The meeting agenda.

Options to create a meeting agenda with MyCommittee.

When you’re scheduling a meeting, a meeting agenda is essential to help you make sure that all required items will be discussed, the discussions stay on topic and the meeting time is used efficiently. When you publish the meeting agenda well in advance of the meeting, you also allow your members to get prepared and this will increase the quality of the dialog and decision making.

Everyone knows this and most committees do start off with great intentions but keeping this up can be hard. Everyone also knows that over time, many organizations struggle to maintain the high standards they set out at the beginning.

Making this easy and fun and helping you to keep up and improve this process is why we created MyCommittee in the first place. We are convinced that any improvements to the base of your decision making processes will trickle down and benefit the entire organization in the long run.

To learn more about how to schedule a meeting from beginning to end, take a look at a previous Agenda Wizard post. In this article, I will focus on the main section of the agenda only, the agenda items or 'the meeting agenda'.

The meeting agenda in MyCommittee

MyCommittee provides several options to create a meeting agenda and you can choose one that fits depending on your habits and preferences.
If you are already set up and used to making your agendas with an external application, you can continue to do so and upload your agenda together with other meeting documents or as a dedicated agenda document.
On the other hand, the built-in agenda editor that is part of the Agenda Wizard provides several benefits:

• Agenda items automatically flow into the Minutes Wizard after the meeting.

• Agenda and minutes items are fully indexed and searchable.

• Parked or deferred items are saved and can be added to future agendas again.

• Members can edit (update) their assigned agenda items before the meeting.

• Agenda items requested by members can simply be dragged onto any agenda.

• A new agenda can quickly be created from a template.

• You can copy an agenda from a previous meeting.

You can use a mix as well. Some organizations initially keep their old ways of creating agendas and minutes and at some point, make the switch to the agenda editor. You can also create dummy past meetings and upload your existing minutes to have all your meeting history in MyCommittee.

We will go over the different options more in detail in the next sections.

Using an external application

Some organizations start out running their board and committees completely manually. Initially, word processing and spreadsheet applications are very often used to plan and schedule meetings, keep track of items, tasks, communications, etc. Until it all gets too overwhelming.

When you make the switch to MyCommittee, you don’t need to give up everything at once if you’re not ready. If your manual meeting processes and tools are still working, you can use MyCommittee already for all the rest and keep creating your own separate agenda and minutes documents the way you are used to.

In the agenda wizard you can either upload your agenda document in the documents tab and leave the agenda tab empty or upload it under the agenda tab, so it gets recognized as the agenda document. The way to do the latter is by clicking the ‘Change or upload agenda’ button in the top right under the agenda tab. This will open the agenda selector page.

Use the ‘Upload agenda’ box on this page to upload your own agenda document. From now on, this document will show as a link on the meeting page under the agenda header. You can always come back to the agenda tab to upload a new version if required.

The minutes wizard has the same feature so you can upload your separately created minutes document. Note: Documents uploaded here can be searched by the title (and tags) but MyCommittee doesn’t search the content of your documents.

Using the agenda editor

This is the default behavior of the Agenda and Minutes Wizards. When you create a meeting for the first time, MyCommittee will populate the agenda using a very simple agenda template. This is to illustrate the feature and can easily be modified or disabled. More about agenda templates in the next section.

There are 2 types of elements used to create an agenda. Sections and agenda items.

Sections

You will use sections (and subsections) to build the structure of the agenda. These are the main headings of the agenda (E.g., Committee business, Reports, New business, etc.). You can add a section to an agenda by using the Add section button at the bottom of the agenda. New sections are automatically added at the end but can easily be dragged to any place on the agenda. You can add a subsection to a section by clicking the ‘Add subsection’ button on that section.
You can edit the section title by clicking the title.

Agenda items

Under each section and subsection, you can add agenda items. To add an agenda item to a section, click on the ‘+’ button on that section. A new item will be added to the section and an item editor will open to the right side to enter the agenda item details. MyCommittee currently supports 3 basic item types:

• Issue / discussion: The default agenda item type used for most meetings

• Motion / resolution: For committees that use formal motions that are moved and seconded.

• Action item / task: For items that require work to be done outside of the meeting room.

You can use the drag icon (=) in the front of each agenda element to reorder items or even entire sections. Hold the drag icon while dragging an element to a different place. The new order is saved automatically. To edit an agenda item, simply click the item title and the editor will open on the right side.

Adding pending or requested items to the agenda

Just a quick note on adding agenda items requested by members or deferred/parked from a previous meeting. When you click the ‘Pending items’ button (top right corner), the agenda item editor will be replaced with the pending items selector. You can click on any item to view more details and adding the item to the agenda is as simple as dragging it to the desired location on the left.

Creating agenda templates

If you have recurring meetings and the structure of your meeting agenda is fixed or very similar for every meeting, an agenda template can save you plenty of time. You can create a meeting agenda template in the committee settings. (Settings -> Agendas -> Agenda templates)

To create an agenda template, you can start with one of the models provided by MyCommittee, copy a template shared by another group in your organization or create your own from scratch. Creating an agenda template is basically the same as creating an agenda. Agenda templates are built using sections and agenda items and saved as a model for future meetings.

Each time you create a new meeting, MyCommittee will look for your default agenda template and creates a copy as a starting agenda for the new meeting. After that you can add or delete items as necessary.

You can create up to three different agenda templates and select one of them as the default. (E.g., a default template for monthly meetings and another template for the annual meeting).

You can enter the meeting location and video conference information in the template as well so this information will all be copied automatically each time you schedule a new meeting.

Choosing a different template for a meeting

As mentioned in the previous section, you can create up to three agenda templates per committee. When you schedule a new meeting, MyCommittee will automatically create an agenda using your default agenda template. To change the template for a particular meeting, go to the agenda tab in the agenda wizard and click on the ‘Change or upload agenda’ button. This will open the agenda selector page. Use the agenda template selector box to choose the required template for this meeting. MyCommittee will replace the current agenda with a copy of the selected template.

ou can also use this option to start with an empty agenda for the case where you want to create a special agenda from scratch. Select the

Please note that all changes you made to your current agenda will be lost with this operation.

Copy an agenda from a previous meeting.

Like selecting another template for a meeting, you can also copy the agenda of a previous meeting. This can be handy if many of the agenda items need follow-up or didn’t make it in the previous meeting.

To copy the agenda from a previous meeting go to the agenda tab in the agenda wizard and click on the ‘Change or upload agenda’ button. This will open the agenda selector page. Use the previous meeting selector box to select the meeting you want to copy the agenda from. MyCommittee will replace the current agenda with a copy of the agenda of the selected meeting.

Please note that all changes you made to your current agenda will be lost with this operation.

Summary

This is in a nutshell the different ways you can create and manage meeting agendas in MyCommittee. When you get started with MyCommittee you can initially use your own agenda and minutes documents but we really encourage to make the switch to the agenda editor and get all the benefits that come with our wizards as mentioned above. There is a small learning curve, but we promise that after a couple of meetings, you don’t want to go back.

If you have any questions or have ideas for more handy features, please contact us here and we will see how we can help.