Commonweal Housing

Commonweal Housing knew they needed a better way to create their meeting packs. With BoardPacks, the information is now just a click away

Profile

Commonweal Housing is a registered charity, but not a housing association. Supporting and enabling other charities and service delivery partners to develop and test new models and new housing based services for people who are enduring social injustice. Commonweal Housing aims to help capture and share the learning and best practice from these new models; ensuring individuals are better placed to establish themselves in life, enabling them to make wise choices and have a fair chance to realise decent aspirations.

8 Board members/trustees
6 members of the executive team

Background

Commonweal Housing were looking into solutions to help distribute their meeting packs. With their board of directors and executive directors meeting quarterly plus one strategic away day per annum, the charity needed to find a way to make sure their meeting packs were formatted in a more user friendly way. Ashley Horsey, Chief Executive of Commonweal Housing said:

“There was always a large physical meeting pack and too much paper. This bundle of papers was perceived as being quite intimidating and did not encourage Trustees to think they could read them all!”

The solution

Commonweal Housing looked at the online board portal options available to them, before deciding that BoardPacks was the one that best suited their needs. Ashley Horsey said:

“Other portals were considered but I was familiar with BoardPacks from other organisations I was involved with and confident that the solution was the best fit for our board’s needs moving forwards.”

The benefits

After a swift implementation in January 2017, the board members and executive team at Commonweal Housing found that with BoardPacks, all the information was easily accessible and at their fingertips. Now board papers and required reports are all being published to BoardPacks. This is a huge step forward from the previous situation of printing and posting large amounts of documents. Ashley Horsey continues:

“The ability to upload background papers to the Knowledge module, knowing that they are all entirely searchable has been tremendously helpful, as is the ability to collate and print off, if required, a hard copy PDF of the agenda and board papers.”

Conclusion

With the introduction of BoardPacks, Commonweal Housing is confident it can reduce the paperwork and administration burden they face in managing their meeting packs. Board members and members of the executive team have an IT-based solution that is user-friendly and easy to use. Ashley Horsey concludes:

“The transition to BoardPacks from an Executive perspective in terms of understanding how to set up meetings, administrate the Board membership and upload and issue papers was supported very well by eShare representatives. This was via on-site training to core staff but also via helpful telephone and web-chat support once we were starting to operate the system ourselves.”

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Commonweal Housing