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If you work for a nonprofit it is possible you spend a majority of your week in meetings.  With the nature of our work being collaboration and program development meetings are inevitable.  To keep meeting efficient prepare an agenda before hand.  Agendas are helpful for both  internal and external meetings.

Two different types of agenda I recommend are consent and decision driven.

Consent Agendas

Consent agendas are great for regular meetings and meetings with a lot to accomplish.  Consent agendas are sent around to meeting participants one week prior to the meeting.  Each participant then fills in updates about their projects and programs. The meeting leader then sends out the summaries to participants prior to the meeting.  The point of the consent agenda is to eliminate time during meetings for updating and allow for more time for discussion and decision-making.  This article gives a full explanation of how to use one.

Decision Driven Agendas

Decision driven agendas don’t have a specific format like consent agendas but instead include time to review, discuss, and decide.  By dividing agenda items into these three groups you are able to keep on task with what is happening at each time.  Review allows for background information, discussion of previous months events, or review of set rules for a program.  Discuss, is just that, a time to discuss the program or project at question.  Decide, is as straight forward as discuss.  Depending on what works for your group you can lump these three together for each agenda item or have an agenda time for each.  For example you can discuss an upcoming event and then for that event review, discuss, and decide. Or you can review that event, fundraising, and volunteering, then discuss all three and decide all three.  The best agenda may include a combination of either way.  Observe the flow of your group and what works best.  Make sure to set time limits if your group tends to take too long on any one item.

No matter what agenda you decide to use, be sure to include your mission and vision statements somewhere on the sheet.  This will help everyone keep on task with ideas and provide you the opportunity to ask, “Does this fit with our vision and mission?”.

Share with us.

What types of agendas do you use?  What other tools or activities do you use to help keep meetings on task?

Now that a majority of our population uses email for a majority of their correspondence, it is very easy to get bogged down by email all day long.  Many articles, like this one and this one, state the importance of keeping email reading to small batches throughout the day.  What they are suggesting is nearly impossible, especially if the staff of your organization uses email as their sole mode of communication and project management.  There are multiple ways an organization can reduce its email use to help staff be more productive.  One easy way is to institute an online chat system.

Chat tools such as GChat, Facebook Chat, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger are great ways nonprofit organizations can reduce wasted time in their email boxes.  Use chat for quick questions and sharing quick links.  If you were planning on writing an email like, “When time are you meeting with said client?” or “Do you have the budget done for the grant?” you could instead send a chat message and receive an instant response.  A recent article in Blue Avacado, “Instant Messaging in Nonprofits: Catching On” provides some insight how how nonprofit organizations are using chat.

Here are a few reasons why using chat can be more productive:

• You can receive an instant answer, with little interruption to someone’s work.
• Although email may be open on your screen all day for quick access it is easy that once you look at one email to answer a line of them once you have it open.
• If someone likes working with their earphones on or you work in small office, chat can be good for not disturbing them or others.
• If you work a lot with volunteers who are on Facebook or use Gmail you can allow them to ask questions via chat about volunteer hours or next projects.  Make sure to set times when you will be on chat.
• If you get a lot of questions from clients through your info@email, set up chat hours with usernames on your website and clients can get answers to their questions more quickly.  Quick responses via chat give your organization a personal feel.

Here are a few things to avoid when using chat:

• If the answer to your question is a month long project, stick to email.  This will help staff keep track of project details and wait to answer until the project is ready to be worked on.
• If someone is working on a lengthy, head down project don’t disturb him or her every two minutes with chat questions.  Allow staff members to put messages in their chat that state they are working on a project and will be offline or need a couple hours chat free (don’t expect email checking during this time either).  In these cases institute a policy that they can only be chatted in emergencies.
• If staff is abusing chat privileges, set policies and speak directly with them about their usage.  Just as if they were using their email all day to send funny pictures of dog to friends set limits on chat use.
• Avoid sensitive discussions on chat.  Just like you wouldn’t talk with someone about the policy they have broken over email, you should not talk with them over chat about it.  Although chat is more interactive and personal then email, written word can be taken wrong if out of context.
• If you are allowing staff to limit email checking to only a couple hours a day, have staff set up “Out of Office” like replies that state “Thank you for your email, you will receive a response to your question within 24 hours of your response”.  Depending on the use of your email by clients and volunteers this time line may very.  If there is an emergency with a client or volunteer staff should be using the phone anyways.