How to manage multiple board and commission meetings (without losing your mind!)
During your morning commute, you mentally go over your to-do list. As the clerk of a state government agency, you support and manage not only state board meetings, but also agency commissions and their subcommittees. Your job requires quite a bit of juggling, among other skills.
You remind yourself that three commission boards are meeting this month, and you must finalize the agendas and the minutes of the previous meeting to send to the members. One commission is considering adding a citizen subcommittee, so you’ll need to investigate the legal requirements for doing so. You sigh as you realize you’ll be adding another meeting to your responsibilities.
As soon as you get to your desk, a citizen calls to ask how the board members of the Planning and Zoning Commission voted on a certain matter. You can’t find the information easily because the minutes for each commission are in different folders online.
New applications for board commission vacancies have come in, but you haven’t had the time to comb through your emails to review them. You love your job, but sometimes it feels overwhelming. Administrative tasks prevent you from doing things like tracking board goals and keeping up to date with board training and professional development. Thankfully, every day isn’t that way, but you often find yourself thinking, “There has to be a better way!”
The challenges of managing multiple meetings
As you can see from the scenario above, clerks managing multiple boards must be multitasking mavens. But even the most experienced clerk will find it difficult to provide everything multiple boards need without support.
Among the biggest challenges is creating multiple agendas and including feedback and approval from board members, commissioners, and committee members. Ensuring that the members of these various entities only have access to what they need to know is essential. Sensitive information must be protected.
Finding and recording all the email RSVPs for the various meetings and ensuring that the meeting times don’t overlap or conflict for members who serve on multiple committees also can result in logistical headaches.
In most states, sunshine laws require that meeting agendas and minutes be available to members of the public to ensure transparency and enhance engagement. However, the public may have trouble finding this information, resulting in phone calls and emails that the clerk must answer.
Governing bodies at city, region, or state levels are complex entities, made up of a variety of boards, commissions and subcommittees, each with their own needs and legal requirements.
Local, regional and state governments work with tight budgets, and their support administration to take on multiple management responsibilities. Fortunately for those entities and their harried clerks, board management software such as Diligent Community can significantly streamline the process of scheduling, conducting and documenting multiple meetings.
With Diligent Community’s support, clerks can overcome these challenges of working with multiple boards.
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Download the checklist!Meeting preparation
Good meetings start with thorough preparation. Diligent Community’s agenda builder is designed to streamline meeting planning and preparation. With the agenda builder, you can create and edit agendas and attach documents and notes. Instead of stitching together agendas from comments in emails and different document formats, this feature lets you build and publish packets within a single platform.
Through the secure platform, you can share agendas with board and committee members confident that those documents are secure.
Jessica Markham is the town clerk for the City of Carbondale, in Colorado. Markham is responsible for setting up meetings for the town’s various boards. With Diligent Community, she and her colleagues no longer spend hours preparing agendas and fulfilling requests for meeting minutes and other information. She no longer has to use separate mailing lists for members of each committee.
“Not having to manage an email list anymore is huge. If we have a new member join one of our committees, it’s already done,” says Markham.
Using Diligent Community’s Community Manager feature, Carbondale committees to work in private, virtual workrooms, and create automated reminders for scheduling meetings and tracking action items, which also saves time for the clerks.
During and after meetings
Well-organized and well-documented meetings support better decision-making by providing clear records of discussions, decisions and action items. Agendas should include suggested timing for each discussion item and for the public comment section.
Clerks often need to look up information during board meetings when questions come up about past votes or the legal requirements around a proposed initiative. Diligent Community’s document library gives clerks and board members a centralized repository for all board materials including meeting minutes. There’s an easy search to find and then access key information through the library – no need to search through many emails to find latest documents.
Recording meeting minutes is usually the clerk’s responsibly. Because minutes are considered legal documents, care must be taken to ensure their accuracy. Diligent Community helps record meeting minutes. AI Meeting Minutes captures key points and action items effectively, making it easier to summarize the minutes for board members and the public.
The platform makes editing, distributing and archiving minutes easier. It streamlines publishing minutes on the public transparency website, too.
Transparency made easy
The public increasingly expects transparency from governing boards. Making the board meeting accessible to the public through livestreaming is a common and effective way to allow more members of the public to participate in the governing process.
Livestream meetings directly to your public website with high-quality video streams through Diligent Community’s Livestream Manager. The feature produces captions for hard-of-hearing community members.
If information about board meetings isn’t easy to find on your website, they will call or email the clerks for the information.
They may ask about the dates, times and locations of board and commission meetings. They may want to know about specific agenda items or are curious about how members voted on issues they care about.
Diligent Community’s public transparency website provides access to agendas, minutes and documents supporting decision-making. It complies with open meeting laws and ADA legislation, while also protecting confidential information. The search capabilities help the public find information easily.
Now when that concerned citizen calls wanting to know how the members of the Planning and Zoning Commission voted, you no longer need to sift through emails to find the meeting minutes. You can simply refer them to the website, where they can pull up the information themselves.
Diligent Community makes managing multiple meetings streamlined and efficient
Diligent Community helps local governments be more efficient while improving public access to information. The time that it saves makes juggling the required duties of managing boards and commissions as easy as having just one board to manage.
Now, imagine that same drive to work, weighed down with worry about the many tasks you’d be facing once you arrived at your office. Since Diligent Community has helped to reduce time-consuming administrative tasks and made your work more efficient, you can spend your time on other more strategic priorities.
Request a demo to find out how Diligent Community can support you in your role today.
