Convene sat down with Debbie Lannon and Westward Housing to discuss how Convene’s simple, intuitive and flexible system helps them as a Housing Association.
Could you introduce yourself and describe your Board management structure?
I’m Debbie Lannon. I’m the Governance Manager and Company Secretary for Westward Housing. We’ve got a board for the whole group because we do have a subsidiary, although it’s currently dormant, that’s a limited company that does open market sales as well as social housing.
So that’s the main board and then we’ve got two committees. We’ve got an audit and assurance committee. And we have a remunerations and membership committee as well. Things go through those two committees for discussion and then get recommended to the Board for approval.
How frequently do you have meetings?
We have five main board meetings in the year and we have an extra one which deals just with one subject and that’s stress testing the 30 year business plan. The other five meetings are full agenda meetings and are ordered by the insurance committee.
For the audit committee and the remuneration and membership committee there is one main meeting a year and then one smaller meeting that just agrees the objectives for members for the coming year.
What were you using before Convene?
I joined Westward just as they were about to do the first board meeting with Convene, so I was very lucky, but before that it was paper. Basically all of the papers were going out and bearing in mind we have hundreds of pages. That’s a lot of expense and a lot of work that apparently took several days to pull together and print off and get them out in the post.
I think they were trying to get away from the paperwork. We were aware of systems and software out there that could do a much more efficient job, and that was in 2017.
How has the support and training been from Convene?
Support and training has been great anytime we need. When you need any additional training, something new, It’s always available and we get reminded from time to time that if there’s anything we’re struggling with we can set up a session for training. It’s really helpful to have that, but it is very simple, it’s quite intuitive and easy to use.
What features of Convene do you find the most useful?
Okay, so here comes my notes. My first point was that it’s simple, intuitive and flexible. That’s the first thing I just want to say.
So obviously we use it for meetings. We load all of the papers up for meetings and there’s a really useful annotations function with that as well. We publish the papers like a week before and then members have the chance to read all the papers, make any comments and questions there. They can then raise some things and then we can deal with those on Convene.
Another good thing is alongside the annotations, is the function just for making your own notes. So for instance, if I’m presenting several papers at a meeting, I will add my notes of what I’m going to say to present the paper. It’s especially useful if you’re having the meeting via Teams which our committee meetings are. It’s good to have that, those little prompts there.
We also use it for things like Board effectiveness surveys and for appraisal feedback. We use the surveys function for that, which has been brilliant. We’ve been using that for the last two or three years now, so we really like that function.
Review rooms is another thing we use constantly and throughout the organisation, not just for Board committees, we’ll also use it for executive teams. We’ve moved all of our policy so they don’t get discussed at meetings anymore because they just took up an awful lot of time, and now they get shared via the review rooms. Any comments get clarified there and then we put a final version into resolutions. People can vote on it, so that has been really transformed and given us a bit more time at meetings to focus on other things or finish early, which has been really good.
On the resolutions thing as well. So once we’ve had that, the final version has been approved by all the board members. If there’s a couple of months until the next Board meeting and we really wanted something approved urgently, we’d use the resolutions function so they can all vote. Then we get a voting sheet, and we take that to the next Board meeting and it gets ratified. So then we’ve got like an audit trail to show that afterwards, which is brilliant.
The document library has been invaluable, and really good for new Board members. We put all the key documents there and we’ve got several different folders, so it’s easy to find things. There’s one specifically for new members to find various bits and bobs.
We can set up new users and amend things and all of that, but we also set up user groups as we have lots of different groups. It’s really quick when you’re setting up a meeting, you can click once to make sure all the people are invited, rather than having to bring all the names in and not forget someone each time. Which is very useful.
How have Board members found using Convene, and have they had any feedback?
They all love it, especially like when new board members come in as well. In fact, when I first started in 2017, we had quite an elderly board and some of them admittedly were not great on tech and were worried, but they found it really easy to use and really simple. So they were very pleased with it from that perspective.
Since then, any new members we’ve had and any new staff, they’ve all found it really easy because I’ve set up a little training session with them. I’ve said you can set up another one with Convene, but I don’t think many of them have taken that up. They seem to have just got the knack really quick.
I’m a part of a network of company secretaries and often people will say we’re thinking of changing our software. What do you use? What do you recommend? And I’ve always said Convene. We really love it. It’s just one of the simplest software systems I’ve come across in any walk of life. Everything it’s supposed to do, it does, and it’s just really easy to follow.
How is Convene performing for you as far as security is concerned?
Yeah, brilliant. We set up MFA multi factor authentication maybe a year or two ago across everything in our organisation. So we were able to also add that into Convene which has been brilliant. I work closely with our IT team. We meet monthly for any issues because I also cover data protection and so we meet to discuss that. They’re very happy with Convene, so yeah, no problems with security at all.
Why do you think that Convene would be useful for Housing Associations?
I just think that the nature of our work is a lot of audit trails that are needed for discussions and decisions that are made, and Convene allows you to do that really easily. You can download the Board papers after the meeting with all of the comments on there and all of the responses to the comments as well as just having a PDF of the Board papers with no comments, you can go for either way. That’s really useful for Housing Associations with that regulatory background going on and making sure you’re doing everything you should be doing.
The only other thing is when we have needed support for an issue that we either can’t figure out how to do something or there’s been a problem, the support team have always been really quick at coming back, or they’ve kept in touch and told us how long it will be before they come back to us. That’s always been really useful.