Meeting vs Agenda Management: What's the difference?

It’s no secret that technology improves productivity, accuracy, and mitigates risk. It is important to make sure you protect the accuracy of your work, but sometimes human errors get in the way if you’re not using the right solution. City Clerks, board members, and leaders in the community rely on technologies to help them be prepared for meetings, and it is important that they use technology they can trust. Tools are out there today to help with agendas, which have improved this process. But it is important to look at the entire meeting process and see where shifting one's focus to Meeting Management will help you achieve your goals. Here are some key differences between Agenda Management and Meeting Management, and how they relate to your organization’s needs.

Agenda Management - One Piece of the Pie

A typical Agenda Management solution offers some features that can improve your meetings, cut costs on resources, reduce time spent preparing for meetings, and manage any last minute agenda changes.

Agenda Focused

Organizations typically focus on agenda creation because the goal is to present a professional, usable agenda to participants and your online audience. Agenda Managers allow you to create preset templates to follow so you can keep it consistent and familiar to work with every time. Some Agenda Management tools also offer things like scheduling, distribution, and note taking features to participants, as well as version control to make sure you have the most up-to-date agenda ready to go. These features can really help your organization. It is however, just focused on one part of the meeting life-cycle, and does not take into consideration other components of a meeting.

Meeting Management - 360 Degree Approach

A complete meeting management solution includes Agenda Management, as well as other meeting components. Meeting Management uses a 360 degree approach when taking workflows into consideration. Important elements such as agendas, minutes, voting, report authoring, and publishing all make a meeting successful, no matter the size or complexity. So why stop at automating agendas only?

Enabling Collaboration

Meeting Management uses the same tools as Agenda Management, but now it is time to take it a step further and host the meeting using technology too. You have participants join in person and/or remotely while also hosting public speakers. You’ll need to test all of the AV equipment in the room to make sure you’re able to see presentations, turn your mics on/off, show speaker timers, and jump to different camera angles for your online audience. Currently, none of the technology in the room collaborates with traditional agenda management systems. So multiple steps and resources are needed to ensure the technology in the room and agenda software all works simultaneously in real time. Meeting Management tools need to collaborate with the other technology you use during a meeting. When Meeting Management software is designed to coexist with the main technology it allows for a simple, easy to use solution that eliminates manual efforts.

Real Time Efficiency

When the meeting starts Meeting Management tools take over and automate almost every task. Currently, manual efforts need to be made like recording votes, motions, timestamping topics, speaker comment cards, etc. City Clerks and Secretaries are responsible for taking notes or recording all of the data themselves, and then have to reinsert that data back into their Agenda Management software when they’re ready to publish. Meeting Management software solves the disconnect between what happens during a meeting and how you take that information to publish completed agendas. Using this software structure not only eliminates 95% of human error when automating these tasks, but it also saves ample time by not duplicating data entry efforts.

External Communication and Transparency

It is important to record public meetings to the outside world so citizens have full transparency. As such, web pages, external references and reports, voting results, and other content should all be supported by the Meeting Management system that is in use. Whether you stream your meeting to a live audience or publish recordings afterwards, Meeting Management solutions support digital audiences while also controlling in-room functionalities. This means that now you’re able to host meetings while also leveraging technology anywhere in the world. Meeting Management solutions also make it easy to increase voter transparency. One can now easily track voting records, particular agenda topics, meeting history, etc. so citizens can be engaged. It also makes it easy to publish agendas 75% faster and have the ability to share data collected in every meeting. Citizens are informed faster and also have full transparency in the process.

Why the Difference Matters

The distinction between Agenda and Meeting Management is that Meeting Management looks at the entire process while Agenda Management focuses on one particular aspect. While Agenda Management is an important and helpful feature, it is much more powerful when integrated with a complete Meeting Management solution. Every organization is unique and has different goals. But choosing a software provider that can handle the entire Meeting Management process will help organizations be productive without having to make major changes to their workflows. No matter the size of your organization, choosing a 360 degree provider will give you the opportunity to increase collaboration, efficiency, and transparency. There are Meeting Management providers who offer a modular approach, so you can start small but have room to grow when the time comes. Don’t let your organization size stop you from exploring all options.

About C.D.S.

Cloud Driven Solutions provides Saas platforms, consulting services, and app development. We focus on delivering quality, easy to use solutions that are customized to fit your needs. Thanks to our team’s 20+ years experience in software development and the audio / video industry, we are able to provide a unique ability to blend our software solutions with new or existing audio, video, recording, or broadcast equipment.