"People like the ease of use and a number of the functions, nobody has complained about papers getting lost in the post, everyone gets everything on time with Convene."
South & City College Birmingham is a further education and higher education college in Birmingham, England, providing full-time and part-time courses and training to over 20,000 students.
Please describe the situation before Convene
We were looking for an online meeting tool for reducing cost, saving time, increasing efficiency, and for pushing the all-important green agenda. Printing itself, as well as incurring costs with collating 200 plus pages and binding large documents into Board packs, also resulted in a lot of time being spent in reprographics which often meant that papers would be seen late. If there was ever an error in a report, we would have to print off the corrected copy and instruct all attendees to ignore the erroneous document already contained in the Board pack. Plus files and folders containing such large Board packs were bulky and heavy to carry!
How do you use Convene?
We use Convene for governor meetings. We have six corporations’ meetings on average per year and we have different committee meetings, who meet three times a year, so we do meet quite frequently. We are hoping to use it for our Senior Management team, however, they are not yet used to the system.
What Convene features do you find most useful?
The Agenda Tool is very useful to us because it means we can work with it in the background and make any necessary amendments before we publish it. Having the ability to prepare the agenda and to move it according to our needs to the next meeting is great. We can schedule the meetings for the rest of the academic year and because we have a calendar of business, can populate the agenda with it, so if we decide that a meeting is not necessary in one instance, we can simply move it to the next appropriate time.
We don’t lose sight of the meeting and we know the agenda is there. You can use it on both iPad and laptop so you can switch between devices easily. The Agenda function is also helpful in situations where we split a long meeting into two parts. We populate the agenda and allocate a break in the meeting and using the Agenda function means that we can easily pick up the second half of the meeting seamlessly.
Another great thing about Convene is that you can put important documents for example articles in the Document Library. The governors know where to locate the documents. It’s a one-stop shop, you can locate and access them easily.
How has Convene helped you as far as security is concerned?
Security is always a big concern for us so Convene as a system is very secure when it comes to documents and access. We are safe in the knowledge that any private papers are only visible to the intended audience.
We also like the way the licensing works with Convene. The fact that the licenses are transferable makes things much easier for us if someone leaves. We can transfer the license to a new member of staff without the need to set up a brand-new license since they’re valid for a time period.
How have your users taken to Convene?
People like the ease of use and a number of the functions, nobody has complained about papers getting lost in the post, everyone gets everything on time with Convene.
Convene is also a really good system as far as disability/Additional/Special Needs are concerned. It was really helpful to one of our Governors who is partially sighted. When I started the meeting, he found it really effective on Convene because he could see where I was going from the beginning of the meeting.
Would you recommend Convene to other organisations in the education sector?
Yes, I would highly recommend it. It’s easy to use, documents both current and previous documents and agendas can be viewed easily, and the other functions are very beneficial when it comes to time, efficiency, cost and of course the green agenda.
