Ashley Marchand Orme

The times, they are a-changin’. And so are we.

NACD’s Research team, headed by Director of Research Friso Van der Oord, has been hard at work making changes to significantly enhance how you experience our content. We heard your feedback, and—with our members as our central focus—we’ve released new, practical types of content and reorganized our closets to help you find what you need, when you need it. Let’s begin with our reorganization.

NACD Resource Centers

We’ve curated the best NACD content on the most universal board governance topics in NACD Board Resource Centers. These resource centers include our best thought leadership, most practical tools, recent expert analysis, and upcoming events. Their content gets refreshed monthly. We now have resource centers available on the following topics, with more to come in the next 6 months:

• Audit Committee
• Board Diversity
• Board-Shareholder Engagement
• Compensation Committee
• Compliance and Ethics
• Corporate Governance Standards
• Cyber-Risk Oversight
• Director Liability
• M&A Oversight
• Nominating and Governance Committee
• Preparation for Proxy Season
• Private Company Governance
• Risk Oversight
• Strategy Development and Long-Term Value Creation

Board Insights Portal

In addition to Resource Centers, NACD also debuted its Board Insights Portal in the last year. Here, you can find our most recent publications, blogs and articles.

This page also features three drop-down menus that allow you to search for our research and insights by committee type (for the three traditional committees), by topic, or for benchmarking data by company type.

Director Essentials

Among the publications you’ll find in our Resource Centers and Board Insights Portal are a new publication type called our Director Essentials series. This new series offers “essentials” guides for boards on key governance issues, outlining core responsibilities of boards, tactics they can adopt to strengthen oversight and questions they can ask to inform the dialogue with management

• Compliance and Ethics Oversight;
• Oversight of M&A;
• Preparing for Proxy Season;
• Risk Oversight; and
• Shareholder Activism.

Director FAQs

Another new content type is the Director FAQs. These two- to three-page briefs answer the most common questions we receive from our members. Topics include:

• What is the role of the board vs. management?
• How do I communicate with shareholders while complying with Regulation FD?
• What constitutes a conflict of interest?
• What are some tips to help me find my next board seat?

Blue Ribbon Commission Reports

We also recently built a dedicated page this year to highlight the findings of the 2016 Blue Ribbon Commission Report on Building the Strategic-Asset Board. This page also includes an executive summary of the report, additional resources related to the report, and links to all other BRCs that NACD has produced over the last decade.

Enhanced Search Function

A cross-departmental team of NACD staff have also worked to improve our website’s search function. We cleared out our old or redundant pages and ensured that our most relevant content appears when you search your favorite governance terms on our site. So now, if we’ve published it, you can more easily find it.

What This Means for You

We hope that these changes will help you and your board to better identify specific resources to frame your boardroom discussions, diagnose an issue, and outline possible solutions. We only ask that you continue to provide us with feedback about your experience finding or using our content. Please offer your comments below, or send an email to me (AMOrme@NACDonline.org) or Friso (FVanderOord@NACDonline.org).

You may also click here for more information on how to gain access to NACD’s exclusive boardroom intelligence.