The Wolfson Foundation is an independent charity that awards grants to support and promote excellence in the fields of science, health, education and the arts & humanities. The foundation consists of 12 trustees, a small staff team in their London office and a wider network of advisors and reviewers.
The Wolfson Foundation found they were losing valuable time when it came to administrating papers for their meetings. They wanted to find a way to save their staff time and improve the security of their documents above and beyond their existing measures. The Foundation had issues with couriers trying to deliver paperwork when recipients were not home, resulting in the papers being returned to the office and having to be despatched again another day. This increased the delivery cost for us and reduced the time recipients had to read their papers.
They also found they were spending valuable time shredding each pack after their meeting. It was time to explore some alternatives. After researching board portal providers, they decided to implement BoardPacks. Natasha Wright, Programme Manager at The Wolfson Foundation said:
“We looked at three pieces of software for online meetings. We compared all of the features vs. the cost and decided that BoardPacks would meet our needs at the best price point. We also considered alternative routes such as Dropbox but felt it wasn’t suitable as, for example, you can’t manage conflicts of interest through that system.”
The foundation wanted to find a way to save paper and time, and after a member of the panel suggested that they should consider using electronic papers, they found that with the use of BoardPacks that this laborious process could be avoided. Natasha Wright continues:
“From a staff perspective, there are a number of issues with paper based meetings. For example, it can be very time consuming to put together the packs as we have to collate together each application for each panel member (e.g. around 20 applications x 10 people). This also wastes a significant amount of paper and staff time is taken up to ensure that these papers are securely shredded after the meeting.”
Since implementing the software, The Wolfson Foundation has managed significant time savings for their busy staff members. With BoardPacks they were able to reduce the amount of time it took to prepare for their meetings and take comfort in knowing that their documents were secured and safe – removing the need to head over to the shredder. Natasha Wright reflects:
“We know that it would usually take us several days to put together the papers but this time it only took a couple of hours.”
The Wolfson Foundation wanted a quicker and more sustainable way to produce their meeting papers and are already seeing the benefits of using BoardPacks. Natasha concludes:
“It allowed us to run our first meeting completely electronically which saved a lot of staff time in preparing the papers, reduced the paper used in the meeting and meant it was easier to carry the papers to the meeting.”
Find out how you can improve your meetings with BoardPacks.
