“We always recommend it to our clients…it’s a system that is just user friendly and efficient”
Convene sat down with Libby Gracie and Indigo Governance to discuss how Convene’s features and ease of use has helped their clients in their Board meetings.
Please describe your board and management structure and how you use Convene within this structure.
We’re service providers, so we use it for our clients who we provide company secretary services for. We’ve got quite a number of boards under different workspaces on Convene. So we use it for different boards and committees, for different clients basically.
We use Convene mainly to provide board packs for all our clients. We do also use the review rooms function and library functions, but we don’t use it for ourselves. We use it mainly for our clients to provide meeting packs.
Did you consider any other providers when you were looking for a board portal?
Yeah, we’ve looked at a few different board portal providers. We’ve had lots of different clients. They often come with their own board portal provider anyway. So we’ve had the experience of quite a few different systems.
We like Convene for its ease, basically. I don’t want to say it in a bad way, but it’s because it’s basic, it’s got what you need. We didn’t need to have all the bells and whistles, we just needed to have a basic board pack system that can deliver to the board directly.
How did your clients receive Convene?
I think the people that we’ve trialled with have always taken it up basically. It’s quite often that they haven’t had a portal before. Some of them have had experience with different systems. But in general, the actual company would be new to portals and having a system where everything was in one place.
Generally it’s been well received, easy to use. We’ve had very few instances when there’s been problems with accessing papers, etcetera. Fewer, fewer instances than when we all used our old system which was just basically emailing and sending PDFs.
Which features of Convene do you and your clients find the most useful?
There’s probably two answers to that actually. Because when we’re putting the board packs together, it’s the fact that you can build the agenda and it can be so flexible. You can move items up and down and change times and all the different aspects. You can change things really quickly rather than having to redo and start again.
That’s probably one of the biggest advantages to us, as well as being able to add in papers late once the board pack has been published. Being able to add in extras or change things as needed is absolutely amazing because otherwise we’d have to redo the whole board pack and send it all out, maybe even print it sometimes.
I think the advantages from a board user perspective is the ease of being able to go onto an app or access a web page and have everything in front of you and know that you’ve got the most up to date information at the click of a mouse. So that’s good for them.
Have you ever had to receive any support or training from Convene before and what was that experience like?
I’ve probably more than myself than others have contacted the support quite frequently I would say, but usually the responses are within minutes rather than hours.
We always get some kind of resolution if there’s not an absolute fix for that minute, there’s usually a workaround if we need one.
We’ve definitely all had the basic training, All of the people in the office all had the basic training for setting up an agenda and doing everything that you need to do for that.
As a governance professional, would you recommend Convene?
I definitely would. We always recommend it to our clients, particularly if they don’t have a board portal. But quite often when they do, it’s a cheaper option for them and it’s a system that is just user friendly and efficient. It does enough to be useful from our point of view, from the backroom point of view. It’s a time saver, a complete time saver.
So that’s a win-win for everybody.