How to host your advisory board with Onomi

What are Onomi Advisory Boards?

With Onomi Advisory Boards, you can build an Advisor Experience app customized to your specific advisory board needs. 

From fully asynchronous exchanges to real-time meetings with pre-meeting input, Onomi supports your process end-to-end, on both mobile and web app.

Add all essential content to your Advisor Experience app, beginning with detailed advisor and moderator lists, including bios and profiles. Build pages to share key logistical information or to serve as a welcome hub for participants. Upload all necessary PDF documents for review both before and during the event. Set up discussion boards to encourage advisor interaction through comments and posts. Schedule and distribute forms to gather additional input from your experts. Finally, include a disclaimer or warning footer, if needed, to remind advisors not to discuss adverse event reporting.

Guide advisors effectively with a customizable task list that highlights exactly where their input is needed. A clear, step-by-step list with direct links to relevant content ensures advisors can easily complete tasks and use their time efficiently.

Send out key communications such as invitations and task reminders via email to keep advisors informed and on schedule. Combine content with targeted messaging to ensure every advisor enjoys a fully personalized experience.

Enable collaborative document reviews with document annotations. Advisors can review documents and interact with other advisors' input through comments and replies. Annotations can be added anytime, anywhere, using either the mobile or desktop app. This way, for both the organizers and advisors, all advisor insights are centralized, making it easy to track, review, and take action. Notifications are sent via both email and the app whenever advisors comment or reply, ensuring participants know when their input is needed, even if they’re not actively logged in.

Foster insightful exchanges with discussion boards, where experts can provide answers to questions and give their opinion on other advisor inputs. Keep advisors involved by alerting them when new input is required or when someone has responded to their comments, to ensure timely participation throughout the advisory board’s lifecycle. Assign moderators to your discussion boards to ensure that each contribution is fully reviewed and meets compliance needs.

Send out surveys and questionnaires to privately capture your advisor’s opinions, ensuring that your experts provide an unbiased response to the specific questions.

Bring advisors together in real-time by scheduling virtual meetings directly within the Adboard desktop app. With built-in features such as polls, screen sharing, instant chat, and AI generated captions, you can provide all the functionalities needed for efficient collaboration. Meetings can also be recorded, giving planners a reliable way to revisit discussions and capture insights.

Finally, take advantage of the dedicated Onomi Advisor Experience workspace template, which comes pre-loaded with all the above mentioned features. It helps you quickly create, configure, and customize your Advisor Experience app.

Our Onomi professional services team is also available to support you with creating and configuring your workspace, if needed.

Creating the Advisor Experience app using the dedicated workspace template

We highly recommend that you use the Advisor Experience workspace template, when creating your workspace in Backstage:

Using the dedicated workspace template will instantly produce an Advisor Experience that includes all the functionalities that you need. All you will need to do is adjust the content and configuration based on your needs.

It is designed to cater for Advisory board events that combine both asynchronous engagement and live sessions with live interactions

Example: For an advisory board that may be short in duration or span over several months.
Your advisors will contribute virtually via collaborative document reviews with annotations, as well as discussion boards, and meet once or periodically for live interaction via live sessions with polls, live video meetings, and/or in-person meetings.

Walkthrough of the Advisor Experience app features

Below we will provide a walk-through of the features that are key to a successful Advisor Experience app, along with some best practices on how they should be set-up.

As a starting point we will use the Advisory board workspace template, and we will focus on the items that are each listed in the app menu (and displayed when selected) by the app user.

Landing on the home page (or Welcome page)

Let’s take a look at the app home page, here called the Welcome and Overview page, and look at the content and functionalities that are visible there:

In the app home page, you can see the following:

• The template app has its own design (theme colors, banners, icons, etc.) that you can customize based on your needs via the workspace theme editor.
• Important go-to items are located in the navigation bar at the top and the app menu to the left, and the quick links section below the banner. All these are configurable based on your needs.
• For the home page, we have chosen to display a "Welcome & overview" message, that provides a landing point for your advisors entering the app, with a description of the app, and a person of contact in case of questions.
• Whether placed as links that are accessible via the app menu, in the navigation bar, or in the quick links, app users can easily access the various sections in the app, which will be further described below.

