The agenda wizard makes it very easy to schedule a meeting, manage attendance, create the agenda, manage meeting documents and notify participants.
The wizard uses the recurring meeting schedule and agenda templates you can setup in committee settings. Based on your meeting schedule, the wizard will calculate the meeting date of your next meeting automatically and will use your default agenda template to create your initial meeting agenda. Members are automatically added to the participant list so your meeting is almost half done with just one click.
Depending on your preference, you can schedule the meeting first, notify participants, continue to finalize documents and agenda items and publish the agenda later when finalized. Or you can do everything at once and just send one notification.
If you already have a system in place to manage agendas and minutes (E.g. using Word or PDF format), you can upload that document on the agenda tab instead of using the agenda editor and simply use the wizard to manage all the rest. (But we recommend to take a look at the agenda editor anyway which is really easy to use and will save you plenty of time in the long run).
Here’s how the wizard looks when you create a new meeting.
Agenda wizard
You can navigate back and forth between any step of the wizard using the buttons at the top or go the next and previous steps by using the buttons at the bottom. Information is saved automatically while you are changing it or typing so you will never lose any of your work.
A note on Notifications
You can skip step 3 (Notifications) if you want to send only one notification to participants and send that notification in the last step (Publish). In this case, the agenda and documents will be available to participants immediately.
When you send the notification in step 3 (and not publish the agenda yet), participants can already add the meeting to their calendars but the agenda and newly uploaded documents will remain in draft mode and not visible to participants until the agenda is published. Later, when you publish the agenda, you can also notify participants that the final agenda is available.
Approve for distribution
If your committee requires approval of the agenda by the chair before publishing, you can enable approvals in the committee settings. In this case, an extra ‘Approval’ step will be inserted in the wizard to manage the approval process and the ‘Publish’ feature will not be enabled until the agenda is approved for distribution.
Meeting documents and board package
Meeting documents can either be attached individually to the meeting and/or to each agenda item in their original format or they can all be converted to PDF and merged into one ‘board package’.
By default, a board will be configured to use a board package and a committee to use individual documents but this can easily be changed in the settings.
You can find this setting under 'Settings → Agendas → Agenda preferences.
The tab name in the wizard will either show ‘Documents’ or ‘Package’ depending on your selected setting.
What happens when I add a new member after the agenda was published?
New members are automatically added to existing meetings depending on their start date. They will not automatically get meeting invites for meetings that have already been published but you can send them an individual invite.
How can I align text in a paragraph?
There are a few ways to align text using the agenda or minutes editor.
You can use the indent buttons to indent text in a regular paragraph. The indent buttons will cause text to set in from the left margin. You can change the indent level using the left and right indent buttons.
Aligning text into columns requires an extra step. When you insert multiple spaces or tabs in a normal paragraph, they are squished together into 1 space when you exit the editor. This is typical behaviour for online rich text editing. To preserve these spaces, you can select the text and click on the 'pre-formatted' button (</>). This will create a 'pre-formatted' box. Inside this box, the editor will change the font to a fixed width font and text can be aligned using spaces. The spaces will be preserved after exiting the editor.
Can I delete a recurring item or entire section just for one meeting?
The agenda template is used to create the initial agenda of the meeting. Once the meeting is created, there is no more linkage with the template. You can simply delete any agenda item or section you don't need for this meeting. When you will schedule the next meeting later, all items will be created from the template again.
How do I change the meeting date once I have created the agenda?
You can always change the meeting date, time, location, etc.
On the 'meetings' page select the meeting you want to change.
Click on 'Edit agenda'. The meeting info page will open
Modify any field. The changes are saved automatically
Send notifications or publish the agenda again to notify your members of the changed date
You can insert a note in the notification email if you want.
How do I delete or cancel a meeting?
On the meetings page, select the meeting you want to delete or cancel. Once the meeting opens, you will see either a 'Delete meeting' or 'Cancel meeting' button. Meetings that are still in draft mode (agenda not yet published) can be deleted. Meetings that have been published can be cancelled. The cancel meeting page will open and you can add a custom message to the notifications that will be sent to all participants.
If you deleted a meeting by mistake you can go to the recycle bin and restore the meeting. Deleted meetings stay in the recycle bin for 30 days. After 30 days, deleted meetings are automatically and permanently purged.
How do I create the meeting minutes
On the main meetings page, select the meeting you want to edit. The agenda page will open. click the 'More' button (…) on the top and select 'Create minutes'.
Because you are now changing the status of the meeting from agenda to minutes, the system will automatically create a PDF version of the final agenda for your records. Members can view and download this agenda PDF when they open the agenda from the meetings page.
After the PDF document is created and saved, the minutes wizard will open, ready to edit the minutes.
Can I customize the header and footer of an agenda?
Yes, please see the agenda headers and footers help in the Committee settings for details on customizing the agenda format. In the committee settings, you will find several other options to change the formatting and style of your agendas and minutes. Some will impact the online version of the meeting (E.g. numbering style, indentation) and some are only applicable for the PDF version.
