If you are running a smaller charity, sports club, housing association, or small business with a board of trustees or directors, you may not have heard of board portals. Or even know they exist as you struggle on with email and cloud storage, along with an old excel worksheet that contains your (wildly out of date risk register).
Or you might have seen the ads in business magazines and trade shows and quickly dismissed them as nice in principal but completely out of your league.
“They are for corporates”; “We only have six trustees”; “We manage just fine with email”; “I got a quote for one once and it came to more than £5,000 a year”
It’s an understandable reaction. The board portal market has spent years chasing enterprise clients — FTSE 350 companies, large NHS trusts, multinational corporations. The pricing reflects it, the features reflect it, and the sales process definitely reflects it. So smaller organisations look at the category and assume it’s not for them. [as a heads-up – some of the enterprise products are amazing – we’ve used some in other roles, but it depends who you are and what you can afford and use]
But here’s the thing: you are exactly who needs one most.
The governance gap nobody talks about
Large organisations have company secretaries, governance teams, and compliance departments. They have people whose entire job is making sure the board runs properly. A board portal makes their lives easier, but they’d survive without one.
Smaller organisations don’t have that luxury. The CEO is often the board administrator. The chair is a volunteer fitting governance around a day job. The clerk to the governors is juggling it alongside everything else. There’s no dedicated governance function — just people doing their best with shared drives, email chains, and the occasional WhatsApp message.
That’s where things go wrong. Board packs get sent late. Actions from the last meeting get forgotten. Risk registers live in a spreadsheet nobody updates. Policies lapse without anyone noticing. And when the regulator comes knocking — whether that’s the Charity Commission, the FCA, or Companies House — there’s a frantic scramble to pull everything together.
Sound familiar?
The real question isn’t size — it’s complexity
If your organisation has a board that meets regularly, makes decisions, tracks risks, and needs to demonstrate compliance, you have governance complexity. It doesn’t matter whether you have five board members or fifty. The obligations are real, the stakes are real, and the consequences of getting it wrong are real.
A trustee of a £500,000 charity has the same legal duties as a director of a £500 million company. The difference is they’re doing it with a fraction of the support.
Why we built Governance360 differently
This is precisely why Governance360 exists. We didn’t take an enterprise board portal and strip features out to make a cheaper version. We started from scratch, building specifically for the organisations that the rest of the market ignores.
Our founders have sat on charity boards and served as company directors. We know what it feels like to chase trustees for document approvals at 10pm on a Sunday, or to realise nobody can find the signed minutes from three meetings ago. We built the platform to solve the problems we’d lived through ourselves.
Critically, we co-created Governance360 with the people who actually use it — charity CEOs, volunteer trustees, club secretaries, and small business directors. Every feature exists because a real user told us they needed it, not because an enterprise sales team demanded it.
The result is a platform that’s simple enough for a volunteer board to adopt in a single meeting, yet robust enough to satisfy your regulator, your auditor, and your insurers.
So, to conclude, is my organisation too small for a Board Portal?
Here’s a simple test. If your organisation has three or more board or committee members, holds at least four meetings a year, and has any form of regulatory or compliance obligation, you’re not too small for a board portal.
You’re exactly who we built this for.
Ready to see how Governance360 works for organisations like yours? Book a 15-minute demo or start a free trial yourself and we’ll show you — no jargon, no pressure, no enterprise sales pitch.