AGM in three weeks: who prepares the documents?
Tuesday evening, a quarter to eleven. The treasurer has finally sent the annual figures, the chair wants to add one more agenda item, and you are searching your inbox for last year's minutes because you want to know exactly what was decided about the membership fee. The AGM is in three weeks.
Anyone who runs an association or foundation alongside a job knows this. The work isn't difficult. It is a lot of separate pieces, all of which have to be ready on time, and it rests with one or two volunteers who work on it in the evenings.
What an AGM actually involves
Put it all in a list. An ordinary annual general meeting often requires the following:
- an agenda, derived from the previous meeting and the articles of association
- the documents: annual report, financial overview, budget, proposals from the board
- an invitation to all members within the notice period your articles of association prescribe
- a check on who is entitled to vote, and who has sent apologies
- minutes during or shortly after the meeting, and an action list with names attached
None of these steps requires any special skill. Together they easily cost a board member a few evenings, spread over weeks, with the constant risk that something gets left undone. A wrong number of members in the invitation, an attachment that is missing, an agenda item that doesn't return in the minutes.
What an agent takes over
The Association Secretary role in Stilops is built for this work: processing membership changes, preparing the AGM from agenda to minutes, sorting the mail from the federation and the municipality, and keeping the grant calendar up to date. For the AGM, it takes over the preparatory work.
It lays the previous agenda and the minutes side by side and proposes a new agenda, including the items that were left over from last year. It puts the documents in the order of the agenda and flags what is still missing, for example the budget the treasurer still has to deliver. It writes a draft invitation based on your own earlier invitation, so the tone stays the way members know it. Afterwards, it turns your notes into minutes and pulls out the action points, with who was going to do what.
What it doesn't do: decide. It doesn't choose which proposals go on the agenda, and it sends nothing to the members without you having seen it.
Why you approve an outcome, not an intention
Many tools ask for your approval up front on a description: "I will send the invitation to all members." You then approve what is going to happen without knowing what it looks like. Only once it has been sent do you see that the date of the previous meeting is still in it, or that an email went out to former members.
At Stilops it works the other way around. A task begins with a test run. The agent does the work, but nothing goes out. You see the outcome: the draft invitation as a member would receive it, the agenda, the list of recipients. If something isn't right, you adjust it. Only then do you approve, and only then does the invitation leave the building.
For an association, that is no minor detail. An invitation sent too late or to the wrong group causes trouble over the validity of what is decided. You want to prevent that before sending, not afterwards in an email from an angry member.
Calculating in hours, not in price
How much difference does it make? That is different for every association, so work it out yourself. Add up the hours that the agenda, the documents, the invitation and the minutes cost you last year, across all board members. Multiply that by the number of meetings per year: the AGM, but also the board meetings that follow it. Part of that work remains yours, namely the judgement. The preparatory part, the searching, organising and writing up, is what the agent does.
The Association Secretary costs 99 euros per month, with 40 tasks per month included. For each task you can see what was done and what it cost. Many associations have little work outside the AGM weeks, so also look at the year as a whole: membership changes and mail run throughout the year.
How to test it yourself
There are no customer cases yet, and we won't invent any. You can try it yourself, though. Take last year's agenda and minutes, have the agent turn them into an agenda and a draft invitation, and see what you get. Is the draft better or worse than what you would write? Does it miss something specific to your association, such as a fixed section or a custom from the articles of association? You approve nothing until it is right, and then you know right away whether this is work you can hand over.
Are you on a board yourself, with the AGM already on the calendar? Then look at which of the five steps above you would least like to do yourself. That is where you start.