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Approval of minutes via email


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Each month we have our board meetings for two hours. A lot of time was being spent on reviewing minutes, making changes and approvals. The current president now has me, as the Secretary, send out the draft version of the meeting minutes via email. I give the board members three days to review, then I compile any revisions made and send out the final for approval. The approval is done via email and they have one week to approve. Is email an okay format for meeting minutes to be communicated and approved? It is very time consuming in our short board meetings.

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Is email an okay format for meeting minutes to be communicated and approved?

No. It's okay to send out the draft and get some corrections via e-mail, but the final approval must be done at a meeting (and further changes are in order at that time).

It is very time consuming in our short board meetings.

Well, if you get all the little corrections out of the way before the meeting, that shouldn't be an issue.

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Each month we have our board meetings for two hours. A lot of time was being spent on reviewing minutes, making changes and approvals. The current president now has me, as the Secretary, send out the draft version of the meeting minutes via email. I give the board members three days to review, then I compile any revisions made and send out the final for approval. The approval is done via email and they have one week to approve. Is email an okay format for meeting minutes to be communicated and approved? It is very time consuming in our short board meetings.

You cannot approve the minutes via email unless the bylaws allow for voting via email (RONR p. 2 footnote and pp. 408-409). However, I don't see a problem with (hopefully) shorting the time at the meeting by members submitting their revisions via email and you compiling a final document which would be up for approval at the Board meeting (corrections would still need to be asked for at the meeting as well).

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Each month we have our board meetings for two hours. A lot of time was being spent on reviewing minutes, making changes and approvals. The current president now has me, as the Secretary, send out the draft version of the meeting minutes via email. I give the board members three days to review, then I compile any revisions made and send out the final for approval. The approval is done via email and they have one week to approve. Is email an okay format for meeting minutes to be communicated and approved? It is very time consuming in our short board meetings.

You are obviously putting far too much stuff into your minutes which shouldn't be there at all (such as summarizing what was said in reports and in debate). Take a careful look at pages 451-456 in RONR, or pages 146-150 in RONRIB.

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Once you get the "details" corrected in the manner you propose, you could put approval of the minutes in a Consent Agenda which would speed the approval process (as long as nobody objected).

I also agree that something is wrong if approval of the minutes is time consuming. It means, I believe, one or more of the following:

1. The minutes are not being prepared accurately and correctly

2. There is too much detail in the minutes (what was said vs what was done)

3. Members micromanageing details that are not important

4. Badly run meeting and approval process (should ask for corrections, not debate details)

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Once you get the "details" corrected in the manner you propose, you could put approval of the minutes in a Consent Agenda which would speed the approval process (as long as nobody objected).

I sincerely doubt that this board has a special rule of order providing for the establishment of a consent calendar (see RONR, 10th ed., pp. 349-50), and even if it did it is extremely unlikely that it would facilitate approval of the minutes.

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Once you get the "details" corrected in the manner you propose, you could put approval of the minutes in a Consent Agenda which would speed the approval process (as long as nobody objected).

In the unlikely event that they even use a Consent Agenda, this topic has proven in the past to be a controversial one at most meetings. The likelihood of nobody objecting would seem to be vanishingly small.

I agree that if approval of minutes takes a long time, there is very likely way too much being included in the minutes.

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