The Construction Industry Training Board works with the industry to encourage training and help build a safe, professional and fully qualified workforce. They have been using Convene as their board portal system for their board, executive, and sub-committee meetings since February 2015.
Alison Walker-Fraser, Corporate Governance Manager at the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), talks about her experience switching to Convene as their board portal system solution.
“Before choosing Convene, we assessed several board portal software packages against a series of detailed criteria. We had been using a different board portal software for two years already, but when the time came to go out to tender, Convene was the one that met our criteria the best,” she clarified.
Alison continued saying that, “We judged the different systems on their ease-of-use, the support they offered, the accounts they held, options within the system and, of course, cost. As a public body, we’re required to have a high level of security so that was important to us too, and Convene ticked all the boxes.”
Excellent Customer Service
She added that, “We’ve been using Convene since February 2015 and are very happy. We have about 150 users across the organization, with the biggest users being the eight board member and five members of the executive.”
“The system is intuitive to use and the support that we’ve received from our Convene account manager has been excellent. She provided initial training and also additional training when two new administrators joined,” Alison complimented regarding the sales team of Convene.
Board Members like Convene
Regarding the reception of the board members regarding the board portal, she said that, “The feedback from the board members has been good too. They like the overall visual presentation, how easy it is to use, and the tools within the system which allow them to, for example, annotate documents and share their annotations.”
Technical Support
“The technical backup is very helpful. Our technical questions are quite simple, generally, but we don’t always have the skills or time to resolve them internally, so having support on hand from Convene is very good.”, Alison added when talking about the 24/7 support team of Convene.
She also added that, “They’ve been very good at taking back our suggestions for how the board portal could be developed to meet our particular needs too. For example, our board members wanted to be able to print documents straight from their iPads, and Convene is going to amend the software to make that possible.”
Intuitive and Straightforward
“Our board members are used to different types of board portals from their own companies, so there’s an expectation that we will adopt a good paperless system too. I think it’s mainly the ease of use they like about Convene is the fact that it’s intuitive and very straightforward,” Alison says when comparing the different board portals available in the market.
She ends the interview saying that, “We were reasonably happy with the board portal software we were using before, but when I look back now and compare the two systems I would say Convene is much better.”
For the board members of her organization, they like Convene’s overall visual presentation, how easy it is to use, and the very intuitive tools within the board portal system.