Using the Notifications page

In the Notifications section of the app, your advisors can see any notifications that they have received, whether they are sent by the event planners, by other attendees, or automatically by the app directly from a discussion board activity or a document review activity that may require the app user’s input:

Here for example, selecting the notification will take the advisor directly to the Reading materials section:

Advisors can also access their personal notifications settings in order to set their preferences in terms of the notifications that they should receive:

Accessing the Advisors user list

This Advisors list contains all the advisors that will take part in the advisory board, and that have been added to the workspace's main Users list.

Here we recommend that event planners always add a biography as well as a picture of the advisor, if possible:

Advisors can select a fellow advisor in the list in order to see their details, connect with and message them, or see a summary of their recent activity in the app:

Event planners can decide exactly what information is made visible here to other advisers.

Accessing the Moderators user list

The Moderators list includes all the app users that will be performing the important moderation tasks in the app.

It is a content page in the workspace, that contains a link list that points to the specific app users that will be performing the moderation in the app. These moderator app users are also added to the workspace via the main users list:

Advisors can select a moderator here to see their details, their bios, or see a recap of their activity in the app:

Event planners can decide exactly what information is made visible here to other advisers.

Provide guidance via the Advisor checklist

This Advisor checklist is designed to provide a clear step-by-step list of things to do in the app for your advisors, with direct links to the content that you want them to engage with.

It can be fully customized in the workspace via the Activity challenge module, which here has been used specifically to create a task list based on the advisory board needs:

Selecting a task in the checklist will conveniently take the adviser to the task that needs to be completed: read a document, post on a discussion board, etc.

As the tasks are completed by the advisors, they will appear as checked in the task list, allowing advisors to follow a determined order, easily see their progress, and to know exactly what to do next.

Provide access to reading materials

The Reading materials section is also a content page that includes a list of documents for advisors to read. Each item on the page is a link to an individual document:

This type of content page can be used to list out documents or other content pages, and can also be linked to the adviser checklist, or a notification.

Document review and PDF annotations

The Document review link in the app menu will directly take the advisors to a PDF document that they can directly read and add their input on:

Uploaded materials for review and commenting can be anything in PDF format: posters, slides, medical studies, brochures, etc.

Thanks to PDF annotations, advisors can add their own comments to the document, and respond to comments posted by other advisers:

The app will also automatically send in-app notifications and emails to the advisors whenever someone has reacted to one of their comments, to keep them engaged with the document reviews.

Pre-meeting questionnaire

This is a form that is made accessible for advisors to fill in before the live meeting, and can be used to privately capture your advisor's opinions, ensuring that your experts provide an unbiased response to the specific questions.

To encourage advisors to complete it, it can be linked to the Advisor checklist, made accessible via an app menu item or a quick link, as well as linked to a scheduled notification:

Make discussion boards available to your advisors

Discussion boards are managed via the Feeds module in Backstage, and are used to ask your advisors questions around one or more topics or questions, and to capture their insights.

Discussion boards can be fully moderated by Backstage users or by app users who are in charge of moderating the comments that are added.

Reading materials can also be associated with discussion boards in order to engage your advisors and facilitate the discussion.

Keep in mind that, to keep your advisors engaged with the discussion board(s), the app will automatically send in-app notifications and emails to the advisors whenever someone has reacted to their post.

In this template, we have added three variants of discussion boards that can be used as follows.

The “Single question discussion board”

This is a single page in the app with multiple questions that are added to it:

Each question links to an individual discussion board:

This is the most efficient and user-friendly approach for discussion boards.

Adding multiple individual discussion boards to a single page allows planners to gather multiple discussion boards in one place and to help advisors find and access them. This can for example be used to create a group of “pre-live meeting” discussion boards, or to group the discussion boards around a same topic or task.

Also, using one distinct discussion board per topic or question will ensure that the discussions that take place here are truly focused around that particular question or topic.

When using a single discussion board per question or topic, we recommend that you always repeat the question or topic in the discussion board banner, in text format, so that screen readers can also process it.

The “Multiple questions discussion board”

This is a discussion board that focuses on a single main topic, but can contain multiple distinct questions or discussions around that topic. Questions are added as a post that advisors can then react to by commenting:

Here, the event planner has added the three questions. The event planner will create a specific post for each question in the discussion board, where advisors will be able to provide their input directly.

Again, you can see that the discussion board banner matches the topic at-hand. You can also see that a document has been added to the discussion board, to provide materials to the advisors that are related to this topic and the specific questions.

