Velux Stiftung and Beatrice Merkli sat down with Convene to share how our software has helped them save time, money and paper.
Please describe your board and management structure and how you use Convene in this structure.
We have 4 board members, which use Convene to get access to all the board material, the documents we have and what we upload.
We also have team members and our director joining the board meeting. It’s not only the board itself, it’s the management as well. So in total, there should be maybe seven or eight people each board meeting.
Usually we set up the board meeting like 4 weeks in advance on Convene and we upload documents as soon as they’re ready. Everybody has their laptop and can access the documents while discussing each agenda item.
Why did you decide to implement a board portal, and did you look at any other providers aside from Convene?
Before having this online platform for all the documents, we used to prepare binders where we had all the documents on paper. There were 3 binders for each person containing all the documents for applications and other agenda items. So like, a couple of 100 pages of paper for each board meeting.
We are based in Switzerland and we have two board members who live in Denmark. So we had to prepare all the binders and send them to Denmark so they can study in advance all the documents and then the meeting would be in Zurich. So they had to bring all the binders to Zurich.
And after the board meeting, all the paper was just thrown away. So it was a waste of time, waste of paper, a waste of postage. So that was the main reason.
We looked at other providers and some of them had all these extensive features which we wouldn’t need and especially also the price was an issue as well. So I think that’s why we went with Convene.
Once you implemented Convene, how did your processes around your regular board and committee meetings change?
I think it was easier for the boards to have instant access to the documents and not having to wait for the parcels which had the documents to be delivered by post.
They could make sticky notes on some of the documents where all the board members could see as well. So they have these shared notes they can access together.
We also use the review rooms before the board meetings. There are documents which the board has to approve before the board meeting, so we use the review room for that and then have a history of all those decisions on Convene.
We also use the document library for foundation documents where board members can access everything in the document library. So they can look up everything. We put the meeting notes in there as well.
Which Convene features do you find the most useful in your job?
I think it’s really easy to set up meetings and to change agenda items, like just sliding them up and down and the numbers adjusting automatically. It’s very easy to set everything up and to upload documents. Yeah, I think that’s the main part that I really like about Convene. It’s very user friendly.
It’s saved many, many hours of printing all the material and putting them in like 20 different binders. It took me maybe two days each for each board meeting to prepare everything. So that’s a huge time gain now.
I just think we’re really satisfied with all that. It features everything that we need.