There’s never enough time in an advisory board meeting. There’s always that one conversation that gets cut off, that one train of thought that gets left unexplored, that one recommendation that never gets fully fleshed out and that feeling the day after the meeting that it could have been so much better.
So what can you do? You can start conversations before the meeting begins so they can be continued and (hopefully) concluded at the meeting — and when it wraps, you can feel great knowing nothing was left on the table.
At Impetus, we can help get you thinking about what to share with your board members in the weeks and days leading up to kick-off so they don’t show up cold.
Let’s say your advisory board has to do with a rebranding; we might suggest a few category-specific examples of successful and unsuccessful rebranding exercises to give them context. But then to get the wheels turning in a different direction, we could toss in a few unrelated rebrands we thought were really great. Our own comes to mind.
If the advisory board has been convened to solve a less creative problem, you can still get your members’ juices flowing — just differently. Let’s say the board got together to discuss how to handle a new patient education campaign, we may suggest sharing video interviews with patients so your board members get a better feeling for what success looked like. When they show up to brainstorm, they’ll know what they need to know to be productive. And that’s the whole point — getting your board members prepared early so when the time comes to get to it, they can get to it with gusto.