The “Live discussion board”

This discussion board can be used as a more “general” discussion board, that is not so topic or question-specific. It provides a space for questions to be posted in more of a spontaneous manner:

When using this type of discussion board, we recommend that you have a team member or moderator readily available to keep the discussions going, by continually adding more content/questions to the live discussion board.

Agenda (live only)

If your advisory board will take place (at least partially) in real-time, you may wish to add an agenda.

Here we have linked an agenda to the app menu for a specific “live” day, that will provide guidance to your advisers on where they should be, how to access (for live virtual sessions) or how to get there (if in person), and any other important information that they may need:

If your advisory board event is taking place 100% asynchronously, you will most likely not need an agenda.

Post meeting materials (live only)

The “Post meetings materials” page contains a list of all the materials that relate to the meetings that took place:

Here planners can add anything they like, depending on their needs:

• Live session video recordings.
• The video recordings of any virtual meetings that took place.
• The transcripts of any virtual meetings (available starting December 10, 2025).
• Any meeting minutes and their related next steps or resulting actions.

Post-meeting questionnaire (live only)

This is a form that was made accessible for advisors to fill in after the live meeting.

To encourage advisors to complete it, it can be linked to the Advisor checklist, made accessible via an app menu item or a quick link, as well as linked to a scheduled notification:

Reporting and analytics

As an advisory board organizer, it’s essential that you have access to insights on how advisors have interacted with the content in your Advisor Experience app.

Insights are readily available via:

• Excel reports that can be downloaded from the workspace dashboard, for discussion boards and document reviews.
• Annotated PDF documents.
• Discussion board transcripts that can be downloaded.
• Virtual meeting recordings.
• Virtual meeting transcripts (available starting December 10, 2025).

Adboard insights via the workspace dashboard

Organizers can access insights via the reports that are available via the workspace dashboard.

These Excel reports can be downloaded via the Feeds section of the dashboard (for discussion boards), and the Documents section (for document reviews and annotations).

For discussion boards (via Feeds):
A summary of data for all discussion boards: names, creation dates, number of posts, posts with images/videos, number of comments and number of likes.
Individual reports per discussion board, with the same data but including user information. Separate sheet that includes all discussion board posts and associated responses/comments.

For documents reviews:
Summary of data for all documents: names, creation dates, total number of document views, views over time, as well as the number of document downloads (when document downloads are enabled).
Individual reports per document, with the same data but including user information, such as the number of views or downloads per user and per document.
Summary of all data for interactions on PDF documents that are set to "Public annotations":
- "Summary - Annotations" sheet that contains a total number of annotations (all comments and replies), per document, and also broken down per day.
- "Overview per user - Annotations" sheet that contains the total number of annotations, per user and per document.
-  "Total number of annotations" column in the "Summary" sheet, that includes a total number of annotations per document.
-  "Number of annotations per user" sheet, that contains the total number of annotations per user, broken down per day.

Starting December 10, 2025, please note that these reports will no longer include any comments that were deleted in the documents.

To see the exact comments that were deleted, you can go to the Public annotations tab, and see in the list the comments marked as “Deleted”:

To note, comments can be deleted by the author of the comment in the app, or by the user in Backstage that might be moderating comments for compliance purposes.

Adboard insights via the discussion board transcripts

Organizers can download full transcripts of the discussion boards present in the Advisor Experience app.

These transcripts include all posts/comments/replies, as well as the likes, that were added to the discussion board by the app users.

This can be done via the Feeds module in Backstage, by selecting the exact feeds/discussion boards that you want to download the transcripts for, and clicking on the Download transcript button:

A MS Word (.docx) document for each discussion board will be generated and saved to your computer.

The document will be named according to the feed title and the download date (with date format following the format selected in the workspace settings).

Each transcript will include the following information:

• The feed/discussion board name.
• A list of all posts or comments or replies, reflecting all text, and using a layout that clearly distinguishes all posts/comments and their respective replies, using indents to separate each item.
• The first name and last name of the author of each post/comment/reply. This includes any comments that were not approved by the moderator as well as deleted comments.
• The date and time when the post/comment/reply was added.
• Links to any attachments that were added to posts/comments/replies, and that can be accessed as files in the workspace (if the user has the necessary Backstage role and permissions).

All transcript content is listed chronologically,  with the oldest content at the top and newest at the bottom of the document.