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How to create a non-committee meeting?

Sometimes you just want to meet with a few people in between your committee meetings to discuss something outside of your regular agenda. With mycommittee this is easy!
Each registered mycommittee user can quickly create a private meeting (with agenda) in the 'My Other Meetings' section accessible from the dashboard: There is no setup! 

Simply use the dashboard to navigate to 'My Other Meetings', click on 'schedule a new meeting' and follow the step-by-step instructions from the agenda wizard to setup the meeting, invite people and create the agenda. The wizard will send notifications to all participants. Each attendee can RSVP and view the agenda online! After the meeting, you can update the agenda with the key notes of the meeting and participants can immediately view the minutes online.
With the latest version you can also suggest multiple meeting dates and participants can confirm their availability online.
 

How to control your notifications

From time to time, mycommittee sends emails to notify you of certain events happening on your committee web site(s). Some common notifications are: "A new meeting is scheduled", "A new comment posted" or "You have a new message in your inbox".
Some of these notifications are sent immediately on request of the admin or chair person but you can control others in your profile (accessible from the Profile header link on each page).
For each committee, you can choose how you want to be notified. The choices you have are:
- Immediately (whenever the message is sent or comment is posted)
- Daily digest (receive a summary once a day)
- Weekly digest (receive a summary once a week)
- Never (don't get notified at all)
You can change these preferences any time and changes will take effect immediately.

 

How to create a task for one or more members?

Tasks and action items are closely related. When you identify an action item during the meeting, make a one or two sentence summary of the action to be taken, assign the action item to a committee member and agree on a reasonable completion (due) date.
After the meeting, when creating the minutes, add a (sub) item (type action item) to the minutes and enter the details as agreed upon during the meeting. mycommittee will now automatically create a new task for the member assigned to the action item. The action item is by default deferred to the due date and will automatically show up on the first new agenda on or after this date. You can manually change the defer date if (for instance) you want to add the item to an earlier agenda to get an intermediate status update.

 

Asynchronous meetings

What is an asynchronous meeting? It's a way to get input from your entire team without actually organizing a real meeting.

In some cases you can use the 'comments' feature to setup an asynchronous meeting. To do this, simply create an agenda and set the meeting location to 'none' or anything else that indicates you're not actually organizing a face-to-face meeting.
Distribute the agenda as usual and add a note to the notification email explaining that you expect everyone to add comments to each agenda item whenever they have a chance. Including a due date is a good idea! (Give at least a few days to a week to give people a chance to go online and enter their comments).
Once you have all the input you can compile the comments or discussions and create the minutes. Open the comments on each agenda item and enter the key points in the minutes section.

Voila, you're done without having to leave your desk!

 

Parked or tabled items

When, during a meeting, you have an item on the agenda that can't be resolved immediately or for whatever reason should be postponed to 'later...' mark it as "deferred" in the meeting minutes but leave the defer date blank.
This way the item will not be lost or forgotten. mycommittee keeps track of all parked agenda items and you can easily add it to the agenda again when it's the right time.

To add a parked item to the agenda, click on 'Add new business arising items' in the agenda and select the 'Select from business arising' option in the top corner.
Select the item(s) you want to add from the list and click on 'Add selected items'.

You can always view a complete list of deferred and parked items on the meetings page. (All members can view this list).

 

Meeting time and comments

Meeting time is very expensive! The comments feature is there to help you get the most out of your meetings.
Encourage your team to review the agenda and minutes and add comments to items when something is incorrect or missing. This way you can make corrections before the actual meeting saving valuable meeting time.

While comments are mostly used to discuss agendas and minutes you can start a new separate discussion any time and use the feature as a whiteboard to discuss anything that is related to your organization.
To start a new thread, click on the 'Start a new discussion' link on the comments page. Enter a title and comment and click on 'Save comment'. Members will get a notification email each time a new comment is added.

It's much easier than email and you can view the entire thread with just one click!

 

Old meeting minutes

If you used to create your minutes with another application (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) and you still have electronic versions of the old documents, create a document category 'Old Meeting Minutes' and upload your documents to mycommittee. This way everything stays together for easy access and reference in the future.

To create a new document category, go to the documents tab and next to 'Categories' (on the right side) click on 'change'. On the 'Document categories' page click on 'Add new category'.

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