Warden School District Goes Paperless!

I'm so privileged to travel throughout the country; seeing places that most folks only have seen in magazines. I have such an appreciation of the sheer beauty of the United States.

Have you ever been to Washington State? It's one of the most beautiful states in our country. The towering trees, the snow capped mountains and the vast desert are gorgeous. (Did she just say desert.... in Washington???) Yep, If you travel southwest from Spokane along I-90 you will drive through a desert plateau; you won't see a tree for miles! In two hours you can go from an urban city, through a desert and into the mountains. Amazing!

Here are a few of my favorite pictures of Washington's beauty, enjoy.

Entering the Cascades

San Juan Islands for whale watching

Driving through the plateau
















Warden is a small farming community located in south central Washington. The administration at Warden did an analysis of the costs of producing "paper packets." They estimated that they spend a minimum of $14,000/year but guessed that it's much more! The board members had little problem voting to use the BoardDocs service. It saves money, saves the environment and allows all stakeholders to join in the governance process!

The food is pretty good too! Inca's in Moses Lake.....best Mexican food EVER!

Back to you Laura!

Is White Chocolate REALLY Chocolate? or Chesterfield VA Gets Live Oak

So Ari and I arrive in Richmond VA about an hour before Dawn (Dawn Adams the BoardDocs trainer, not the time of day) and proceed to the Caribou Coffee to check our email and wait for Dawn. We order non-fat no whip mochas. Coffee guys says, "we're out of chocolate, we only have white chocolate." No chocolate? Only white chocolate? How can that be? And is white chocolate really chocolate at all. I mean if chocolate is not only a food, but a color as well, is whilte chocolate really chocolate? These questions are too deep for a Friday morning. I will ponder them later.

ANYWAY...

Chesterfield County Virginia became the second BoardDocs customer to receive the Live Oak version. Carol, the primary document publisher, had pulled together almost all of the material for a meeting to be held next week. The new system is so simple that she had built almost the entire meeting by the end of the first afternoon! Drag and Drop and categories with no agenda items really make a difference in how long it takes to build a meeting. Changes are easy to make and adjustments are not a big deal. I love that.

The board members really liked BoardDocs and were excited about using it for the upcoming meeting. The idea of having everything right at your fingertips during a meeting is always a big deal for the board.

We expect a lot of discussion regarding the actual process used to build meetings, and Chesterfield was no exception. One thing is true about BoardDocs for each new customer - it makes you sit back and look at the process you use for creating your meetings and minutes. A majority of the time, people do things a certain way simply because they have always been done that way. Discussing the process as part of BoardDocs training really gives our subscribers the opportunity to make the process different, better and more efficient. You can blame it all on BoardDocs! And if your process is exactly the way you want it to be, that is just fine too.

People manager really shined this week as we easily added administrative users. Gotta love People Manager.

So, on to the next implementation in a couple of weeks. More and more pieces are fitting into place with the all new BoardDocs and the functionality just continues to grow.  This thing is simply amazing.