Surf Life Saving NSW | BoardPro

BoardPro gives the board back time for oversight and strategy, which means more time towards supporting the staff and volunteers who equip, empower and deliver rescue and safety services across the NSW coastline

At a glance

Customer: Surf Life Saving NSW is the largest volunteer-based emergency service in Australia, and the peak body for coastal rescue services along the NSW coast. It comprises eleven branches, 129 clubs, around 87,000 members, including 75,000 volunteer members and over 20,000 volunteer lifesavers patrolling beaches each summer. Last year, its volunteers and lifeguards rescued 4,500 people. Its purpose is to equip, empower, develop, and support its people to deliver vital aquatic rescue and safety services to save lives across the NSW coastline.

Challenge: Governance documentation for two separate boards, numerous standing committees and working groups was scattered across manual and internal files. Important documents were being lost or misplaced.

Solution: BoardPro, where the board minutes and documentation features were the first drawcards. Following success on the main board, BoardPro was rolled out across both boards and all working groups, and offered out to branches and clubs.

Results:

One central, consistent governance record across two boards and every committee — the kind of consistency regulators, funders, and members ultimately rely on
Faster onboarding for new admin staff and new board directors — so new people can support operations sooner, in an organisation that runs on volunteers
Time back for the CEO and admin team, on tracking actions and preparing for government reporting — time redirected to training, strategy, and frontline support
A more contemporary, transparent organisation, with clear conflict-of-interest records — the sort of transparency that helps sustain public trust and regulatory confidence
More time and attention available for the organisation's actual mission — saving lives, developing future leaders, and building stronger coastal communities

Surf Life Saving NSW doesn't measure its work in spreadsheets or board packs. It measures it in lives saved across the NSW coastline. So when its CEO, Steven Pearce, talks about what BoardPro has done for the organisation, he doesn't reach for a software benefit — he reaches for the mission.

“The time that we save using BoardPro allows us to use more time to save people's lives,” he says. “It's been a really wonderful piece of technology that we've brought into Surf Life Saving NSW.”

It's a simple idea with a lot riding on it. Surf Life Saving NSW is the peak body for coastal rescue up and down the New South Wales coast — a volunteer-based emergency service on a scale most organisations never approach: 11 branches, 129 clubs, close to 87,000 members, 75,000 of them volunteers, and over 20,000 volunteer lifesavers patrolling beaches each summer — a record 21,668 in the most recent season. Two separate boards meet to oversee a mission that hasn't changed in over a century — saving lives, creating great Australians, and building better communities. Every hour its governance layer can hand back is an hour that goes toward the real-world impact the organisation exists to deliver: onto the sand, into training, towards the next Nipper finding their feet in the surf.

When filing diligence becomes a governance risk

Before BoardPro, governance at Surf Life Saving NSW ran on manual, internal files, which was a system only as strong as whoever happened to be filing that week. For most organisations, that's an inconvenience. For one running two separate boards, plus a web of standing committees and working groups, it posed a very real risk.

“The filing diligence is only as good as the person putting it in there,” Steven says. Documents were being lost or misplaced, and there was no single, familiar home for governance material, so anyone moving between a board, a committee and a working group had to relearn where things lived each time.

As Company Secretary, Steven felt the inefficiencies and risk directly. Getting board documentation properly centralised wasn't just a nice-to-have. “It was always an obligation on myself to ensure we had document management,” he says. “So that we knew that we had all the minutes in one place. They were all centralised, all in a uniform layout in nature. That was the intent.”

Why Surf Life Saving NSW chose BoardPro

Surf Life Saving NSW found BoardPro the old-fashioned way — face to face, at an industry conference, at a display stand set up for an entirely different purpose. “It just so happened that at that time we were looking at how we could shore up and tighten our governance, particularly our document governance,” Steven says. “We made an inquiry with BoardPro, and it just went from there.”

What kept BoardPro in place wasn't a long feature list. It was how little friction it added to people's day.

