For governments, and their important meetings, a Board portal is a crucial piece of software to help streamline operations. Effective meeting management systems allow public sector organisations to run more efficiently, simplify more complex tasks and boost their transparency.

With many different Board portals on the market, it's important to establish what features will be most beneficial for your meetings.

There are many features you should consider when looking for a new Board portal for governments. We’ve collated the five most critical ones for your organisation to consider.

But first, what even is a Board portal?


What is a Board Portal?

A Board portal is a solution for running seamless meetings in the digital age. 

Board management software utilises communication and collaboration tools to help simplify Board material preparation, reports, and many other meeting-related tasks.

Board portals also facilitate a secured environment for sharing confidential documents and information. 

Board meeting software collapses the entire meeting process, aiming to elevate transparency, practise corporate compliance, and increase efficiency. It removes the need for tasks like printing documents, sending emails manually, and physically compiling annotations.

At Convene, our Award Winning Board portal is designed to help governments to run effectively and efficiently. Convene is here to assist in establishing good governance and communication in your committee meetings.


Features of a Board Portal

If you want to effectively manage different aspects of government, it is important to invest in the appropriate tools. Here are essential Board portal features that will assist you in achieving your objectives effortlessly.


1. Agenda Builder

This feature enables your team to be on the same page before, during, and after committee meetings. 

An Agenda Builder allows you to drag and drop documents into the agenda and update Board packs instantly. This way you can find all the information needed for meetings at once.

Once the agenda has been created, meeting organisers can also choose which participants can access the agenda files. This helps to increase security and confidentiality.

Organisers can assign action items when creating the agenda. When adding the action, they can assign the designated person/s for the task and set the deadline.

With a feature like an Agenda Builder, your committee meetings can have a clear plan and schedule. This means that your meeting process is even more streamlined. 


2. Annotations

Running remote meetings requires the ability to collaborate seamlessly with a range of annotation tools. Attendees should be able to make notes, highlight sections or draw on the Board papers.

Annotation tools should be easy to use for all participants. This not only aids the communication process, but also allows all in attendance to record their ideas within the Board portal.

Moreover, annotations offer an additional layer of accountability for your participants. Once a Board pack is annotated, you have a digital trail which helps track what was happening in particular meetings. 

Annotations made on paper can simply get lost - especially when meetings are remote. This makes them a crucial Board portal feature for both accountability and productivity.


3. In-meeting Voting

Physical meetings often require travelling, accommodation costs, and significant amounts of time. For this reason, Board portals must be able to facilitate the decision making process.

A quality Board portal should allow you to create a survey which can be voted on during or prior to the meeting. The voting system should be a secret ballot, or a show of hands. This improves accountability as well as speeding up the decision making process.

Convene allows participants to vote anonymously as well as remotely, meaning that if a member cannot attend the meeting they can still participate.


4. Document Library

For any organisation, there will be a never ending amount of documents that might be needed in a committee meeting. With a Document Library, all meeting packs, Board documents, and meeting minutes are kept securely in the same place. 

This helps keep your remote meeting on track and running seamlessly, while also improving accountability and transparency. With everything stored in one place, Board members can see all the documents they might need.

Convene has an inbuilt retention schedule if you need to ensure your records are compliant with specific corporate records management standards, further establishing your data security. Convene’s document library is protected by 256-AES bit encryption, which is the safest technology available. 

Our Board portal also allows administrators to manage access rights during the meeting. This means attendees can only look at specific documents if they have the correct security clearance..

This is why a secure and efficient Document Library is another important feature of any Board portal.


5. Audit Trail

Automated Audit Trails are another way a Board portal promotes a culture of transparency and accountability within your committee meetings. 

Audit trails make sure nothing goes unnoticed or forgotten, as every action is monitored and tracked. Tracking the actions of users means they cannot misuse any data or sensitive information, as they know that any breach or misuse can be traced back to them.

With a Board portal, audit trails are now easily automated and stored digitally. This saves admin time and allows for more storage of old audits, as well as enhancing security and transparency. 

With Convene, administrators have access to an audit trail log, which keeps a record of user actions, such as login, creation, modification, exporting, or deletion, as well as the date and time at which these transactions occurred. Convene allows users to export the records from the system as a PDF report.  Records that can be exported include meetings, review and approvals, and resolutions.

Audit trails are a critical way to ensure safety and transparency for your government, and having an automated system within a Board portal enables this security.


Enhance Your Board Portal Governance with Convene

Board portal software should simplify your meetings, not complicate them. Join hundreds of organisations around the world in embracing a smart, simple and secure future with Convene.

Every step of your meeting process should be as smooth as possible; with the right software that has the right features, the complex task of governance can be much easier. 

Convene Board portal features include:

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:

Convene uses AES-256 Bit Encryption, which is the best security available on the market, but you may not know what this means exactly. We’ve written a very simplified, helpful guide to explain what it is and why you should value it.

Convene is trusted by financial institutions around the world who rely on our software to protect their confidential data. Financial organisations play a crucial role in the global economy and cannot afford to take risks when it comes to security.

The UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the main law in the UK when it comes to data protection. It was put into place in 2018 and is the UK’s version of the EU law of a similar name. The law makes some important changes from the previous Data Protection Act in how we consider consent and accountability.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a law that came into action in the UK in 2018. It’s based on an EU law of a similar name and is the main piece of legislation when it comes to data protection. The law has seven key principles for data collection that are underlined by lawfulness, fairness and transparency.

What are flexible logins and flexible platforms?

Special category data is data which requires a higher level of protection under the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Organisations dealing with this type of data need to make sure they process it appropriately and have stronger security standards. Many of the special categories overlap with the protected characteristics, but they are not exactly the same.

Paper documents have never been secure. No matter how careful you are, they can still be picked up and read by anyone. The digital age offers a new chance to protect your valuable data - but what steps should you take to improve your security?

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a way of measuring whether your organisation is meeting its goals. It is a quantifiable figure that tells you about your progress over time.

A KPI is more specific than general performance metrics. It assesses the most important targets of your business, and shows your team where their priorities should be. Your company likely already collects data, so selecting KPIs is about choosing the metrics that support your strategic goals.

When it comes to incident management, there are a number of different KPIs you can track. They can tell you how well your team is reacting to issues, and the things you can do to improve.

Virtual Board meetings can solve many of the problems your Board encounters. With new technology, your team members no longer have to be in the same room to have important discussions.

Audit trails are vital in discovering and understanding what went wrong when a company or organisation suffers a security breach, data loss or misconduct. Having a detailed log of who accessed what and when, can make the search for what went wrong quick and easy. But, as this blog will discuss, there are more benefits to keeping audit trails than being prepared for when something goes wrong!

You might have found this page when searching for a login for your board portal. Have you ever thought about how easy it is for others to find the same page that you were looking for and how you can make sure they don’t get any further? The login page is the front door to your commercially sensitive documents so let’s look at ways of making sure it stays shut to unauthorised visitors.

The first stage in any due diligence process is reviewing alternative options to the status quo. You may be wondering how you can save money and still keep the same level of functionality in your current meeting software or processes. This is where Convene can help you out. 

The ‘value’ of cybersecurity comes from the losses that have been prevented as a result of its implementation.