Countdown to Be Savvy, BoardEffect’s Annual Conference

With less than two weeks until the 4^th annual BoardEffect Users Conference on September 28^th – 30^th, the final count-down to kick-off has begun.  This is unquestionably the biggest conference on our company’s yearly calendar; and it evokes in our team a powerful mixture of anticipation, enthusiasm, and an earnest ambition to improve upon prior years’ events.

Our goal for the conference is to foster a fun, learning environment that helps members of the community optimize their organizations’ use of BoardEffect.  With all of this in mind, the conference has officially been re-named BE Savvy.  The new name is intended to capture the essence and objective of the event: to empower BE users to “be savvy” about using the BE solution, leveraging the rich set of available supporting resources, and engaging as active members of the community.

The name also represents the organizational evolution of BoardEffect itself.  Having learned a great deal from our first three users’ conferences, we will be bringing back the best elements of past events and adding some new user-driven session ideas.  I am optimistic that, with emphasis in the following areas, the 2016 BoardEffect Users Conference will be our very best one to date:

• Product Education: Prior years’ survey results have been unmistakable – learning how to best use BoardEffect is among attendees’ most highly valued aspects of our annual get-together. So, we’ve doubled-down on product education as the cornerstone of the upcoming conference agenda.  Functional, hands-on training will once again be offered in pre-conference sessions; including a “Boot Camp” level for those new to the BoardEffect system and a “Master Class” for more experienced administrators. During the conference, sessions will center around discussions on best practices for solving common challenges and taking advantage of BoardEffect features to advance all of the activities of your board.  Also driven by feedback from prior attendees, we will be adding more technical sessions for IT-oriented attendees (e.g. “BoardEffect Technology: DevOps, Infrastructure, Security and Compliance”).  Finally, BoardEffect “Tune-ups” will be introduced; these are check-ups for your board portal that help ensure it is working its best for you and your board.

• News and Updates: It’s been a busy twelve months since we last convened as a user community; and this event will help attendees catch-up on a range of news relating to BoardEffect. We will provide further background on recent product updates such as the board portal industry’s first ever Integration Panel and ongoing enhancements in the area of security and compliance.  Attendees will also learn how to leverage BoardEffect’s comprehensive study “Nonprofit Laws: Board Rules and Regulations.”  Finally, we’ll offer a look ahead at future areas of focus, so that community members can begin to plan for upcoming product and operational enhancements.

• Communities of Learning: One of the most exciting and instructive new aspects to the BE Savvy program is the concept of Communities of Learning. The Community of Learning track will enable attendees to identify and convene with others who share similar board types, industries, or usage of BoardEffect.  The objective is for attendees to hear directly from industry colleagues about how they introduced BoardEffect into their organization and supported adoption of a new process, along with how their expertise and usage of BoardEffect has changed over time.  These Communities of Learning clearly demonstrate the evolution of our conference and community; and we anticipate that this initiative will provide attendees with a valuable network of resources to be leveraged on an ongoing basis throughout the year.

If you are planning on attending BE Savvy 2016, I hope that this post helps to ramp up your anticipation around the conference – we at BoardEffect are enthusiastically looking forward to it.