Digital Duct Tape: The Story of a Mess

There’s nothing simpler than planning a meeting for 17 busy professionals, right?

You use email or an app to find a good time. You hope everyone adds it to their various calendars. Documents go out from one person to another. Budgets are stored on someone’s computer or a cloud. Cross your fingers that each board member tracks their tasks somehow.

When it comes to meeting planning and preparation, “digital duct tape” is a short term solution and a long term mess. Why? It’s combining email, cloud drives, apps, tools, calendars, and a lot of other unconnected tools to “tape” your meeting management together. 

Finding a Meeting Time

Board Admin: “You should see the 187 email thread it took to schedule our last meeting! 100 emails in, and I still didn’t have a consensus on time and date. I did end up with a killer lasagna recipe, though. It would have been nice to have a simpler way to agree on a meeting time.”

Board Member: “I think we have a meeting soon? But I didn’t put it on my calendar and now I have to dig through all these emails to try to figure it out. It would be helpful if we had some kind of central calendar where I could find all my upcoming meetings. I finally found it, but now I’m also craving lasagna.”

Board Chair: “I have board members emailing and calling us constantly to ask where the meeting is. I know they’re busy and I want to help, but I’m trying to prepare for the meeting. I wish they had a central source of information about their board commitments.”

Preparing the Meeting Documents

Admin: “Some of our board members can’t use Google Drive or Dropbox because of the security on their work computer networks, so I end up saving and revising the same document over and over and naming it something descriptive like ‘Agenda-Final.No.Really.Super.Final.This.Time-I.Mean.It’” We really need a way to collaborate and share documents efficiently.

Board Member: “I want to be prepared for meetings, but sometimes I end up reviewing the wrong version of a document because the email threads are so confusing. I’ve also completely skipped reviewing a document by accident because there were so many separate files. I wish I could go to one place and find all my meeting prep documents.”

Board Chair: “I tried to get some last-minute changes to the agenda made, but passing different versions between the CEO and the board admin gets so disorganized. I’m never sure we’re working from the same version. We really need a way to unify our edits and save the document somewhere we can all access it.”

Sound familiar? If you’re tired of sifting through endless emails for a document and wondering if everyone is literally on the same page, you’re not alone.

Ditch the Digital Duct Tape

There is a better way. 

Take that big ball of digital duct tape you’ve been using to manage the board and throw it away! You can roll all these tools into one single solution for everyone on your team.

Try Boardable free (no credit card, no commitment) and test out these solutions:

• Scheduler Tool & Meeting Prep: Find a date for your meeting in minutes, not endless emails. See all your upcoming meetings in one place.
• Agenda Builder: Build the agenda from scratch or a template and attach all additional meeting documents using our simple portal.
• Groups Feature: Subdivide committees, staff, and board of directors to streamline information sharing.
• Mobile App: Review all your meeting materials and details from any device.

Your team can plan and prepare for your next meeting in record time when you streamline the tasks that used to take days into a few clicks. Everyone wins with a better meeting preparation experience.

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