Customer Stories
Make-A-Wish® Alabama
How OnBoard Helped This Nonprofit Fulfill More “Wishes” for Children with Critical Illnesses
Key Features
Drag & drop, any file type, meeting builder
Set priorities that strengthen governance
Automated and replicable tool for annual D&O surveys
Anonymized and aggregated real-time insights
Create meeting minutes directly within the platform
Built-in secure chat for 1-on-1 and group conversations
Organize, track, review, and approve decisions
Seamlessly connect with Zoom or Teams
Platform Solutions
Deliver accurate and reliable information before meetings
Board intelligence tools that create strategic insights
Seamless Cross-Device Boardroom Apps
Why OnBoard is the highest-rated board management platform.
Limit risk to and reduce vulnerable endpoints
Unparalleled training, support, and success
By Role
Simplify how meetings are created, distributed, and organized
A platform to realize the organization’s mission and vision
Keep the board engaged, working smarter, and achieving more
Protect the board, its members, and the organization from risk.
By Industry
Strengthen association health and member experience
Trusted by community banks, and large institutions
Designed to meet credit unions’ unique needs
Redefining public engagement and modern digital governance
HIPAA compliant board management for healthcare
Created together with AGB to serve higher-education institutions
Create a shared best-practice framework across every board
The most trusted board portal solution for nonprofits
A cloud-first platform built by tech for tech
Resources By Type
Company
Empowering boards to change the world with uncomplicated technology
Join the fast-growing team that enables boards leaders to make an impact
Explore OnBoard’s executive team, senior leadership, and board of directors
Giving back 1% of our time, product, and profit to the community
Check out what’s hot off the press and where we’re making waves
Questions about services, pricing, plans, a demo, or anything else?
Customer Stories
How OnBoard Helped This Nonprofit Fulfill More “Wishes” for Children with Critical Illnesses
Industry: Nonprofit
Board Size: 12 Members
Board Management Goals
Results
The Challenges
When speaking with Make-A-Wish Alabama’s President and CEO, Tracy Smith, and Sarah Stumpf, director of administration, you’ll immediately notice their passion, enthusiasm, and world-class professionalism. They aren’t just competent and good at their work; they are fierce, powerful advocates for the Foundation’s mission of providing life-changing “wishes” for children with critical illnesses.
“With so many of these children, all they hear is ‘No,’” Stumpf says. “’You can’t do this. You can’t go to school because you’re in treatment. You can’t go outside because you’re medically fragile.’ Many of them live in the hospital for weeks, months, and sometimes years, going through their treatment. So we’re a breath of fresh air because we say, ‘Yes, you can. What do you want to do? What do you want to be? What do you want to have?’ We give them something to look forward to.”
Supporting Smith, Stumpf, and the staff’s work is the chapter’s 12-member Board of Directors, which is comprised of business owners, C-suite executives, and other community volunteers from a diverse range of industries and backgrounds. While the majority of board members are located in or near Birmingham, the board represents the entire state of Alabama.
When describing the process of preparing for the bimonthly board meetings before implementing OnBoard, Smith and Stumpf use words such as “clunky” and “manual.”
“Two board members specifically reached out to me and said, ‘This is too much,’” Stumpf says. “There was no one place I could point to and say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to discuss and here’s the place where you can go access it.’ I was manually trying to keep the board packet short, but then I would have to attach three addendums. It was a lot.”
“Pulling everything together was a very manual process, you’d have a Word document that you would have to put into PDF format, convert an Excel spreadsheet into a PDF, and then merge it all together into one giant PDF."
The Solution for Less Manual Board Book Preparation
As the director of administration, Stumpf is the consummate professional who tirelessly works “behind the curtain” and serves as the focal point for creating and distributing board materials. Before OnBoard, she was sometimes spending up to 12 hours juggling various apps and platforms to get the job done.
“Pulling everything together was a very manual process,” Stumpf says. “You’d have a Word document that you would have to put into PDF format, convert an Excel spreadsheet into a PDF, and then merge it all together into one giant PDF. From there, you’d have to change all the headers and footers. There would be last-minute changes like a document we forgot to add, and that meant last-minute changes to the page numbers. Then we’d send it all out over email at 11 p.m. the night before the board meeting.”
Now, Stumpf is able to use OnBoard’s Board Book Builder to put together the board books in far less time. Sarah gathers the documents but now uploads everything into OnBoard with a simple drag-and-drop. An agenda is built on the fly with a table of contents and automatic page numbering. Most importantly, she can easily make changes at any time, and all the changes are kept in sync so the version everyone is looking at is always current and up-to-date.
“The pre-read is so easy and accessible now,” Stumpf says. “Once we create the book, board members can go in there and review the information. Once we actually meet, they have already seen the information they need to see. The meeting is now really about constructive conversation on moving the needle.”
The Solution for a More Efficient, Transparent Voting Process
In April 2020, Smith applied for a loan through the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) on behalf of Make-A-Wish Alabama’s 15 staff members. Designed to help businesses and nonprofits keep their workforces employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the PPP loan was a crucial lifeline for the organization.
OnBoard played a significant role during this critical time.
To sign off on the loan application, the board was required to conduct a vote on it. Before OnBoard, this was the process (which Tracy described as “clunky”):
Using OnBoard’s built-in voting functionality, Smith and Stumpf were able to conduct the vote faster and with greater efficiency and transparency (which Smith described as “magic”).
“The vote was user-friendly for the board, and very efficient for us on the back end,” Tracy says. “The board was very impressed they could vote on their phone or laptop, and we were delighted that the results were tabulated in real-time. It really elevated the professionalism and sophistication of our organization.”
“OnBoard has been critical because while it makes all of us more efficient, it especially makes [Sarah] more efficient. She and I now have more time to have strategic conversations. We can go to our revenue department with trends and opportunities that we’re seeing to grant more wishes."
The Results
Alabama is one of 61 federated chapters of Make-A-Wish America, and the entire state is considered part of its territory. Replacing earlier, more “clunky” solutions with OnBoard has helped Smith, Stumpf, and the chapter not only survive, but thrive – even during a pandemic.
All of this increased efficiency is of tremendous value. But did it lead to an increase in wishes?
“I would definitely say yes,” Smith says. ”Sarah is our director of administration and that encompasses so much – HR, operations, finances, board management. The reality is we need three Sarahs. OnBoard has been critical because while it makes all of us more efficient, it especially makes her more efficient. She and I now have more time to have strategic conversations. We can go to our revenue department with trends and opportunities that we’re seeing to grant more wishes. But we can’t do any of that if she’s having to spend three hours a day building a board packet or going back and forth with board members on email.”
OnBoard combines the highest level of security with innovative features designed to optimize your board’s effectiveness. Start your journey and unlock unparalleled security, insights, and efficiency.
©2024 Passageways All Rights Reserved.