Why your board needs a board portal instead of another collaboration tool

Decisions made at the board level carry a lot of weight for organizations and their shareholders, employees, and regulators. That makes high-quality board communication essential for board effectiveness.

Despite this, many boards still rely on tools that weren’t designed with them and their specific needs in mind, such as email, courier, cloud storage, and generic collaboration platforms. These tools may have worked in the past, but today, they sustain inefficient working practices and leave boards exposed to risk. Boards that use them are also missing out on valuable opportunities to improve their performance and impact.

A board portal offers a better way, because it’s designed specifically for the way boards operate. Read on to find out how board portals compare to the alternatives, and how using one can help you, your board, and your organization as a whole.

These are the essential processes a board portal delivers to support your board and help it stay focused on what matters most.

A board portal is a secure digital platform designed to support the entire life cycle of board activity, from preparing and distributing papers to managing approvals.

It’s not a general-purpose file-sharing or collaboration tool like Teams or Dropbox. And it’s not a one-way broadcast like email. It’s a solution tailored to board and governance needs, that enables collaboration, provides structure, and offers built-in compliance safeguards.

Want to learn more about board management software? Read our ‘What is a board portal?’ primer and our guide to board portals for more information.

If your board isn’t using a board portal already, it’s likely you’re using one or more of these tools:

• Email: Convenient but not well secured, because it’s impossible to control or track documents once sent. Version control is a challenge.
• Courier: Outdated, time-consuming, and risky in transit. Version control is even more challenging because of the time needed to print and deliver documents.
• Collaboration platforms (e.g. Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Dropbox): Flexible, but not built for board governance. Lacking audit trails and role-specific access controls.

Our analysis shows that 52% of boards now use a secure board portal to distribute their board materials, compared with just 40% doing so back in 2020. These findings are based on submissions to our board reporting self-assessment tool, showing a clear shift away from legacy tools.

These tools have their place in business, but when it comes to board communication, they fall short.

Compared with email and generic collaboration tools, board portals provide substantial benefits. Importantly, they reduce the risk of confidential board materials ending up in the wrong hands. They also improve the timeliness and efficiency of board meeting preparation and enhance the quality of board interactions.

Why board portals outperform other tools

1. Built for governance: Designed for the needs of directors and governance teams.
2. Time-saving automation: Streamlined workflows and administration tasks.
3. Secure by design: Enterprise-grade security with role-based access and audit trails.
4. A single source of truth: Centrally stored, up-to-date documents, instead of multiple versions in inboxes or folders.
5. A better board experience: Intuitive, user-friendly interface, available to use securely on desktop and mobile.
6. Supports hybrid and remote governance: Available anywhere, and suitable for mobile and fully remote working.
7. Helps you demonstrate good governance: A professional approach that helps board recruitment, plus data and analytics that support regulatory compliance.

Let’s look at each benefit in more detail.

A board portal supports the unique responsibilities and working practices of boards and governance teams. This includes recording decisions, managing approvals, and evidencing good governance and regulatory compliance. Tools like Teams and SharePoint weren’t built with these tasks in mind.

With Board Intelligence, you can set access permissions at document level, revoke access instantly, and create a robust audit trail. You can digitally manage meetings and approvals, with workflows that reflect how your board and committees work and what matters most to them.

You can also enjoy the benefits of additional features, many powered by AI, that simplify very specific board and governance team challenges. For example, users of Board Intelligence’s board portal have access to a range of features that enhance efficiency and effectiveness. These include:

• Agenda Planner, which simplifies the management of the board’s forward calendar and makes it easier to plan meeting agendas.
• Report Briefer, which automates sending paper briefs and reminders, and helps leaders manage board pack submissions in a dedicated workspace (not their inbox).
• Insight Driver, which helps directors prevent information overload and engage critically with meeting materials.
• Minute Writer, which improves the process of taking board and committee meeting minutes.

Don’t simply acquire features for features' sake. Instead, choose a board portal partner that understands what boards and governance teams need and puts those needs front and center when developing new features and tools. As one of our clients (Sarah Dobson, Head of Executive Support at Cambridge Building Society) put it: “Generic AI tools work well for high-level summaries, but for board and committee meetings, detail is key—and that’s what we get from the AI in Board Intelligence.”

Organizing board and committee meetings and preparing board materials can be time-consuming. A board portal lets you automate routine tasks, such as issuing calendar invitations for meetings, sending reminders about upcoming paper submission deadlines, collating documents for the board pack, and notifying directors about material updates.

