We are always looking at places where we can make changes to our processes to ensure that students’ lives are easier. Your feedback recently has been that a lot of the things we do are outdated, hard to find, and even harder to keep track of, with forms going missing or not being dealt with in a timely manner.

Since the end of Welcome Week, the Activities team has been auditing these processes, and digitalising things where possible to make ourselves more efficient, and make the services we provide you more reliable – and bring them into the 21^st century!

We’ve brought a lot of our forms and process online, namely:

• Our brand new Courtyard Café booking form – groups can now book this from 5pm on weekdays, and can also have their own caterers in this space subject to approval!
• External affiliations are now a proper thing! Fill out this form to request a referendum for your society, so that you can affiliate to an external organisation.
• Got an event you want to sell tickets for? Let us know all the ticket types you want, and we’ll get it set up for you!
• Starting a new society also became a whole lot easier!

Alongside this, we’re converting a lot of our reception processes like room bookings, external speaker requests, and finance claims to a new system called Freshdesk. We’ve been building this to make our work more transparent and efficient – you’ll be able to see what stage your requests are at, get automatic confirmations when you send stuff in, and have quicker access to our services.

If there’s anything else you can think of that you’d like to see us improve, get in touch with us at studentsunion@city.ac.uk and we’ll look into it!