The Scotland-based Centre for Confidence and Well-being was set up at the beginning of January 2005 with an ambitious mission to bring about a transformation of Scottish culture, to make it more supportive of positive attitudes and well-being.
A not-for-profit organisation, the Centre is backed by companies such as BT, Royal Mail and LogicaCMG. Effective communication with the Centre’s partners, facilitators and the wider community is key to its success – sometimes it is not always possible to attend all the meetings you’d like to in person, and conferencing from BT has provided an excellent and cost-effective alternative.
As Zoe Conlin, events manager at the Centre for Confidence and Well-being told us: ‘The solutions are great – there is a wide range to choose from.’
As part of its distance learning programmes, the Centre for Confidence and Well-being has used BT Conferencing’s webconferencing solution, Microsoft Office Live Meeting. This has enabled US-based subject-matter experts to deliver lectures to a UK-based audience, which could both listen in on the Live Meeting website and participate interactively by asking questions.
‘We would not have been able to conduct our distance learning programmes face to face,’ explains Conlin. Participants for the Vanguard Programme – an extensive, in-depth training programme on positive psychology – totalled 300, and ‘[they] come from all over the UK and the sheer number of them would make it too difficult to try to organise anything but conferencing. Also, we would have had to use a much more complicated method to record the US lectures – I’m not sure what we would have done… BT Conferencing gave us a solution.’
She adds, ‘We simply couldn’t have done what we wanted to any other way so BT Conferencing has been worth the cost.’ Every BT Conferencing customer has their own account manager who is there for people to consult and to help them achieve a conferencing strategy – savings, services, training, delivering their plan. According to Conlin this has been key to the Centre’s success: ‘My account manager is always available when I need to speak to him and always returns my calls or gets back to me when he says he will.
If he is unable to answer my query or request, he will find someone who can.’ Conlin is also impressed with the after-sales service she received from BT Conferencing. ‘Recently my account manager was off work and his colleagues stepped in to help me record two live meetings in a week when I had moved offices and was having major systems and electricity failures. They sorted everything out for me and stayed late to record the call, which meant it all went very smoothly.’
When asked whether she would consider continuing to use BT Conferencing in the future, Conlin is equally enthusiastic. ‘A lot of our participants have also been pleasantly surprised with the technology and were unfamiliar with it beforehand,’ she says. ‘As a charity, the Centre tries to keep costs to a minimum and run a good e-business. BT Conferencing has helped us do this and I am sure that we will continue to use it in the future. I would have no hesitation in recommending the BT Conferencing products – they are very simple to use.’
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