With a board portal, you can:

• Create agendas from templates or duplicate previous meeting agendas.
• Quickly re-order agenda items using drag and drop functionality.
• Automatically add and update meeting timings.
• Issue meeting invitations and track meeting attendance.
• Create sections, tabs, and page numbers in a few simple clicks.
• Combine PDFs, slide decks, and other files into one document.
• Easily distribute the final packs to the right people.
• Collect annotations and comments on the pack by exporting all notes into a separate file.

The time savings can be substantial. For example, corporate service provider JTC achieved a 20-25% time saving by creating their board packs using the Board Intelligence board portal. 

A board portal offers more than just a productivity boost. It also gives the governance team the headspace needed to focus on strategic, value-adding work rather than time-consuming logistics.

With a board portal, you can:

• Centrally control who’s allowed to download papers.
• Share calendar invitations and remote/hybrid meeting links to secure access to your meetings.
• Easily monitor which documents each board member has access to.
• Access an audit trail of who has logged in and which documents they have seen.
• Remove individual users’ access to specific packs where necessary.
  Eliminate the risk of documents being shared in the wrong channel.

You also avoid the chaos of version control and unauthorized sharing, which could otherwise have serious legal or reputational consequences.

Our security and resilience guide explains how Board Intelligence keeps your information safe and secure.

When multiple versions of board packs and reports are sent via email or stored in multiple folders on a shared drive, mistakes happen. Directors can easily waste valuable preparation time searching for the latest version. People can accidentally base their preparation, discussion points, and ideas on outdated versions of documents. Comments get buried in the version history and are missed.

A board portal solves these issues by centralizing everything in one place, ensuring that the documents are up to date, and making them easy to navigate and annotate.

In practice, that means:

• It’s easy to update the pack with late, revised, or additional papers, without having to format the file again.
• Late papers or amendments can be republished without losing the annotations, comments, and notes made by directors.
• Board members always look at the most up-to-date, timestamped version of their papers, which eliminates the risk of previous versions being in circulation and of board members looking at outdated information.
• Board members can be notified that a new paper has been uploaded with the click of a button.

Directors are busy people. They don’t want to search through their inbox for invites and meeting papers or try to annotate PDFs on the go. A board portal provides a user-friendly interface that’s available securely on desktop and mobile, to support how boards really work.

In summary:

• All critical documents, conversations, and links are stored in a single platform that every board member can easily access.
• Board papers are available on any device, both online and offline.
• Board members can quickly and easily find information through a simple search function.
• Support is tailored to directors’ working patterns, available 24 hours a day.

Board Intelligence’s board portal is designed to make reading and annotating papers hassle-free. It’s easy for even the most tech-averse directors to use. Our board portal takes everything we enjoy about working with paper and combines it with smart collaboration tools. Even the biggest advocates of paper documentation become fans of our portal.

Modern boards are rarely all in the same location. With directors spread across countries and time zones, it’s critical that they can access materials and collaborate from anywhere.

Board portals are built with this reality top of mind. They offer offline access, real-time updates, and a consistent user experience across devices. For example:

• Navigate to remote meetings directly from the board pack with just one click.
• Use the annotations made before the meeting to ask for attendees’ contributions at the right points in the meeting.
• Use the split-screen view to compare documents or view an agenda next to your pack during your remote meeting.
• Vote, collect e-signatures, and keep an audit trail of votes that can easily be exported.

It’s not enough to do the right thing. You need to be able to demonstrate it.

A board portal creates a clear digital record of engagement, approvals, and decisions. This makes it easier to show compliance with governance codes and regulatory expectations, or respond quickly to audits and information requests.

It also helps with board recruitment. Today, more directors expect organizations to have a portal in place to help them do their jobs and demonstrate a commitment to strong governance. For top-tier candidates, the absence of a board portal is a red flag.

“I wouldn’t go back to paper — the Board Intelligence board portal is very intuitive and allows Governors to have all documents at their fingertips.”

- Richard Atkinson, Clerk to the Governors, Middlesbrough College — read the case study

A board portal isn’t just another app. It’s a tool designed to manage the unique responsibilities and risks that boards face regularly.

Sticking with outdated or ill-suited tools carries serious risks. Switching to a board portal offers better governance, stronger security, and improved credibility.

Board Intelligence’s board management software gives you a smarter way to support your board. To see it in action or find out more, get in touch with our team to book a demo.