Customer Stories
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis
The world’s largest children’s museum boosts board engagement and efficiency with OnBoard, making governance more efficient for its 60-member board.
Customer Stories
The world’s largest children’s museum boosts board engagement and efficiency with OnBoard, making governance more efficient for its 60-member board.
Industry: Nonprofits; museums
Location: Indianapolis
Board Management Goals
Results
OnBoard Capabilities Utilized
Previous Board Management Solution: BoardEffect
Founded in 1925, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is the largest children’s museum in the world, welcoming more than 1 million visitors annually. As a cultural and educational cornerstone of the community, it combines hands-on exhibits, immersive experiences, and innovative programming to inspire and educate children and families.
Guided by a 60-member board, an unusually large governance body even in the museum sector, the organization relies heavily on its trustees for strategic direction, community representation, and fundraising leadership.
“Our governance is only as good as our board engagement,” says Libby Dissauer, Board Relations Manager. “We remove as many rumble strips and roadblocks as possible so they can be fully engaged.”
Before implementing OnBoard, the museum used a different board management solution. While it offered basic board portal functions, administrators and trustees found it frustrating.
“We got a lot of negative feedback about our prior product,” Libby says. “People didn’t like it. They didn’t like using it. I didn’t like using it.”
The platform’s shortcomings forced the board office into an exhausting cycle of duplicate work. “I was doing work in duplicate and triplicate — gathering materials, saving them as PDFs, uploading them to the platform, and then emailing them,” Libby says. This inefficiency also created potential data security issues. “Email gets hacked all the time,” she adds.
The result was a less engaged board, wasted staff hours, and an ongoing struggle to keep meeting preparation timely and secure.
As the previous platform’s contract neared its end, Libby approached the museum’s CIO and asked, “Can we just explore what other options would be out there? What we’ve got is not working and it’s not a good value.”
The museum evaluated three contenders. The goal was to find something intuitive, feature-rich, and efficient. “Selfishly, I wanted something that was easy for me to use,” Libby says, “but I also wanted it to be as simple as possible for my board members.”
The evaluation process made the choice clear. “We all came to the consensus that this was the best and most robust toolbox,” Libby says, adding that OnBoard offered the best value for the money.
Knowing her board’s wide age range and varied comfort with technology, Libby took a careful approach to adoption.
“I was very intentional to build kind of an on ramp — no pun intended — because I’ve got older folks who may not be early adopters, and younger folks who I knew would run with it right away,” she says.
They emphasized steady communication and early expectation-setting during the transition, which included eliminating printed board books. When the museum went live with OnBoard in January, in-person training during the annual board orientation bolstered the rollout.
“It was amazing,” Libby says. “I could not have asked for better.”
Outstanding service supplemented the process. “The customer service has been second-to-none,” Libby adds. “Every step of the way, if we had questions or feedback, they were addressed in real time. People feel heard, and 90% of your problem is solved when people feel heard.”
— Libby Dissauer, Board Relations Manager, The Children's Museum of Indianapolis
Just six months after adoption, the board was seeing measurable improvements:
Trustees now access materials easily and take advantage of features like annotations. “They’re engaging with the meeting materials earlier and in a more in-depth way than before,” Libby says. “That means they come to my meetings better prepared to ask questions and engage in the business of the board.”
The new workflow is a relief for Libby. “I do things one time,” she says. “I’m not emailing and copying and all that. It’s freed up my time to work with my advancement team on donor relations, which feels really good.”
OnBoard’s skills and diversity tracking feature gave the museum better insight into board composition. “I was able to take a deep dive into our pipeline and figure out where the gaps are — where we need to be focusing on in the coming year,” Libby says.
The homepage announcements feature has reduced email clutter and improved clarity. “People log on and see just what they need to see,” Libby says. “It’s very intuitive for them, and I think that’s really increased board satisfaction overall.”
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis has long been recognized for its innovation in programming and community engagement. With OnBoard, the museum has extended that spirit of innovation into its governance processes, equipping its board with a platform that matches the scale, diversity, and complexity of its work.
By moving away from a clunky, duplicative system to a streamlined, intuitive solution, the museum has freed staff and trustees to focus on what matters most: delivering extraordinary experiences to the community and advancing the mission.
For other large, mission-driven organizations, especially in the arts, culture, and humanities, The Children’s Museum’s experience shows how the right board management platform can do more than just manage meetings. It can transform how a board engages, decides, and leads.
Start your journey and unlock unparalleled security, insights, and efficiency with OnBoard.
