CAFCASS represents the interests of children in family court cases, making sure children’s voices are heard and decisions are taken in their best interests.
Elizabeth Morrison, Board and Corporate Support Assistant at the Children and Family Courts Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS), talks about their business case for switching to Convene.
“At CAFCASS, we’re always looking to be innovative and do more for less money, so it was the Director of Resources who suggested we look to use a digital solution for our board packs. We prepared the business case for change. We looked at the average size of the board pack, the printing costs, how long it took to put the packs together, and the cost of postage. Then we compared that to the cost of purchasing Convene, and also the cost of buying tablets for all the board members, and it worked out as we’d make savings by going digital,” Elizabeth said when their organization decided to pursue a digital solution.
Use Convene on Different Devices
“We looked at BoardPad, BoardVantage, BoardEffect and VirtualBoard, but Convene was the best value for money compared to all the other providers. For example, you can use Convene on different devices, including Android tablets, whereas a lot of the other providers don’t have that option. That was a key selling point for us because a lot of our board members already have their own devices so they didn’t want another piece of kit to carry around specifically for our meetings. Convene’s security and encryption was a key factor too because our documents can contain highly sensitive information so it’s important our data is secure,” she added.
Straightforward and User-Friendly
“We had a trial period with Convene, which lasted for one cycle of meetings, and then got feedback from everyone. The board member who trialed it really recommended it. She thought it offered just what we needed. She liked that they can still make comments on the documents, just as with hard copies, but that she didn’t have to carry round a big bundle of papers. So we started phasing in Convene in December 2014, and the whole board has been using it since March 2015. We took Convene’s user guidance and ran workshops with the board members, who found it straightforward and user-friendly. As the administrator, I didn’t need any formal training either.”, Elizabeth said when talking about the reaction of their board members.
Flexibility to Customize the User Experience
Elizabeth notes that, “We now have 13 licenses and use Convene for all board and committee meetings. Since we’ve got Convene we’ve ran a survey of board members to ask whether there was anything that could be made better. For example, we asked if the pen line in the annotation options be made thinner and this change has now been carried out, which is great. If a document needs updating, I can simply upload it and the next time someone logs in they can see what’s been updated, so it’s all very clear. Before, if a document came in late you had to hold off posting the papers, which didn’t give people as much time to read them. The library feature is useful too. You can store documents board members refer to regularly, such as terms of reference or the schedule of meeting dates, whereas before we’d have to email these out to people whenever they asked for them.”
Ready Made Board Packs within Half an Hour
She ended the interview saying that, “Going back to the old way of doing things would be much slower. We worked out the average board pack was 100 sheets, so with 13 board members that’s 1,300 pieces of paper. It took us up to a whole day to produce meeting packs for one meeting. Whereas it takes maybe half an hour, with Convene.”