Beyond the agenda packet: Rediscovering the full value of Diligent Community
Renewal time isn’t just a checkbox; it’s a chance to realign your district’s priorities.
For public sector leaders navigating tight budgets, limited staff and rising expectations for transparency, it’s natural to ask: “Is Diligent Community still delivering the value we need?”
Diligent Community isn’t just about posting agendas or checking a compliance box. It’s about empowering your board, council or committee to govern effectively, make better decisions and stay aligned with your community’s needs, all from one secure, purpose-built platform.
As you weigh your renewal decision, it’s worth looking beyond the agenda packet to rediscover the deeper value Diligent Community brings to public boards every day.
Building on yesterday’s knowledge to strengthen tomorrow’s board
Picture a typical Thursday for a school district board secretary or a city clerk.
A newly elected board or council member has just joined. They are eager to contribute, but unsure how to piece together years of decisions, policies and context.
Instead of shared drives, scattered PDFs and “do you still have that file?” emails, they log into Diligent Community.
There, they find a secure, centralized document library and public site, with past agendas, minutes, policies, reports and supporting documents organized and easy to search.
For staff, this becomes a living institutional memory. For new members, it dramatically shortens the learning curve. They can see how policy decisions evolved, what actions were taken and how those choices were communicated to the community — all without asking anyone to resend documents or recreate history.
When institutional knowledge is accessible instead of locked away in inboxes or personal folders, you don’t just preserve continuity; you strengthen your board’s ability to lead across election cycles, leadership changes and unexpected events.
What Diligent Community customers are saying
“Before, it wasn’t uncommon for members of the public to email me asking for bylaws, minutes, or reports, and I’d have to go searching for them. Now it’s almost the reverse — people are bringing the information back to me with questions because they’ve already found it themselves.” — Gwen Dombroski, Manager of Legislative Services / Clerk, County of Renfrew
“There is a search engine here, and I have a whole blurb I share so people can do it themselves next time.” — Amanda Irving, Corporate Officer, District of Highlands
Navigating tight budgets and growing mandates
Public sector organizations are being asked to do more with less, to deliver high-quality services, comply with open meeting and records laws, and keep the public informed, all with finite staff and shrinking budgets.
In many districts, colleges and municipalities, meeting preparation has historically meant full days of copying, collating and recreating packets whenever an agenda item changed.
Diligent Community changes that calculus.
With Agenda Builder, staff can drag and drop items, reuse templates and attach materials in a few clicks. You can build, revise and publish agendas without manual layout or repeated file conversions.
Approval workflows replace email chains and ad hoc signoffs. Agenda items can be submitted, reviewed and approved through customizable workflows, with automated notifications that keep everyone on track.
And with tools like Livestream Manager, staff set up livestreams directly from Diligent Community, rather than juggling separate platforms and manual uploads.
Time saved here isn’t just a line in the budget. It’s evenings given back to clerks and board secretaries, and hours redirected from manual prep to supporting board members, leaders and community engagement.
What Diligent Community customers are saying
“Everything was being done manually through PDFs: building packages by hand, emailing them out, and repeating the same conversations across different committees. When we moved into Diligent and went to Committee of the Whole, it just saved us so much time. Everybody is seeing the same information at the same time, debating it at the same time, and we’re able to move things forward much faster. We were waiting over a month to execute things before, now we’re executing every two weeks.” — Gwen Dombroski, Manager of Legislative Services / Clerk, County of Renfrew
“Diligent Community allows community members to see the board function as a well-oiled machine. No one thinks we’ve buried something deep into the pages, and we’ve received positive feedback about the time and money we’re saving.” — Delia Smart, Board Manager, Visalia Unified School District
“We estimated that managing all of these manual tasks was approximately equivalent to one week out of a whole month. Diligent Community has given that time back.” — Dr. Chad Bledsoe, President, Montgomery Community College
Turning participation from passive to powerful
Public service is demanding. Many board and council members balance their duties with full-time careers, family responsibilities and community commitments.
If materials are hard to access or cumbersome to navigate, it’s easy for meetings to become a passive “review” exercise instead of an active forum for decision-making.
Diligent Community is designed to make participation easier and more meaningful.
Board and council members can securely access meeting packets from any device, review agenda items in context, and add private notes that stay tied to the materials they’ll be discussing.
