Government-backed BIG gives billions of pounds of National Lottery funds to worthwhile causes across Great Britain, now helped by wide adoption of their browser-based booking software, Rendezvous, provided by NFS.

Officially established in 2006 by Parliament, The Big Lottery Fund (BIG) gives around £2 million of lottery funds every 24 hours to community groups and projects that improve health, education and the environment. These are funds raised by The National Lottery for good causes – around 13p for every lottery ticket sold.

BIG exists to ensure that most people across the UK are within a few miles of a lottery-funded project. It delivers funding mostly through programmes tailored specifically to the needs of communities in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, as well as some that cover the whole of Great Britain.

To date, BIG has given over £2.8 billion to good causes and is currently working on 30 UK projects. With a corporate office in London, BIG also has offices in Birmingham, Nottingham, Cambridge, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Manchester, Guildford, Exeter, Leeds, Belfast, Glasgow, Powys and Cardiff.

Multi-Site Access Improves Booking Processes

In order to review the many thousands of requests and projects involving lottery money, BIG needs to conduct a very large number of meetings at all its office locations. It was because of this that in 2009 the organisation installed the Rendezvous scheduling software solution from NFS, initially at its head office and then rolling out to additional locations. The system was deployed primarily to provide more efficient processes for checking availability and booking of rooms around the country.

Rendezvous has now been in situ at BIG for over two years and has been extended to all the main UK offices. The system is accessed by all staff via the company intranet and all bookings are approved by a small team of supervisors who check that the right rooms are allocated to the right project teams.

The Self Service interface available for Rendezvous makes it easy for users to view available space and make booking requests on a 24/7 basis, with minimum training needed, which has been a key factor in product adoption and wide usage across the business.

Enterprise Wide Deployment Saves Time and Improves Business Decisions

Jill Thompson, Facilities Manager at BIG and an experienced user of Rendezvous, comments: “This is a very user-friendly solution which saves our admin teams many hours a day. This because it is able to efficiently manage bookings as well as all the confirmations and notifications needed to ensure meeting hosts and service providers are kept fully engaged in the process.”

“As a business tool, we find that Rendezvous enables us to make better decisions on both meeting room space requirements and ancilliaries, such as appropriate stock levels for AV equipment. Management reporting information, like utilisation reports, is available in just moments, saving me personally a great deal of time when responding to senior managers’ questions about room usage across the company,” explains Jill.

“In addition, having fast access to room availability information, including for multi-site meetings, makes it possible for our Client Services team to plan meetings very efficiently.”

“For companies struggling with using Outlook to schedule meeting rooms and resources, the Rendezvous platform offers excellent functionality; being browser-based, Rendezvous delivers a solution that is fully integrated with Outlook,” comments Luis De Souza, Managing Director of NFS.

He continues: “The powerful reporting capability within our software helps organisations make better business decisions regarding space and equipment, and the notifications and alerts feature ensures that frequent changes in meeting schedules and requirements can be well managed within a busy office environment. This equates to more efficient meeting bookings, time savings for admin teams and the ability to deliver a great service to the user community.”