Convene spoke to Sandra Coventry from Sandway Homes about how Convene’s user-friendly system and features have made life a lot easier.
Would you mind introducing yourself and describing your board management structure?
I’m Sandra Coventry. I’m head of operations and sales at Sandway Homes Limited. My role started off as a more junior role and it’s developed as the company’s developed.
One of our first jobs was setting up our Board of directors. We’ve got a number of non-executive directors and one executive director. We were originally using all manual structures to send out board packs.
So we would compile them into a PDF, and then we’d be emailing them over. We decided to use Convene when our last Managing Director started with us. She’d used the system before and it was great, so introduced us from there.
What made you decide to implement Convene?
As I said our Managing Director joined us in 2022, and she’d used Convene before in a previous role. She really recommended it. One of the facilities she loved was the fact that you could see what you’d read, what you hadn’t read, and add notes to it as well.
She envisaged that our Board would be able to do that, that they would add lots of notes which we could read, and then we could incorporate those within a presentation that would go alongside Convene when we have the actual Board meeting.
Do you have some features that you enjoy using in Convene?
I’m the administrator, so putting the board pack together is just an absolute breeze. It’s a simple case of just adding an item, then you can press your button and add any attachments that go with it. You can also put extra reading materials in a reading room and set up the resolution so that everything is being kept together in one space, one depository.
Also the annotations. Our Board were very good at first, they were putting in a few post-it notes on our Board pack with a few questions which meant we could go in before the day knowing what they had in mind and make sure that got answered.
Do you think that Convene has saved you a lot of time?
I think it has just given the fact that all documents get saved as a PDF. It saves me using Word or Excel and everything else and then converting them to a PDF and then putting them all into the same document because a lot of our things are prepared by different people. So Convene’s a great way of just compiling it all in one go in whatever format, and then it will throw out a PDF.
I couldn’t say how much time it saves. I know I can put a Board pack from completed documents together in the matter of probably 10 minutes if I’ve got everything at my fingertips. Before, I could spend up to like half a day converting everything and then making sure and putting page numbers on but now everything’s there already in Convene.
Have you had any feedback from Board members who use it?
So the Board members thought it was very good that they could put the post-it notes in there. I think everyone’s found it absolutely fine. They get an automated email once a meeting is published, so it’s there with the link they can click into it and they can see it. They can go into the meeting and review the pack as we’re running the meeting, so that’s another positive bit of feedback.
Unfortunately, they haven’t kept that good practice up and so the post-it notes have tended to dwindle. So in our case it’s been a case of we’ve got the Board, the Board knows how to use it, and now our struggle is how to try and encourage the board to keep that up.
Have you used any Convene training or had to use Convene support in any way?
We were given some training when we signed up, which was really useful. And I’ve got to say the support team as well and even our account manager, when we were a little bit unsure, everybody stopped and helped us.
I know there’s documents and tutorials you can look at as well, but it is pretty user friendly and you know within one go if you know what you’re doing. So that’s some other great positive feedback that we can give to anyone who is looking into using Convene in the future.
How is Convene performing for you as far as security is concerned?
Yeah, it’s great because the administrator can set up the users and disregard the users as need be. So obviously, initially when you’re taking out the contract you need to name how many users there are and once you give those names, they’re set up on the system for you.
But we’ve had some changes, so it is very easy for me as an administrator to go and remove somebody. I can’t think of any way anyone would be able to contravene security either, because once I’ve removed them off the system the links won’t work for them.
Do you have any other comments or things that you’d like to say about Convene?
Other than that it is very user friendly, very intuitive. It’s very easy to compile a board pack, very easy to set up a resolution. You can have votes as you go along in your meeting as well, which is really really useful.
I would say a great feature of it is it keeps everything together so that if you were using the system from beginning to end, you’ve got a simple record there of every resolution you’ve passed. You can add shareholders to the system if you want to. You can also provide different grades of access as well, so some people can edit, some people can write.
There’s a system whereby if you’re presenting using Convene, different people who are set up with those permissions can take over the presentation from each other as well.
Definitely makes the life of a company secretary so much easier.