Customer Stories
Brentford FC Community Sports Trust
How OnBoard helped this sports trust improve board security and reduce time required to prepare board papers.
Customer Stories
How OnBoard helped this sports trust improve board security and reduce time required to prepare board papers.
Industry: Sports
Headquarters: London, United Kingdom
Board Management Goals
Results
Brentford FC Community Sports Trust has been doing community work for more than three decades. It works in partnership with Brentford FC to offer programs in education, employability, sports participation, health and community engagement.
Using sport to educate, motivate and inspire people is a noble goal and as a four-time ‘Football League Community Club of the Year’ winner it’s fair to say that Brentford is a leading Community Sports Trust.
Brentford Trust is supported by Brentford FC but is independent of the club and receives funding from many other sources. It’s a complicated picture and a broad remit, and it’s fair to say that good governance is critical to Brentford delivering on its commitments.
Yet sending information such as board papers to stakeholders was a significant challenge. “Everything was a paper mountain,” Operations Director Luke Skelhorn recalls. “Trying to circulate the papers by email and on the night providing papers, it was inefficient and time consuming.
“We also have about eight subgroups that feed into the main board. Each subgroup is chaired by a trustee and usually, there’s a second trustee on those boards as well.
“We realised we needed to streamline our processes and improve how quickly we circulated things to the trustees, so they’d have time to read all the papers.”
It was a lot to manage and after a conversation with a trustee, Luke realised that a governance software platform would make managing papers, running meetings and following up afterwards faster, simpler and more secure.
And after doing some homework, he realised that OnBoard was the best platform for the Trust.
“We realised we needed to streamline our processes and improve how quickly we circulated things to the trustees.”
— Luke Skelhorn, Operations Director, Brentford FC Community Sports Trust
One of the first things Luke noticed about OnBoard was how easily the trustees took to it, regardless of their personal platform of choice (typically either a PC or a mobile device).
“They embraced it really quickly,” he says, “whether that was through their personal devices, or the devices we provided for them on the night [of a meeting]. They could access everything straightaway; you could see the difference.
“And they appreciated the fact that we weren’t sending emails with 20 documents attached or giving them a mountain of paperwork to read through on the night.”
“In terms of improving the business and its efficiency, OnBoard has definitely worked really well for us.”
- Luke Skelhorn, Operations Director, Brentford FC Community Sports Trust
Luke and the board have also found that OnBoard has improved their meetings. They’re quicker, for starters, as are out-of-meeting processes, such as getting minutes approved.
“Things are definitely quicker,” Luke says, “whether that’s getting approvals on minutes or getting support from trustees when we can’t wait for the next board meeting. We can circulate things through the system, which speeds things up.”
Another benefit is that being able to prepare papers faster means they can be circulated further in advance, giving board members more time to read and digest the information.
“I’d say it just improved the efficiency of the business. For example, we normally hold our meetings on Thursday,” Luke says. “In the old system, we would sometimes get those papers to them on the Wednesday.
“That was just too late, but we were under pressure to do our day-to-day jobs as well as organising, preparing and running an important meeting. It’s not like we can just drop everything.
“But now we make sure they get everything by the Friday before, because we like to give them a full weekend to read the papers.
“The other thing I would say is that the board meetings themselves are shorter, because they all receive the sub-board minutes ahead of the meeting. We get through what is quite a lengthy agenda so much more quickly and so much more efficiently.
“So, in terms of improving the business and its efficiency, OnBoard has definitely worked really well for us.”
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