Convene sat down with Clare Calder, Executive Assistant at Essex & Hertfordshire Air Ambulance Trust, to discuss how Convene’s user-friendly system has helped their meeting processes.
Could you please describe your board management and how you use Convene within this structure?
Our board structure as a charity is that we have a chairman and then we have seven other trustees, although we are recruiting for trustees at the moment, so we’re hoping to have ten. They meet four times a year for a formal board meeting and once a year we have a whole board strategy day, which is all the trustees and all the executive team. We look at strategy in the short term, medium term and long term. Our board meetings mainly cover finance. The main areas are finance, aviation, our clinical medical work, fundraising, income generation.
We use Convene for the board meetings. You might think well, it’s only four times a year and one strategy day, but I can’t tell you how useful it is and how much time it saves me. For the board meetings and the board strategy day it really comes into its own.
Why did you decide to implement a Board portal?
I’ve been with the charity coming up for 17 years and when I was first there, we had six or seven board meetings a year. So it was like a constant treadmill of printing out board packs. Some of them were like a hundred, two hundred pages long if it was a budget or some big project we were implementing. And I mean, how many forests have we chopped down in those early days? I have no idea. And the postage as well.
One of our trustees at that time was also a trustee on a number of other boards, and she first suggested the idea of a board app. So we had a look at various apps and we settled on Convene, which is excellent I have to say.
Why did you decide to use Convene?
It seemed to be really user friendly. We haven’t got a particularly traditional board, as we have quite a few younger members on our board. They’re quite a dynamic board, but we still needed something that they would actively use.
Doing all the inputting into it, it was easy. I’m not a hugely techie person by any means, but once we’ve done a few meetings I was like, oh my gosh that’s nothing. So it is the ease of inputting all the information and also for our trustees the ease of reading all that information as well. They didn’t have to wait in for this massive pack of board papers, which sometimes didn’t even go through the door. Convene’s just been excellent.
How has Convene helped with your meeting process?
Pre meeting, I don’t spend literally a whole day printing out papers and then posting them, and occasionally they’ve been lost in the post which is super scary.
But in terms of at the meeting we haven’t got people trying to rifle through loads of papers. What we do is in one of our boardrooms we actually have Convene on one of the large screens, so we also run it in the background, although they’ve all got their laptops.
At the end of a meeting, some of them would just leave scattered papers all over the table, and it would be my job to clear up. And it just seems such a waste. All that paper had to be shredded and binned.
It’s also a quieter process. You haven’t got people in the board meetings rifling through trying to find a paper. It’s just super easy for them. The board meetings are more efficient. And, after the board meeting, I update the minutes so they’ve all got access to that. I know that they’ve received them and everything is in one place, which is really super useful.
How has Convene been received by your board and board members?
They love it. I also like it because when I publish the meeting, I know when they’ve opened it to read the papers, which is always very useful. But we haven’t had anyone saying, oh, this isn’t useful or, oh, I use this app at another place I work at, it’s been universally welcomed by the trustees.
And every time a new trustee comes in, I give them a little run through of it and that has always been a really easy process as well. Just the ease of access and all the papers in one place they’ve really appreciated.
How is Convene performing for you as far as security is concerned?
Obviously with any business, even with a charity, we have some really confidential stuff that goes around. We don’t want anyone seeing the papers that we send round very often.
Now, it’s just me, the exec team and the trustees that have access to those papers. So security and safety was a very important aspect and we felt that Convene ticked the boxes for that.