Common pain points for city clerks and how technology can help
As the clerk of a mid-sized city government, Moira Marshall spends her workdays shouldering a mountain of responsibilities: preparing for the upcoming council meeting, responding to public records requests, updating agendas for three different advisory boards and working to solve a technical issue that took a recent hybrid planning commission meeting offline.
It might not look like it, but Marshall’s job is essential to ensuring that democracy functions at the local level. Yet, like many city clerks, she’s working with limited time, minimal staff support and tools that haven’t kept up with modern demands.
Clerks such as Marshall experience common pain points that make their job harder and less rewarding. The right technology can help lighten the load, streamline operations and strengthen local government operations.
The evolving role of city clerks
The role of the city clerk has grown far beyond recordkeeping and meeting minutes. Today’s city clerks ensure government transparency, maintain legal compliance and support public access to local government decision making.
As city and municipal governments become more complex, clerks are taking on expanded responsibilities — from running hybrid meetings and livestreaming to handling public records requests to supporting multiple boards and commissions. Technology, regulations and public expectations are changing, requiring clerks to be more adaptable, detail-oriented and tech-savvy.
With limited time and resources, city clerks work to ensure local governments run efficiently and remain accountable to the public they serve. As communities and governments become more reliant on digital tools, the clerk’s role will continue to change and grow.
Technology in the form of cloud-based board management software such as Diligent Community can help ease the pain points city clerks face.
Managing meeting agendas and minutes
City clerks are responsible for preparing, distributing and archiving agendas and meeting minutes for councils, subcommittees and commissions. This often involves chasing down agenda items from department heads, coordinating last-minute changes and manually formatting minutes after long meetings. A request for a small change could require them to reprint, re-collate and re-distribute the agenda packets all over again.
Relying on multiple documents, spreadsheets and email chains makes this process time-consuming. It also makes the process vulnerable to errors, especially when clerks are under pressure to deliver accurate, timely records.
Manual processes are time-consuming, frustrating and expensive. Council members may have delays in getting accurate information before a meeting, which makes their job more difficult as well.
How technology can help: Diligent Community’s digital agenda and minutes management platform simplifies and speeds up every step of the process. Clerks can build agendas using templates, automatically pull in items from department submissions and make real-time updates while tracking version control. During meetings, digital minute-taking tools enable live note capture, timestamps and action recording — making post-meeting edits and publishing faster and more accurately. Diligent Community’s public website feature allows clerks to share agendas and minutes with the community instantly.
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Download the checklist!Staying compliant with public records laws
Public records laws require government entities to retain and produce records upon request — sometimes within just a few business days. Clerks must not only maintain meticulous records of meetings, correspondence and public notices, but also retrieve and deliver them on demand. When documents are stored across different systems and in a variety of formats, compliance becomes difficult, risking legal issues or public distrust.
How technology helps: Diligent Community’s records management feature helps ensure compliance by centralizing documents in a secure, searchable system. Clerks can tag and organize records by type and date — so when a public records request comes in, they can locate and deliver documents quickly. Members of the public can also search easily to find key documents along with the agenda item and meeting minutes for it.
Coordinating multiple boards and commissions
Most clerks don’t just serve one board or government entity — they support multiple boards and commissions, each with their own meeting schedules, bylaws and members. Keeping up with term expirations, reappointments and documentation requirements for each board can feel like managing a dozen small governments. Critical tasks like notifying members, distributing materials and maintaining quorum records become a constant juggling act.
How technology helps: Automated notifications help ensure members stay informed of upcoming meetings and deadlines. Clerks can also upload and distribute meeting materials securely, while enabling board members to access everything they need — agendas, minutes calendars — through a secure, central location.
Ensuring transparency and public access
The demand for open government is higher than ever, and city clerks are on the front lines. Residents expect real-time access to agendas, meeting minutes, recordings and public notices. Yet many municipalities rely on websites or document repositories that are hard to navigate, making it difficult for citizens to stay informed. For clerks, ensuring timely publication and maintaining accessibility compliance adds yet another layer of responsibility.
How technology helps: Diligent Community’s platforms give clerks the tools to publish documents and updates directly to a public-facing website with a simple but powerful search function, reducing manual steps. Features like automated publication and real-time notifications help clerks maintain transparency without adding extra work.
Limited time and staff resources
City clerks often wear many hats: recordkeeper, compliance officer, meeting facilitator and public liaison — sometimes all in the same day. With tight budgets and limited staffing, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Routine tasks like preparing packets, fielding records requests or coordinating with departments can consume entire workdays, leaving little time for strategic planning or service improvement.
How technology helps: Diligent Community’s workflow tools reduce the administrative burden on clerks. Tasks like document approvals, meeting reminders, email notifications and goal tracking can all be automated.
Holding hybrid meetings
Meetings where members of the public can attend from their homes have become the norm, but they bring new logistical hurdles. Clerks must manage physical room setup, virtual meeting links, public livestreams and recordings on top of their regular duties. Audio/visual issues, tech glitches, or poor internet connections can derail meetings and disrupt public access.
How technology helps: Diligent Community’s Livestream Manager combines video conferencing, livestreaming and agenda management in one place. Clerks can start a meeting, record it and capture minutes from the same interface. The livestreaming function allows public access through the city’s website, with features like automatic archiving and closed captioning to support accessibility. These systems reduce the stress and technical complexity of hybrid meetings, ensuring a seamless experience for both in-person and remote participants.
Empowering clerks with the right tools
If you’re ready to half the number of hours your clerk spends preparing agendas, check out Diligent Community. Its digital tools create efficiency while reducing all of the common pain points that accompany the municipal clerk’s position.
But don't just take our word for it. Here's what Gwen Dombroski, Manager of Legislative Services/Clerk for County of Renfrew says,
Request a demo to find out how Diligent Community can make your clerk’s job easier and increase efficiency.
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