During the meeting, digital voting captures decisions in real time, supporting multiple voting methods and automatically tying votes to the minutes. This doesn’t just save time; it creates clear, auditable records of how decisions were made.
When board members can prepare efficiently, engage deeply and see the impact of their votes reflected in the public record, serving becomes less of a chore and more of an opportunity to make a real difference.
What Diligent Community customers are saying
“The community is much more engaged now… some of our YouTube meetings are getting over 100 views. Before, you had to physically come to our meeting or join Zoom, now people can watch later.” — Amanda Irving, Corporate Officer, District of Highlands
“With Diligent Community, families can join meetings live or watch recordings with captions and translations. It’s opened the door for many more people to participate who couldn’t be there in person.” — Dr R.J. Gravel, Superintendent, Glenbrook High School District 225
Helping boards lead with confidence
Many public bodies don’t have a dedicated governance or legal team.
Often, a small number of administrators and clerks shoulder the responsibility of keeping the board or council on track with evolving regulations, open meeting requirements and internal policies.
Diligent Community quietly embeds best practices into daily workflows.
Agenda and minutes templates, standard approval processes and structured meeting flows help even small teams run meetings with the rigor of much larger organizations.
Beyond individual meetings, goal tracking lets councils and boards define objectives, benchmarks and KPIs, and then update and share progress with stakeholders from a single, centralized hub. This makes it easier to connect day-to-day decisions back to long-term community priorities and strategic plans.
Instead of relying on heroics and institutional memory, boards can lean on a platform designed to support good governance, giving leaders more confidence that their processes, records and decisions will stand up to scrutiny.
What Diligent Community customers are saying
“From a compliance perspective, we had a new policy, a big one on parental rights. And being able to use Diligent Community to go through reads, bring it forward, have people look at it, provide input — and then the transparency, the usability. It’s a game changer.” — Amy Allen, Superintendent, Lebanon School District
“The platform is great and it’s more user-friendly. It’s not that BoardDocs was bad, but Diligent Community has upgraded to this new day and age.” — Amanda Buchanan, Executive Assistant for Governance, Farmington R-7 School District
Embracing risk and agility in a changing world
Recent years have shown just how quickly the ground can shift under public institutions.
Strategic plans written a few years ago rarely account for global disruptions, new regulations, rapid technology changes or shifting community expectations.
Today, boards and councils need tools that help them respond to new risks, requirements and opportunities with speed and clarity.
Diligent Community centralizes agendas, policies, meeting records and public access so leaders can see the full picture when they need to adapt — whether that’s scheduling an emergency meeting, updating a policy or responding to a new mandate.
With capabilities like public-site search, boards can quickly see how similar organizations have approached comparable issues, surfacing relevant decisions and policies to inform their own response.
Agility in governance isn’t just about moving fast. It’s about moving fast with context — and Diligent Community is built to bring that context together.
What Diligent Community customers are saying
“I decided that I was going to just push it all out at once. We sent out the subscription information in a newsletter. We also started livestreaming with recordings through Diligent Community and rolled out the Request to Speak at the same time.” — Amanda Irving, Corporate Officer, District of Highlands
Working smarter with human-centered AI
Clerks and board secretaries know that the real work doesn’t end when the gavel drops.
Drafting accurate, detailed minutes that capture actions, motions and context can consume hours after every meeting.
With AI-Supported Minutes in Diligent Community, AI becomes a trusted assistant in that process.
The system uses transcripts and timestamps from your livestreamed meetings to generate a draft of your minutes, automatically linking actions and motions back to the relevant points in the meeting.
Instead of starting from a blank page, administrators can review, refine and approve a draft, dramatically reducing manual effort while maintaining full human oversight and control.
On the public side, powerful search helps constituents quickly find the agendas, minutes, policies or even caption snippets that matter to them, without sorting through dozens of PDF files.
In both cases, AI isn’t replacing people. It’s taking on the heavy lifting so that board staff, leaders and community members can focus on judgment, context and meaningful engagement.
Real-time engagement and accountability that drives progress
Accountability in the public sector isn’t just internal, it’s visible to the entire community.
Diligent Community is built to support that accountability without creating extra work.
