Customer Stories
The Blagrave Trust
This London not-for-profit organisation enjoys efficient meetings, clearer governance, and engaged trustees, delivered through centralised tools and analytics, thanks to OnBoard.
Customer Stories
This London not-for-profit organisation enjoys efficient meetings, clearer governance, and engaged trustees, delivered through centralised tools and analytics, thanks to OnBoard.
Industry: Not-for-profit
Location: London
Board Management Goals
Results
OnBoard Capabilities Utilised
The Blagrave Trust is a UK-based grant-giver dedicated to youth-led change. Headquartered in London, it works across England with a priority in southeast England.
The Trust empowers young people to enact change by funding youth-focused charities and young people directly. Its vision is a society in which young people have a real stake and influence; its mission translates that vision into practice through strategic grant-making, partnership, and voice-led governance.
Blagrave’s governance model mirrors its youth-centred ethos. “Our board is not a traditional board,” says Geraldine Warren, The Blagrave Trust’s Finance and Governance Manager.
The Trust currently has eight trustees and is about to have 11, with five under age 30 and a diverse breadth of professional knowledge and lived experience. The whole board meets five times a year (three times in-person and twice virtually) supported by a finance and investment committee that meets at least three times annually and a safeguarding committee that meets twice. Trustees serve three-year terms, renewable up to three times.
The Trust’s dispersed and volunteer board created practical challenges long before any meeting began. “All our trustees have full-time jobs and/or caring responsibilities,” Geraldine says, “Their work at Blagrave is voluntary and in addition to everything else they have going on in their lives.”
Without a dedicated governance platform, trustees were handling Blagrave business through a mix of personal and work email accounts; urgent matters sometimes spilled into WhatsApp. “There wasn’t this distinct space where they could just commit to Blagrave-related activities,” she says.
As a result, even in meetings, occasionally key information could be hard to surface: A trustee hunting for a past paper would be searching through their thousands of emails trying to find past records.
Blagrave wanted to support trustees to be able to compartmentalise board work “so they could comfortably and confidently choose when they switched on to Blagrave work and when they could also just switch it off.”
Centralising documents, agendas, and announcements in one secure system became a clear priority.
The search began in a straightforward way. Geraldine ran desk research across comparison lists of board-governance platforms: “One of these ‘which are the best board governance apps’ had a list of the top 10 and [OnBoard was on] the list.”
Shortlisting three vendors, the team compared features, usability and cost. OnBoard stood out for its clarity and feel: “I really liked the visual of the dashboard … the menu and the aesthetics,” she says.
Cost competitiveness also mattered. “I don’t know if yours was actually the cheapest, but it was one of the two cheaper options,” she says. But the clincher was capability and functionality
For a time-pressed, geographically dispersed trustee group, OnBoard promised exactly what Blagrave needed: a single, trustworthy place for meetings, materials, and oversight that was simple enough to adopt without fuss.
Implementation was deliberately light-touch yet thorough, and crucially, fast. Geraldine partnered with OnBoard’s customer success lead, Bibianna Fasogbon.
“She was really helpful and very patient,” Geraldine says of Bibianna. “She helped me set things up to a point where all I really had to do as the administrator was introduce my board to it and they didn’t really need any technical support.”
OnBoard supplied guides and click-through videos, though only one board member needed them because the system proved to be intuitive. Bibianna also helped configure meetings, folders, and the resources area the way they wanted it to be, so trustees could simply sign in and start.
Blagrave’s board composition helped. Because it includes younger trustees accustomed to digital tools, there was no resistance to adoption. “They’re used to it,” Geraldine says. “They’re doing similar things at work anyway, so it wasn’t a problem. It was really straightforward.”
— Geraldine Warren, Finance and Governance Manager, The Blagrave Trust
Within a year of adoption, the changes were clear. Trustees quickly embraced OnBoard and provided positive feedback. The Trust now uses the platform for meetings and as a central repository. Policies and key governance documents live in the Resources section. Trustees access them easily and, critically, can search across materials. “The search function is very popular with the trustees,” Geraldine says.
Meeting flow has improved, too. A surprise hit is the live agenda timer, which provides a shared visual cue that keeps everyone on-track. In the past, a chair might not know the meeting was slipping; now, “the whole room is aware that we’re over time,” Geraldine says, which has “been incredibly helpful in terms of timekeeping.” The cumulative effect is more focused discussions and better time discipline, without anyone needing to police the clock.
Communication is tidier and less intrusive. Rather than emailing documents to 12 people or interrupting personal inboxes, Blagrave now pushes announcements and materials through OnBoard. That means trustees can engage when it suits them.
Geraldine appreciates that OnBoard creates “a really explicit sort of area (for trustees), which is not something we’ve had before,” she says. “It is their own space.” This dedicated channel allows volunteers to switch it on when they’re ready for Blagrave work and switch it off when they’re not, protecting their limited time and headspace.
From an administrative standpoint, OnBoard’s analytics have become invaluable. Geraldine uses them to monitor pre-reading and adjust agendas, liaising with the board chair. The result is fewer surprises in the room and better-paced conversations.
Asked for her top features, Geraldine highlights the Agenda Builder and time tracker. Previously, she compiled agendas manually in Microsoft Word; now, building an agenda and sense-checking timings is automated.
The Resources area is another staple. Policies and archive materials are updated in one place, avoiding “having to email something around to 12 people not even knowing whether or not they’ve caught your email,” Geraldine says. Analytics round out the trio, giving a previously missing window into engagement and readiness.
Trustees, meanwhile, value simplicity above all. Geraldine says they found the system “really intuitive to use … there was no build-up and induction; they just started using it and they just loved it straight away.” The smoothness is almost invisible. “That’s what it’s like with OnBoard,” Geraldine says. “It’s just going on in the background and it’s working.”
Blagrave is now exploring Minutes AI to reduce the burden of note-taking. “I’m really hoping that works for us because that will be my favourite thing,” Geraldine says. Minute-taking takes a lot of manpower. Automating the heavy lifting could return capacity to the conversation while creating a more consistent record.
Finally, Geraldine calls out the human side. “Customer service has been spot-on the whole time,” she says, describing the team as “really super helpful, really approachable … really responsive, really friendly.”
Those interactions have been personable and relaxed, which she appreciates. The experience has made adoption easier and kept momentum high.
OnBoard has given The Blagrave Trust what it needed most: a single, explicit space for governance that respects trustees’ time and circumstances. It separates board work from crowded personal and work channels, improves meeting discipline, and makes documents discoverable on demand.
For administrators, it turns guesswork into insight; for trustees, it turns friction into focus. Geraldine says the platform provides clarity, confidence, and calm: a place trustees can enter purposefully, then leave behind just as easily while the work continues smoothly in the background.
By reducing administrative noise and enabling better-prepared, better-paced meetings, OnBoard helps Blagrave centre its energy on mission: empowering young people to enact change. In that sense, the tool is doing exactly what good governance technology should do: disappearing into the workflow so the organisation’s purpose can take the foreground.
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