In-person board meetings have the potential to be some of the most successful and productive collaborations you have. During a face-to-face board meeting, you have the chance to connect quickly, communicate effectively, and build important relationships across teams.
But there’s a lot to think about when planning and holding in-person board or committee meetings. From ensuring you have the right people present to managing the flow of information among attendees, an in-person committee meeting can become inefficient and costly if you don’t have everything lined up and ready to go.
As board leaders ourselves, we understand just how challenging it can be to successfully pull off a fruitful meeting. At Boardable, we are passionate about helping other leaders find the tools they need to plan and host successful in-person board and committee meetings.
Our platform empowers teams with an in-person board meeting toolkit for pre-meeting preparation, facilitation during the meeting, and post-meeting follow-up. From start to finish, our goal is to help you feel better equipped to make the most of your mission-critical meetings.
Before the Meeting
Long before anyone steps foot into the boardroom, you have to put a framework into place to prevent last-minute scrambling. Pre-meeting planning is, in fact, one of the most critical aspects of a successful board meeting. This stage sets the foundation for the success of the meeting as a whole. Often, the reason pre-meeting strategies fail is not due to a lack of trying. Rather, issues arise when leaders are left attempting to plan without the right tools.
The following tools in our kit are game-changers in this way. These tools will reduce your time in the pre-planning stage by automating tasks and omitting room for user errors while optimizing your results.
Meeting Scheduler
To host a successful in-person meeting, you need the right people in the room. But those same people are the most likely to already have a tightly packed schedule. The result is that scheduling can become a headache and waste an incredible amount of time.
What does this usually look like?
- Long email threads with back-and-forth messages trying to nail down a time that works for everyone
- Confusion that results in key players facing a scheduling conflict
- Constantly scheduling and canceling meetings
Utilizing an automated meeting scheduler is highly recommended. Through the platform, simply propose a range of meeting times, get a summary of attendees’ responses, and pick the best time accordingly. Need to edit an existing meeting or reschedule due to unforeseen circumstances? No problem; rescheduling functionality is built into the tool as well.
Calendar Notifications
In many cases, your board meeting will involve attendance from both internal and external stakeholders. Often, this creates a challenging situation when your internal calendar client is incapable of communicating with external calendars. Again, Boardable’s tools have you covered.
With Boardable, after you’ve chosen the best time for the in-person meeting, the tool will seamlessly connect the meeting to Google Calendar, Microsoft, or iCalendar. This will trigger the tool to automatically send invitations to each person’s calendar and instantly notify invitees of any changes.
RSVP Tracker
You’ve got a quorum for your meeting, but ensuring that you have the necessary number of attendees and the right attendees at your board meeting can be difficult. Boardable’s built-in RSVP tracker allows you to receive real-time RSVP responses to easily track who is planning to attend. As a result, you can more accurately prepare for day-of essentials for an in-person meeting, such as ample seating and supplies.
Agenda Builder
The cornerstone of any good meeting is a quality agenda. Board agendas set the tone for the meeting, and if you create a clear, powerful agenda, you can more easily keep your in-person meeting on track and accomplish meaningful goals.
With Boardable, you can create customizable agendas that everyone can review. This helps ensure that every attendee has amply prepared for the meeting. Additionally, if you want to focus on improving your agenda, check out our resource center dedicated to topics around this critical task: Board Meetings & Agendas.
Digital Board Packet
We’ve all been there. You have received a dozen emails leading up to a meeting, each with an important document attached. By the time the meeting rolls around, half of the documents have been buried in your inbox, and you are missing out on crucial information heading into the discussion.
We recognize that equipping board members with the documents they need and making them readily and easily accessible was a rarity for most board meetings. That’s why we designed a built-in digital board packet. With this tool, you can pull all-important meeting documents into one PDF, allowing invitees to review materials in preparation for the upcoming meeting.
Task Manager
During your last board or committee meeting, you probably determined vital actions that needed to take place before the next gathering. However, these tasks often fall by the wayside. Leaders are busy, and without a simple way to determine what tasks have been accomplished, you wind up wasting a large portion of your next meeting rehashing these action items.
Our platform’s task manager is a tool that empowers you to create visibility and promote accountability. Team members can easily review and complete action items before the next meeting.
During the Meeting
To ensure that everyone is on the same page, it’s essential to make sure all meeting material is accessible. This allows everyone to operate more effectively and efficiently. Unfortunately, most face-to-face board meetings waste valuable time as people scramble to find information throughout the meeting. This is distracting, ineffective use of time, and detracts from everyone’s ability to focus on strategic planning and decision making.
Meeting Page
The meeting page should serve as a single source of truth for all items associated with a meeting. Attendees shouldn’t need to worry about pulling up a chain of emails during your next in-person board meeting in an attempt to find critical meeting information.
This is exactly what Boardable does. The meeting page can house any of the following items:
- The agenda
- Board packet
- Tasks
- Polls
- Meeting notes
When everyone is on the same page, both literally and figuratively, you can cut down on distractions and encourage meaningful engagement.
Minutes Maker
Once your meeting starts rolling, the designated minutes taker is tasked with capturing critical information, decisions, and action items. Keeping track of the details is necessary for any organization to ensure compliance, and this can be tedious – as well as anxiety-inducing. Our minutes maker tool lets you start from your agenda, not from scratch, and record pertinent information during the meeting in a single place.
Interested in learning more about how to hold the most productive and strategic board meetings? Check out our Ultimate Guide to The Best Meetings Ever.
After the Meeting
After wrapping up your most successful in-person board meeting to date, you’ll want to close the loop with follow-up communication. Give everyone, including those who were not in attendance, a clear overview of what happened during the meeting and utilize collaboration tools to stay connected leading up to the next in-person meeting.
Meeting Summary
During your board or committee meeting, Boardable allows you to easily store notes and information about the meeting in a single place. You can then export this information as a PDF that effectively summarizes your meeting.
This meeting summary will include:
- Attendance
- The agenda
- Action items decided on
- Meeting minutes
Providing everyone access to this information will help maintain post-meeting engagement. It will allow leaders to continue collaborating after stepping out of the boardroom, which is critical to creating long-term sustainable success for future meetings.
Cloud-Based Document Center
Boardable offers a secure, cloud-based document center where board and committee members can store and access organizational documents, including meeting materials. This serves as a single source of truth for all finalized documents and meeting materials.
Utilizing the platform’s centralized document center rather than email, an outdated filing cabinet, or a standalone cloud-based storage app is much more efficient because it gives team members one place to access board-related documents without mixing them with others’ job-related or personal documents.
Discussions
Hosting an in-person board meeting gives you and other board members the chance to connect and make important, guiding decisions for your organization. But the conversation shouldn’t end there.
With Boardable’s discussion tool, everyone can keep the conversation going and contribute to it in one place. All members can view and participate in discussions, whether they attended your last meeting. This keeps communication flowing between meetings and boosts engagement, contributing to a productive meeting lifecycle.
