The BoardPro mission

BoardPro(opens in a new tab) Co-Founder Kim Thibault has her sights set on a singular mission: to make good governance possible for everyone.

On any average day in local communities, board members figure heavily into the governance of countless organizations ranging across commercial, educational, and non-profit sectors. As board members gather to govern, documentation figures heavily in the success of their efforts.

BoardPro — which has operated in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the Middle East since 2016 — delivers governance software through its portal that helps boards document everything from agendas and minutes to constitutions and policies.

“We provide a board portal where essentially everything about governance for the organization can happen,” said Thibault. “Maybe there’s something coming up and you want to reflect on it or review it. ‘What did the board decide about this? When was this topic last discussed?’ Our software helps with all of that.”

With users ranging from the technologically savvy to novice volunteers, Thibault began hearing the same request from BoardPro’s clientele: Please make it easier to take notes and review documents across all my devices.

Making board document annotations easier

BoardPro serves more than 2,000 boards across 30 countries, with many small to mid-sized businesses and non-profit organizations. Board members and administrators may often serve on a voluntary basis and lack either the technical knowhow or the budget needed to use electronic documents.

As Thibault realized that BoardPro needed to implement a solution to meet the needs of thousands of boards and their members, three main challenges rose to the surface:

1. BoardPro needed to make annotation of digital board documents easy to use for board members at all levels of technological ability. The fallback approach at the time was to refer board members to use a third-party PDF reader that took users out of the portal and created a cumbersome workflow that also potentially risked document security.
2. BoardPro also needed to ensure members could view documents on one device and pick up where they left off on another. With board members using both tablets and laptops, they need a way to bookmark their spot in a document without wasting minutes searching.
3. BoardPro knew that cost would figure greatly into whatever benefits its solution delivered. With smaller organizations in its clientele and the need to scale a solution without breaking the bank, delivering value was high on Thibault’s mind.

The tools that Nutrient offers are fantastic and valuable tools for helping boards accomplish what they need to.

— Kim Thibault

At the time, less than 10 percent of BoardPro’s employees were engineers, which didn’t support the prospect of building a solution internally. “If we didn’t use Nutrient and we had to hire our own team to build those tools…we don’t want to do that,” shared Thibault. “We’d rather let you do it and focus on building a solution to meet our customers’ needs.”

Once Thibault connected with a member of the Nutrient Sales team, she discovered that the pathway to developing the solution board members had asked for was finally possible.

How the Web SDK and Instant made annotation possible

To meet the demands of BoardPro users, Thibault and her team needed features that would quickly and easily enable annotations on PDF documents. They also needed to deliver a way for documents to be viewed seamlessly across devices while bookmarking a user’s place in their review. Both solutions would need to be implemented in a cost-effective way as BoardPro continued to scale its business.

With the Nutrient Web SDK, board members are able to easily add their own annotations to digital documents in their BoardPro portal. With features like the responsive annotation toolbar, multi-line markup capabilities, and automatic document saving, Nutrient helped BoardPro deliver the answer to a widespread request of BoardPro users.

With Instant, BoardPro users can review documents on a tablet and seamlessly open their laptops to continue reviewing where they left off. This Nutrient functionality infuses convenience into everyday actions by board members.

In technology, functionality and reliability are a basic foundation. For us, it has to work. It has to work repeatedly, and those are the things we found with Nutrient.

— Kim Thibault

Thanks to flexibility of the Nutrient team and its willingness to work with Thibault on a scaling price model, BoardPro implemented the solutions it needed with room to scale. In particular, Thibault appreciated the efforts of Nutrient Vice President of Sales Richard Malloy. “I ended up getting in Richard’s inbox, and I have to say he was a big part of why we made the decision to choose Nutrient,” said Thibault. “He actually came back with a pricing schedule that scaled with us. It was really remarkable.”

BoardPro succeeds in the governance space

With Nutrient’s solutions in place, BoardPro realizes game-changing benefits for its own business success as well as that of its clients.

The ability to deliver annotations for board documents across all device types for clients both large and small is a differentiator for BoardPro. According to Thibault, “No one targeting our space has a tool like annotations available. That’s primarily an enterprise-grade feature.” BoardPro stays competitive by setting the pace for innovation and value compared to its primary competitor, demonstrated by its 90 percent client retention rate.

Through years of growth, scaling up its client base by 10 times to today’s portfolio of more than 2,000, BoardPro boasts a Net Promoter Score (NPS) in the mid-40s. Maintaining strong positive perception by clients is the dream of any startup, and BoardPro maintains its strength with solutions by Nutrient.

By partnering with Nutrient, BoardPro has evolved its clients’ experience with board documents. Where previously, users would have to open a document in a separate PDF reader app to incorporate their notes into board packs, the Nutrient Web SDK made it possible to perform the entire document workflow within the portal environment and create notes about a review.

Additionally, rather than opening documents at page one and forcing users to scroll to the last spot they viewed, Nutrient Instant jumps users to the precise bookmark where they left off. These solutions work so effectively that BoardPro sees board member engagement rates of 80 percent.

The team at BoardPro also senses the success its achieves because of Nutrient every day. By leveraging the functionality of the Web SDK and Instant products, BoardPro has been able to build its own features on top of Nutrient solutions to customize a truly exceptional experience for its clients.

When Nutrient releases something, we can pretty much rely on the fact that it’s going to work.

— Kim Thibault

With the Nutrient Support team, BoardPro was able to solve a problem felt across its client base of board members who are tasked with the governance of their organizations across the globe.

“Our target market is huge,” said Thibault. “In every community and every neighborhood, you have organizations, schools, and businesses that are all governed by boards. They’re consuming information. They’re making decisions. And they need tools to help them do that efficiently.”

As Thibault looks to the future and BoardPro’s industry at large, she believes partnering with Nutrient will enable BoardPro to continue to set the pace of innovation and to achieve its mission of empowering good governance everywhere. “We know the space is growing,” Thibault shared. “We are starting to see more competitors pop up, so the capabilities we offer with the help of Nutrient will become table stakes.”

As BoardPro continues its mission to democratize governance tools across the world’s organizations, Nutrient solutions are ready to support the success of customers and end users who demand more from their documents.