents from different departments and resources. With CiT, access all your resources on one platform anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

CiT eliminates the hassle of going through SharePoint or other resource libraries to find and compile relevant meeting documents. CiT is the one searchable platform you need to access everything — meeting files, agenda packs, decision records, and minutes.

Meeting participants can also prepare for structured meetings. Having all the meeting documents in one location can equip participants with all the information they need to discuss during the meeting — for a well-informed and productive collaboration.


3. Review Rooms

Convene in Teams offers the Review Room, where your meeting participants can collaborate and communicate on documents even without video-conferencing. 

With Review Rooms, you can meet without having meetings; your participants access a document pack and collaborate without needing to be on a video call.

Review Rooms are a secure, access-controlled virtual workspace built around collections of documents. Participants may be granted access based on their level of involvement in a project or their need to know. 

As part of the document collaboration tools, participants can review and privately or publicly annotate documents, take notes, and suggest important changes to files. Users will also receive notifications when changes are accepted or rejected and when other important edits are made or suggested.

This ability to collaborate without needing to be in an official meeting will greatly help your team and your business maintain communication no matter what, no matter where.


4. Audit Trails

With the number of documents and meetings administrators are handling, it is difficult to track all actions done during meetings and on documents.

CiT helps meeting administrators automate action tracking. It can transparently track and monitor activities with its comprehensive audit trail. Not only does it help uphold transparency, but it also provides records that can help identify irregular and suspicious activities.

With CiT, meetings are permanently documented, giving you a tangible reference source for all meeting events, with all notes and action items made during meetings intact.

There are many different types of Boards an organisation can have, and there can be some overlap in their focus and purpose.

Almost every organisation will have a Board of directors, but not every organisation will feature an advisory Board. While there are commonalities between these two Boards, there are also some clear differences in their function within a company.

In this article, we’ll explore exactly what each Board does, and what they have in common, and what they do differently. 

As issues such as climate change threaten our planet, organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the damage they can have on the environment, and the efforts that must be taken to diminish these environmental impacts.

Managing environmental factors has become a core component of companies’ endeavours in investing more into Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), its risks and its opportunities. 

ESG is a framework for doing ethical business, and understanding the ‘E’ in ESG means understanding how businesses interact with the environment, and what can be done to protect it.

There are many different roles and responsibilities that Board Members can have within an organisation, and these positions require different skills and expertise to help achieve the Board’s goals.

On Thursday 27th April 2023, Convene sponsored Chartered Governance Institute’s annual ESG Summit in London. We want to thank the CGI as well as all speakers and attendees for participating in such an engaging Summit.

The ESG Summit focused on exploring the changing Environmental, Social and Governance landscape for Boards, and answering questions about how organisations can contend with developing regulations, both in the UK and globally.

There was a specific emphasis on how “the ‘G’ in ESG underpins and facilitates the ‘E’ and the ‘S’”, and how governance professionals are key in ensuring their organisations meet ESG standards. 

There were several compelling presentations, panels and case studies at the Summit, including talks about how governance is at the heart of establishing good ESG practices, how to tackle greenwashing accusations from a governance perspective and how to nurture a diverse Board and make sure inclusion policies are embedded throughout your organisation.

The Summit also facilitated many discussions about ESG reporting, from how organisations are responding to ESG disclosure requirements to how you can improve the quality of the ESG data collected.

This is where Convene ESG came in as a sponsor of the event.

In this digital age, remote and online meetings are becoming more commonplace than in-person ones. Due to this, there has been an increase in meeting software that is designed to help you run your online meetings as smoothly as possible.

Microsoft Teams is at the forefront of this, and offers a comprehensive service to organisations in helping them run seamless remote meetings from all over the globe.

Teams is a powerful tool to improve remote collaboration and productivity. However, the software is not built for board management. 

This is where Convene in Teams comes in. Convene’s own Award Winning Board portal software is now integrated with Microsoft Teams, so you can have both the benefits of Teams and a Board portal in the same space.

By using the integrated Convene app, secretaries and directors alike can compile meeting packs and engage with documents in a secure, efficient manner.

Here’s how Convene in Teams improves your meeting process:

In this digital age, cybersecurity is of ever growing importance to organisations. With the COVID-19 pandemic, many organisations have had to enter a period of rapid digitalisation in order to stay afloat. This has led organisations to have not considered the cybersecurity implications of their digital transformation. 

It is important for Boards of directors to not just understand how a cyberattack could affect an organisation, but also to have a greater responsibility for it, and take an active part in ensuring cybersecurity.

While you cannot completely prevent a cyberattack, you can be completely prepared to deal with one, and it's important that every level of the organisation understands their role in this.


Why It Is Important For Boards To Understand Cybersecurity

Having a Board that understands cybersecurity, puts in place a risk management framework that includes cyber risk and promotes cyber awareness is vital in ensuring your organisation’s cyber resilience. 

The Board has a responsibility to make sure that its executive team has a plan, and that the whole organisation is prepared for the eventuality of an attack.

Boards of directors need to be cyber literate, which doesn’t mean your Board needs to become IT experts but it does mean they need to have an understanding of how to be cyber secure. 

The Board should understand:

For the fifth year running, Convene is delighted to be sponsoring Herne Hill Velodrome Track League 2023 with Convene ESG. 

As we continue to find answers to climate change, organisations and companies are increasingly required to demonstrate their sustainability through strict environmental-based frameworks. ESG is one such framework, and with Convene ESG you can help your organisation simplify their ESG data collection and reporting.

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, Governance, and refers to the documented sustainability efforts that a company can make in order to shape better environmental, social, and governmental practices for the future.

With Convene ESG, our aim is to alleviate some of the challenges of ESG data gathering, performance tracking, and reporting for ESG factors so organisations can focus instead on their moves towards global sustainability and net zero.

Here at Convene, it is important to us that we maintain our eco mission and green philosophy. We are a paperless company dedicated to helping other organisations develop their sustainability goals, and Convene ESG is just one of our products that achieves this.

Sponsoring Track League is a chance for us to demonstrate further our commitment to sustainability, as well as support a community space that so many people enjoy. 

In recent years, there have been many times when what the future held was uncertain, unstable and unknowable. Whether this was caused by a fluctuating economy, global pandemic or any other factors, many organisations have had to face and deal with these kinds of crises.

Audit reports are a crucial and necessary aspect of running any organisation, and are an important process to understand. 

The goal of an audit report is to document that a company’s financial statements are free from error, and they matter greatly for the success of your organisation.

On the 15th and 16th of March, Convene attended the Housing Finance Conference and Exhibition 2023 in Liverpool. We want to thank the NHF, as well as all speakers and attendees for putting on and participating in an engaging and insightful conference. If you missed our talk, please join us at our Inside Housing Webinar next week.

The Housing Finance Conference focused on ‘building resilience through turbulent times’, and featured many interesting talks on topics surrounding the cost of living, sustainability and green finance, cybersecurity and the future of the housing sector.

In recent years, with the increase in remote and online working, organisations have had to adapt to a new way of work. The adoption of communication tools and Board management software has no doubt eased the transition to this new norm. 

Board Portal software has played a vital part in helping boards, executive and leadership teams to manage meetings. So, what are the essential features that your Board Portal must have to navigate the remote working world?

The Board of directors is a crucial element for any organisation. They are a key and necessary part of managing an organisation efficiently and ensuring the needs of both the organisation and its stakeholders are met.