On the board side, features like digital voting, agenda-item workflows and audit trails provide a clear record of who did what, when, from reviewing materials to casting votes and approving minutes.
On the public side, the Diligent Community website makes it simple to publish agendas, minutes, videos and policies in a consistent, accessible format.
Community members can subscribe to receive automatic notifications about upcoming meetings or newly posted materials, and submit Request-to-Speak or public comment forms online, making participation easier and more equitable.
When everyone, from board members to residents, can see information clearly and trust it’s up to date, it becomes much easier to have productive conversations about priorities, tradeoffs and progress.
What Diligent Community customers are saying
“The timestamps are very helpful. If someone misses a vote or a public comment, I can send them a link, and they can click directly to the relevant part of the video. I control the timestamps, which makes it easy for everyone.” — Amber McDonnell, Director of Board Operations, University of Colorado
“This allows them to go back to hear exactly what was said — it’s a huge help for staff too.” — Amanda Irving, Corporate Officer, District of Highlands
More than software: A partnership built on understanding
So why do public organizations stay with Diligent year after year?
It’s not just the features.
Diligent Community is purpose-built for public and elected boards — school districts, community colleges, cities, counties and special districts — and it’s backed by teams who deeply understand the realities of public sector governance.
From implementation and training to ongoing optimization, your Customer Success Manager is there to help you get the most from the platform. That can mean surfacing underused features like Policy Publisher, Livestream Manager or AI-supported minutes, or helping you design workflows that reflect how your organization actually operates.
Those relationships foster trust, continuity and shared commitment to serving students, residents and communities effectively.
What Diligent Community customers are saying
“It was incredible. We have no words to tell you how awesome it was compared to what we were doing. It absolutely revolutionized our process… Diligent Community adoption was the best thing we’ve done.” — EmmaLee Robinson, Board Chair, White Pine Charter Schools
Enhancing trust with secure, accessible governance
For public entities, safeguarding sensitive information and ensuring equal access aren’t just best practices — they’re legal and ethical obligations.
Diligent Community is designed with that reality in mind.
It provides a secure, cloud-based environment with strong encryption, role-based access controls and detailed audit trails to protect board materials and sensitive data.
At the same time, Diligent Community’s modern public site experience helps organizations meet evolving accessibility standards, so constituents can access agendas, minutes, policies and recordings in a consistent, user-friendly way.
When your platform supports both security and accessibility by design, your team spends less time worrying about compliance gaps and more time focusing on the quality of governance itself.
What Diligent Community customers are saying
“Everything can be found on the website, so I send them the link. The Public Transparency Website serves as the authoritative reference for residents, reducing misinformation and building trust.” — Amanda Irving, Corporate Officer, District of Highlands
“Diligent Community allows community members to see the board function as a well-oiled machine. No one thinks we’ve buried something deep into the pages…” — Delia Smart, Board Manager, Visalia Unified School District
Making the decision to renew
When renewal approaches, it’s natural to compare costs and alternatives.
But the real question is bigger than “Which line item is lower?”
The real question is: How much time are we saving, how much risk are we reducing and how much trust are we building by running our governance on Diligent Community?
For existing customers, renewal is also an opportunity to unlock more value. That might mean enabling features like Policy Publisher, Livestream Manager, Committee Manager, digital voting or AI-supported minutes that you haven’t fully explored yet.
You’ve already chosen to invest in good governance.
By continuing your investment in Diligent Community — and by putting time saved, transparency delivered and strategic impact at the center of your decision — you give your board, council or committee the tools they need to lead with clarity and confidence.
Time, trust, impact: that’s the story Diligent Community helps public sector boards tell to their communities, regulators and stakeholders every day.
What Diligent Community customers are saying
“Diligent Community adoption was the best thing we’ve done.” — EmmaLee Robinson, Board Chair, White Pine Charter Schools
“My advice to other school districts is to embrace the change. When everyone can see the same information and participate in the process, it changes the game.” — Amy Allen, Superintendent, Lebanon School District
To make sure you’re getting the full value from Diligent Community, don’t wait until renewal to reassess your setup. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager to review how you’re using the platform today, identify underused features and explore quick wins that can save time, increase transparency and deepen engagement. A short conversation can uncover new workflows, training or add-ons that turn “agenda software” into a strategic governance ally for your board, staff and community.
Learn more
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