HouseMark is one of the UK housing sector’s largest membership organizations, and has around 380 housing organizations on board on a subscription basis. It provides services to housing organizations to help them improve. This includes benchmarking and data analysis which enables them to assess cost against other housing organizations, and to see how they stand against others in the sector.
Julia Wiles, Assistant to the Chief Executive & Governance and Performance Manager at HouseMark speaks about how Convene has saved them time while supporting good governance.
Convene Supports Board to Meet Remotely
Julia talked about how Convene is used by her organization’s board, “There are eight members of the Board plus four Executive teams and the Chairman is independent. We hold six board meetings per year, plus one or two remuneration committees. All of these are done through Convene. Under normal circumstances everyone meets in person, however, with the current situation, everything is done via WebEx.”
She adds that, “Convene has shaped our meeting model and it is working well. We’ve had two successful Board meetings by WebEx on Convene so far. I also use Convene for my Senior Leadership Team meetings and my Executive Management Team meetings.”
Time-Consuming Processes Pre-Convene
“Before Convene it was very time consuming and labor intensive to prepare meeting packs. There were lots of board papers that had to be collated into one single PDF document. We did produce high-quality spiral-bound board packs which took a full day to prepare, and approximately two hours to produce the PDF document. If there was one change halfway through, it wasn’t easy to remove or add papers into the physical copy,” she recounts on the tasks her team had to do before using Convene.
She also talked about security issues they had before using Convene,” There was a data protection issue too. There was always the question of what would happen to documents after the meeting. There was a lot of highly confidential information and it was critical for this to be managed safely and securely.”
Why Convene? It’s Everything All In One Place
When asked why they picked Convene, she said that, “The meeting schedule before Convene was a very time-consuming process. So we were looking at ways of cutting down the administrative workload and keep everything in one place. We had an external SharePoint but it was quite fiddly for the Board members to log in as they had to locate the link to access the system. It wasn’t readily accessible so it ended up not being used. Prior to Convene, Board members would have the documents made available on a particular day, and then board packs would then be confidentially discarded after the meeting. But, if they couldn’t access documents from prior meetings it blocked the information flow.”
She said that Convene helped solved this problem, “With Convene’s Document Management tool I upload the business plans and monthly management accounts so they can always refer back to the important information that may not have arisen from a specific Board meeting itself but is still highly relevant, for example, governance documents, Declarations of Interest, Articles of Association, and year-end accounts. If any documents are sent out between meetings, or if anyone leaves the organization, then documents are safely stored in Convene’s Document Library and are easily accessible.”
From a security perspective, Julia liked the fact that document access can be changed to only allow the intended audience. This also works really well for her when the need to hold a confidential board meeting arises.
Easier Coordination with Convene
For Julia, prior to Convene, the process was lengthy. She elaborated that, “Convene is used for our board meetings and a range of other management meetings. It’s now so much easier to coordinate everything! One of the best features is the Actions tool where I log all actions, but then everyone is responsible for following them up. There is no longer a need to do any actual chasing. We send out reminders ten days before on Convene and this gives staff time to complete actions before the next meeting.”
Convene Provides the Best Value
When deciding on a board portal solution, she mentioned, “I went through due diligence and we looked at BoardPack, BoardEffect, and Simplify. One of our shareholders had used the Simplify software, however, it fell short of our expectations.”
She further adds that, “Cost was a key factor in the selection process. Our financial director is very stringent, and as with all other organizations in the sector, everything comes down to cost. We were looking for ease of access, and when it came to moving over to a new system, a high standard of support was vital so we went with Convene.”
Friendly and Approachable Customer Support
“When it came to the selection process, we had demos from all the solutions we considered”, she said.
Julia then expanded more on the experience with Convene’s support, “Our account manager at Convene was so nice to deal with and provided a high standard of support. Nothing was too much trouble; she was patient and flexible and also offered HouseMark extra licenses. We liked the simple setup and user interface, and there was a lot of support available to board members if they needed it including remote support for any member wishing to log on remotely. Some of our members are more traditional in their approach and the move from paper to digital was a significant shift for many of them, so the solution had to be user friendly.”
In addition, the fact that Convene could be used on many different platforms and offline devices was a valuable factor in itself for HouseMark.