OnBoard survey finds scattered board data

OnBoard has put a number on a problem many directors and board administrators describe anecdotally: the data boards want often exists, but it is hard to retrieve, compare or assign to a clear owner. In a March 2026 report, the board management software company said its survey of 387 board-connected professionals found that boards struggle to access governance information consistently, even when the underlying information is already somewhere inside the organization. The report is titled “The Governance Insight Gap” and was released through OnBoard’s website and promoted in a social post linking to survey visuals and the full report. The sample covered respondents across North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, according to the report. OnBoard said 91% of respondents had directly served on a board or helped create and distribute board materials, and that the group spanned nonprofit, education, financial services, healthcare and corporate organizations. The company said the research was designed to measure how boards access, track and report on their own governance effectiveness. (onboardmeetings.com) ### Where is the gap showing up? The report says the gap is widest on questions that cut across meetings, follow-up and director behavior. OnBoard wrote that boards often cannot answer clearly how well they follow through on decisions, or which directors are genuinely engaged beyond attendance, because the relevant information is spread across memory, email threads and board materials that are not easy to search quickly. It described those as “fundamental governance questions” that many respondents said they could not answer in a consistent way. (onboardmeetings.com) OnBoard contrasted those issues with more visible operational measures. The report said respondents found it relatively easier to assess matters such as how meetings run, the quality of board materials and whether committees are functioning, because those activities happen in structured settings and leave clearer records. ### Why does scattered information matter to boards? (onboardmeetings.com) The report attributes the problem to board processes and tooling rather than to an absence of data. OnBoard said many boards still manage governance through disconnected systems including email, PDFs, shared drives and, in some cases, a board platform used mainly to distribute materials before meetings. That leaves records of what the board discussed, decided, assigned and completed “in fragments,” the report said. (onboardmeetings.com) For audit and risk oversight, that matters because questions about ownership, follow-through and data quality often fall to committees that need evidence rather than impressions. The report does not frame this as a compliance finding, but it does present the issue as a board information problem: directors may want to measure governance performance while lacking a consistent system of record. (onboardmeetings.com) ### What did OnBoard ask boards to consider? OnBoard’s social post highlighted three governance questions for boards to ask, while directing readers to the full report and its charts. The company’s report centers on recurring questions about follow-through on board decisions, director engagement and access to reliable governance information, which it presents as areas where boards say they want clearer answers. (onboardmeetings.com) The report says nine governance areas were tested in the survey. OnBoard did not present the topline issue as a lack of interest from boards; instead, it said respondents want these measures but struggle to access them reliably. ### Who was surveyed, and when? March 2026 is the field date OnBoard gives for the research. The company said the 387 respondents included 175 board directors and members, 94 CEOs and presidents, 88 board administrators, 74 executive directors, and 66 corporate secretaries or general counsel, with some respondents fitting more than one role category. (onboardmeetings.com 1) (onboardmeetings.com 2) OnBoard said the report establishes a baseline because, in its view, prior market research had not quantified how boards access and report governance insights in this way. The full report remains available on OnBoard’s website, where the company says readers can review the survey visuals and download the document. (onboardmeetings.com) (onboardmeetings.com)