How Digi-Board can add value to your governance review

For those of you who are not familiar with Digi-Board^TM this is an online tool designed to add speed and depth to the process of gathering and analysing data for governance reviews.

I used to carry out governance reviews for charities using the traditional method – interviewing leadership teams and trustees one by one, scanning through their responses and picking out the patterns. Inevitably, this was time consuming. With Digi-Board^TM, I find I can do a better and more consistent job in half the time.

Firstly, everyone who needs to be involved in the review can complete the online questionnaire in their own time. That is a significant time (and cost!) saving for the client and means that I can focus on interpreting the results.

The questionnaire is based on all the principles in the Charity Governance Code, plus other important areas such as income generation, use of digital, safeguarding etc. The format is consistent for all users. This means that not only can you analyse your own performance, but you can also compare it against Digi-Board^TM’s All Charities Benchmark – that is all the other charities that have taken the survey.

The benchmarking covers all the principles included in the questionnaire, but you can also compare the make-up of your board against all other charities for things like sex, age, ethnicity and duration of service. That’s really helpful for Boards in terms of informing their future recruitment plans.

Secondly, the resulting data has a depth and quality that I could never get from one-to-one interviews. As well as rating your current performance, each question allows you to select from up to three statements on how to improve practice, and the opportunity to add comments. So, the data is qualitative as well as quantitative.

Thirdly, once we close the survey, the data is processed instantly and presented in clear graphics that show at a glance where the strengths and weaknesses lie within the organisation.

All this means I can spend more time analysing the results and producing bespoke reports that are really insightful. I can compare the ratings and comments of the trustees with those of the leadership team, to show how well their views align. The closer they are, the better the overall results tend to be.

The quality of the comments underpins the quantitative data. Certain themes tend to emerge. Each charity’s results are unique, but you still see commonality; for example, digital and EDI are almost always the lowest rated areas, while integrity and leadership tend to be nearer the top.

The more you use the tool, the more you recognise the results to build your analysis on. And because it’s done in a consistent way, you get better and better at knowing where to find the evidence and how to present it. All of which ensures a better report for the client.

One further benefit is that the digitised, consistent format means you can compare performance over time. So, as well as having independent, external evaluations every few years, organisations can use Digi-Board^TM themselves to carry out their own assessment in between full governance reviews. This can really help to track their performance over time.

Action Planning is one of the few consultancies using Digi-Board^TM to carry out governance reviews. It really does enable us to provide a better-value service. If you would like to know more, or commission a governance review with Digi-Board^TM for your charity, please get in touch. get in touch.