Simplify Board Forms and Surveys with BoardCloud

Boards of directors rely on structured forms and surveys to maintain good governance, assess their own performance, ensure legal and regulatory compliance, and stay aligned on strategy. Directors are typically busy professionals with limited time, so these tools need to be efficient, targeted and easy to complete, without lengthy email chains, repeated requests for signatures or manual collation.

This is exactly what BoardCloud’s Form Builder is designed for.

A Faster Way to Collect Board Data

BoardCloud’s Form Builder makes it simple to collect a wide range of information from board members, directly within the secure, audited, and POPIA-compliant platform they already use. Members receive a secure link by email, and once they submit the form, their answers are automatically collated for administrators to review, with no manual data entry required.

Instead of emailing a declaration as an attachment, tracking responses in a spreadsheet and manually filing signed copies, administrators can distribute the form through BoardCloud and monitor submissions from one place.

The Form Builder is flexible by design, supporting everything from declarations of interest to detailed board assessments. In minutes, you can build and distribute forms that would otherwise take hours to design and days of follow-up to complete.

With BoardCloud’s Form Builder, you can:

• Build detailed, multi-page forms
• Apply standard and custom validation rules
• Style forms to match your organisation’s branding

Flexible distribution. Once a form is built, it can be sent out in the way that fits your governance process:

• As a standalone form emailed to selected members
• As part of a meeting agenda, to be completed by attendees ahead of time
• As a form assigned to a specific committee

Built-in reporting. Completed forms can be exported as PDFs, providing supporting documentation for audit trails and compliance records. Every response is stored in your organisation’s forms database, creating a historical record for future governance reporting.

What’s Coming

In this series, we’ll look at the forms and surveys boards use most often: how they should be structured, what questions they should ask, and how to put them to work using BoardCloud’s Form Builder. Each article will provide examples that you can adapt for your own board.

Here’s a sample of what’s to come:

• Annual Board Effectiveness Evaluation – Assesses how well the board works as a whole, from boardroom culture to the chairperson’s effectiveness, in line with the performance evaluation practices recommended by King IV.
• Director Self-Assessment & Peer Review – An individual-focused survey where directors evaluate their own effectiveness, sometimes alongside anonymous feedback on fellow board members.
• Director Skills Matrix & Gap Analysis – Directors map their areas of expertise (finance, cybersecurity, legal, industry knowledge) so that the board has a clear view of gaps to address through future recruitment.
• Annual Conflict of Interest Declaration – A compliance form where directors disclose any personal, professional or financial interests that could conflict with their duties to the board, supporting the disclosure requirements of section 75 of the Companies Act 71 of 2008.
• “Pulse” Meeting Evaluations – A quick check-in of three to five questions after each meeting to see what worked and what didn’t.
• CEO & Executive Performance Evaluation – A formal board-completed assessment of the CEO’s performance against agreed KPIs, leadership capability and progress on strategic goals.
• Onboarding Feedback Survey – Sent to new directors six to 12 months into their tenure, this evaluates the effectiveness of the onboarding process and training materials.
• Risk Appetite & Strategy Alignment Survey – Used during annual strategic planning, this gauges each director’s comfort with operational, financial and reputational risk.
• Committee Effectiveness Assessment – A version of the board evaluation tailored to individual committees, to confirm each is meeting its specific charter and mandate.
• Director Independence Questionnaire – Confirms that independent non-executive directors meet the independence criteria set out in King IV and, for listed companies, the JSE Listings Requirements.

These are only some of the governance processes that can be streamlined with the right forms. Follow the series as we examine how each form should be structured, which questions to include, and how to manage the process using BoardCloud’s Form Builder.