“What I really like about BoardPro is just how intuitive it is,” Steven says. “We can bring on new admin executive support, and in a really short period of time they can be upskilled in how to use BoardPro.” In an organisation that depends largely on volunteers, getting people productive fast likely matters more than it would in a typical workplace. Minutes go in as soon as a meeting ends. Actions are recorded and assigned. Notifications go out automatically to whoever owns them — which matters when the actions being tracked can relate to patrol rosters, safety equipment, or training.

“It's just a really simple system to use,” he says.

The bigger shift, though, was one Steven hadn't quite planned for. BoardPro was brought in to solve a board documentation problem for two boards, and the momentum kept building. “I liked how it wasn't just a board portal for board meetings, but that it could be utilised for all our other meetings,” he says. Working groups picked it up. And branches. And clubs. What started as a fix for board minutes is now, in Steven's words, “the primary document management system for our meetings” across the entire organisation — one home for governance now sitting behind decisions everywhere, literally from the boardroom to the beach.

Supporting the change management process

Any member-based organisation knows that the real barrier to a new system usually isn't the system itself — it's the differing views and skills people bring to it. There’s often resistance to change or to new technology, which requires a process to manage it.

“Before COVID, everyone refused to use Zoom or Teams. Now it's just the norm,” Steven says. “I would say it's the same with BoardPro.” Members who might describe themselves as under-skilled with technology use it easily, largely because every board pack looks and works the same way every time. “They know how it's formatted,” Steven says, and for an organisation built on volunteers stepping into new roles constantly, that consistency is doing more governance work than it might get credit for. It's a small thing that arguably helps keep volunteers willing to take on roles within the organisation.

It shows up clearly at board level too. New directors are inducted onto BoardPro quickly, arriving at a board pack that already looks and feels familiar, freeing up more of their attention for strategy and risk rather than paperwork from day one. “We have full adoption of the board directors, which is good,” Steven says. “That's one good tick to get out of the way.”

How the time saved with BoardPro translates to real-world impact

Ask Steven what BoardPro has changed day-to-day, and the answer is time — the kind that used to disappear into admin and now doesn't.

“Because it's intuitive and because it's just so easy to use, and we have it across all our layers of staff as well, it does save us plenty of time,” he says. “In following up actions, even trying to track down past meeting documentation; it's all there for us.” That matters more than it might sound, because Surf Life Saving NSW has extensive reporting responsibilities and relies on that record being solid. “We do a lot of reporting to government. We're reliant on that contemporaneous evidence as well. And to know that we sync it into BoardPro, I don't have to worry about it being set up on a file on my laptop, on the desktop, or gone into the cloud somewhere I can never find it.” A record like that is more than administrative housekeeping — it's likely part of what keeps government confident enough to keep funding and partnering with the organisation.

There's a governance-quality dimension too, and one Steven ties directly to trust. BoardPro gives the organisation, in his words, “an assurity of governance.” Not quite set-and-forget, but close to it: a system solid enough that a bit more attention can go to the coastline instead of the management of administrative board tasks.

The organisation is only just starting to explore BoardPro's AI assistant — beginning with Steven inadvertently clicking into it during a meeting and finding it had produced a useful summary. “Like a lot of other entities, we’re just starting out on our exploration and adoption of AI. No doubt when we get a bit of time to take a deep breath — we're in our full operational season now” — there's more to explore there.”

Governance you can show your stakeholders

For an organisation as large and as publicly accountable as Surf Life Saving NSW, governance isn't just an internal matter — it's something regulators, government partners and the public are entitled to see clearly. BoardPro helps make that visible. “It gives us a clear delineation in regards to conflicts of interest,” Steven says, “everything that's required of us to show that we're a contemporary and transparent organisation.” That kind of transparency likely helps sustain the trust of government partners, funders and the public.

When the organisation’s impact is measured in lives

Steven doesn't measure BoardPro's value in features or time saved. He measures it the way Surf Life Saving NSW measures its work: in lives. "The time that we save using BoardPro allows us to use more time to save people's lives."