“The best websites are ones where it’s fairly obvious what you’ve got to do, and Convene is one of those.”
Convene sat down with Rosalind Allen, Head of Governance at the University of Surrey, to talk about how Convene’s instinctive system and features have helped their meeting processes.
Would you mind introducing yourself?
My name’s Rosalind, I work at the University of Surrey, I’m head of Governance there and I’ve been in that role since 2020. But I’ve been at the university since 2005.
As head of Governance, I have a small team and we look after the council and all the committees that report to council and much of the layer below that as well. So I’m the secretary to the council and another seven committees.
Please describe your Board management structure and how you use Convene within this structure.
We have a council sitting at the top, that’s sort of the equivalent to a board of directors, and underneath that we have the Audit and Assurance Committee, Finance Committee, Governance and Nominations committee, Remuneration committee and then Executive Board, chaired by the Vice Chancellor and Senate, which looks after the academic side. Sitting underneath many of those committees we have some subcommittees as well.
We started using Convene in 2017. We were slightly doubtful at the time whether it would save as much time. But it absolutely transformed what we do and I’d be horrified at the thought of going back to what we were doing, which was painstakingly creating PDFs by combining documents together and either emailing them out or sending them to the print room to be printed and then trundling off with a trolley to pick up 20 packs of 400 pages each.
So our business case to move to Convene was based on the time and convenience, but also sustainability and the expectation that we’d save money, certainly on printing costs. It definitely does save us time.
We use Convene for all of those committees that I’ve mentioned. As well as using it for circulating meeting papers, we also use the resolutions function and the actions function and obviously the document library for people to refer back to committee papers and minutes and so on.
Did you consider any other providers, and what ultimately led you to choose Convene?
I wasn’t head of Governance at the time, so I wasn’t leading on this at the time, but I think we looked at a few. I recall having presentations from at least one other provider. Our procurement regulations would have meant we’d have looked at at least three.
I think it was a combination of it doing pretty much everything we wanted it to do and seeming to be used by a lot of the sector, and the price was pretty competitive as well.
What features do you find most useful in your day-to-day job?
It’s all so useful. This is a fairly boring answer because it’s your core function, but it is the meeting papers and the ability to, if papers coming in late, publish the meeting and then add in late papers as they come in. I mean not that that’s a great thing to do, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.
I do recall in the past having to print out papers that came in late and then walk around the whole university with a hole puncher, inserting them into people’s hard copy documents, which was fairly mad, wasn’t it? But now we are just able to upload something and it’s instantly available to people.
How is it being received by the people who are in your committee meetings?
When we started there was a fair amount of pushback from people who loved having papers in front of them that they could scribble on and carry around and just flick through. It was a sort of change of approach, and some people changed very willingly and other people it was more of a struggle.
But after that initial sort of teething phase, we’ve not had any problems. Any problems we have had haven’t been due to Convene, it’s been due to people having wider technical problems. Just occasionally we have to send someone a PDF of the papers because something’s happened, but it’s nice and convenient to download a PDF from Convene, so it’s not difficult for us to do that.
Our external members of the council tend to be older people who’ve retired, so they tend to be a bit more technically challenged. But you know what? After a bit of hand holding, they’re fine.
Have you received any support or training for Convene, and how’s that experience been?
So as far as training for individual members of committees, we provide that in-house because generally it takes sort of a half an hour virtual meeting to share the screen and just show them the various functions and say come back if you have any problems and people never have to come back.
Convene is fairly instinctive, self-explanatory. The best websites are ones where it’s fairly obvious what you’ve got to do, and Convene is one of those.
We, as far as the people who are the administrators on Convene, we meet a couple of times a year and we give them an update on new things on Convene or new things we’ve discovered or little tips.
I think it was last year that I arranged a couple of online training sessions. We did one that was a sort of introduction and then one which was to show how to use various new features. So that was good. It’s useful having that training to sort of remind you of new ways you could do things.
Do you feel that Convene has improved your meeting process?
For back office staff, it’s made it so much easier. So whereas before we’d have to create an agenda as a Word document before and email it out. Now it doesn’t take long at all to create an agenda and then download it and send it out to people for comment.
Agenda planning meetings are a joy as well, because before you’d have your Word document either electronically or printed out and you’d just be sort of frantically changing things as the people in the agenda planning meeting said ‘Oh, can we rearrange the order?’. All I do now is share my screen and it’s so easy to just change things very quickly as people make all those changes and then I’ve got an agenda ready to go out.
The action logs are great because again, I used to do that in Excel, update the actions log and then send the Excel spreadsheet out to a whole group of people saying you’ve got an action on this actions log, but they’d have to open up the spreadsheet and find their action. So now just being able to add the actions on Convene, and then click send notification and have them be able to update their actions.
Are there any other comments you’d like to make about Convene in general?
It’s just some sort of very general stuff that, you know, we’ve been very happy with.
There’s been things that we’ve mentioned would be good and there’s been tweaks made as a result. So one example is occasionally people send us a paper, it gets published with the meeting, and then they notice there’s an error on page five or something, and they send us the new version.
Then if people have already made annotations on that paper on Convene, you can’t just delete the old version because then they lose their annotations and that was always a bit of a headache for us. We’d add the new version, but then you have two versions sitting there and that would be confusing for people.
But now there’s a way around that so that the new version appears as a default, but you can click to see the old version, so that’s a very exciting thing. That sounds really trivial and boring, but we were quite excited about that because that has been a bit of a headache for us, and we found the support that we got for that really great. I got a reply, I think within hours, certainly within the day, and it wasn’t an urgent query as well, so that was really helpful. I’ve really appreciated that support and help.
Would you recommend Convene for people in your sector?
Oh yeah, I definitely would. Actually we had a meeting of Convene users in the sector a few months ago. It was just a virtual meeting to get together and share thoughts and suggestions.
There were a couple of people there, a couple of institutions, that had just started using it or were just thinking about whether to use it or not. And then there were people like us who’ve been using it for years. So it was a really useful session. I think we’re going to carry on meeting sort of periodically to share good practice and so on.