Convene sat down with Florence Pritchett and Jisc to share how Convene’s features, especially the Review Rooms, has helped them in their meetings.
Would you mind just introducing yourself and then describing your board and management structure?
I’m Florence Pritchett, I’m a government manager in the governance and sustainability team for Jisc, the UK higher, further education and skills vectors not-for-profit organisation for digital services and solution.
We have a board of trustees that’s supported by subcommittees of the board and the subsidiary companies. We also have, as part of our government structure, a group that our funders and owners don’t because we’re sort of funded. We have representatives from our funders and owners who meet regularly just to oversee how fundings being spent. Those meetings are all supported by us in the governance team.
How frequently do you meet?
We have four board meetings a year, and a 2 day strategy event once a year in April time. There’s pretty much always a meeting going on probably apart from in August, there’s always a meeting being prepared for.
Do you know what you were using before Convene?
Before Convene, we’d got our own in-house SharePoint solution that we purpose built for our end users. What prompted us to sort of look for a solution was that the in-house solution just wasn’t suitable for the end user.
There were a lot of firewalls and there were access issues that prevented them from just engaging with the materials that we needed them to read. So that prompted us to put that to bed and to look for a solution.
Why did you choose Convene?
We looked at lots of different providers that provided real time collaboration and agenda builders and minute taking and all that stuff. What made us choose Convene was a number of things. We were really impressed with the accessibility that you’ve got with Convene. That was a big thing for us. We felt like some of the solutions we’d looked at just hadn’t really heard of the standards and weren’t really doing much to comply with them and meet them, so I think accessibility was a big one.
I think we just thought that end user experience was the superior one from Convene and that was the main reason that prompted us to look for a solution in the first place, just the ease of being able to log in and being able to just use it almost without really needing any training on it.
Are there any features of Convene that you find particularly beneficial to you as a governance manager?
For me, I really like the review rooms because that facilitates faster review and approvals of documents. It’s the fact that you can share minutes, for example, in a review room and then the reviewer has to then select done reviewing. It’s just so clear and I just get an email to say that that has happened and you know exactly where you stand. There’s no wondering if they’ve looked at it or not. So for me and our team, I think we’re really using the review rooms quite extensively and that’s something we didn’t really have before with our in-house solution.
I also think the agenda, the dynamic agenda. It just does everything you want it to do, like you can upload a new version of a document really easily. Which happens when you get people making changes to documents, so it’s really helpful for us.
How have Board members found Convene?
So far, no pushback whatsoever. We’ve just had people saying really positive things.
We know when they can’t login, it’s something that I can just help them with as well. Usually they’ve entered their password wrong and I can just go in. And, when I’m not around, having that 24/7 support was another reason why we went with Convene.
I’ve had to use Convene support a few times, and I’ve always been able to get the solution. I found it’s really responsive, really clear. I feel like there’s been a really good service from support for sure.
How is Convene performing for you as far as security is concerned?
So we do have the MFA feature for our users. It’s really strengthened security as that was a concern for us because we’re obviously a company that sort of specialises in cybersecurity and providing technological advice to the sector.
We needed to get that right so having that MFA was just a no brainer. I think it’s gone down really well with our users. It’s just given everyone peace of mind that we know the right people are accessing the system.
Any final comments?
I don’t think I’ve mentioned everything like the minute taking, because we like that feature of being able to take the minutes within the system and being able to put our own template in there.
I don’t have to switch screens between Word and Convene as there’s somebody taking the minutes, and I find that incredibly helpful. And I like that anyone in my team can then export them and read them.
Also the branding, that we could put our own logo in there. It just all added to the feeling that it was ours with those little bits, I think that really went down well with everybody.