Convene sat down with West Herts College and Anne-Marie Kinsella, to talk about how they use Convene in their meetings.
Could you please describe your board and management structure, and how you use Convene within this structure?
We have a board of 17. We have two student governors and two staff governors, one CEO slash principal and then the remainder are all external governors from a variety of different professional backgrounds.
We only use convene for the board meetings. So they’re not used throughout the college for anything else. And the reason that we mainly use it is to keep secure the papers because they’re all posted on to Convene.
I inherited Convene, but two years ago I was asked to do a sort of a benchmark of other meeting portals to see what was available out there. There are some platforms that come at significantly much higher cost.
Most of the time there’s probably one or two governors that would utilise all the aspects of Convene, but generally they go on, they get the board papers, they scroll through them during a meeting. Their usage is quite limited.
So to extend that additional cost, it would have been a waste of money because Convene was doing what we needed it to do.
And how often does your Board meet?
So probably at least monthly there is a meeting of some description between the academic year. Between September and July, there’s probably a meeting that’s monthly, be it a committee meeting or a corporation meeting.
When you have had support for Convene, what has that process been like and has it met your expectations?
Yes, it’s very quick and usually it resolves the issue. There were a few things that I found when I was using it, which we tried to iron out and I was trying to do myself. Then I realised that I could actually go directly to Convene.
So since I’ve been able to go directly to Convene for various different supports just to iron out certain issues we’ve had, I’ve gotten along much better with it.
In your day-to-day job, which features do you find particularly beneficial?
I think that just having the document library there, so it’s like a storage place for me to put old documents or current college documents in a secure place so that governors can actually access them independently without them having to contact me to find things.
So I find that quite useful. But mostly I find things very easy to use.
How has Convene been received by the Board and senior managers?
Yeah, they’re happy with it.
And although they had a few gripes, when push came to shove, they were happy enough to continue with it and actually didn’t want to change because it would have been learning a whole new process.
How has Convene improved your meeting process?
It improves the preparation of a meeting and then after the meeting, being able to collate reports for attendance and meetings and things like that.
I think from the governor’s point of view, it’s very helpful during the meeting, when they’re on a tablet or a phone.
It does what it needs to do and we’re happy with it.