Run a Volunteer Meeting
Love them or hate them, meetings are a vital part of service work. Here’s how to organize and run a good one.
STEP 1 Plan an agenda.
First things first: identify your goals for the meeting. Who do you want around the table? What is the primary topic and task at hand? What do you hope to accomplish? Do you want to make specific decisions, or simply use the time to brainstorm?
Once you’ve figured out the basic goals, create an agenda that lays out 3–5 points you want to address/discuss during the meeting. Set a time frame (2 hours, max), and decide how much time to allocate to each point. (Allocating times in advance keeps the meeting from dragging on forever.) Whenever possible, delegate the meeting leadership as widely as possible. Asking people to lead certain parts will increase how invested they felt in the meeting’s overall success.
STEP 2 Invite people.
Draft a list of invites and send out a few possible meetings times to them via Doodle, Meeting Wizard, or another meeting scheduling program. As soon as possible, send out a confirmation to attendees.
If some people need to join the conference from afar, set up a conference call line at FreeConference, or through a similar service.
STEP 3 Document prep.
Group brainstorming can be a productive way to spend a meeting, but when it comes to decision-making, you don’t want to start from square one. Create draft documents for anything you hope to discuss in depth during the meeting. Send the documents out beforehand, and ask that attendees read and mark them up. The day of the meeting, ask for their input and suggestions.
STEP 4 Get snacks.
Meetings without food are painful, and making decisions on an empty stomach is never a good idea. Make sure to have nibbles and drinks on hand, or ask attendees to bring snacks to share. While you’re buying supplies, make sure you have extra pens and a large white board or flip chart for brainstorming.
STEP 5 Assign a note-taker
Before the meeting starts, ask someone to take notes — ideally not the same person who’s leading the meeting. The note-taker should type/write down the attendees, and keep track of all major discussion threads and decisions reached over the course of the meeting.
STEP 6 Troubleshooting.
There are different personalities at every meeting. Some people dominate conversations or are overly aggressive in stating their points. Other people are hesitant to speak up and end up not getting heard.
The meeting leader/moderator should not shy away from troubleshooting if they notice that a conversation is becoming one-sided or unproductive, or drifting off topic. If someone is speaking too often or for too long, gently cut them off and suggest that people who haven’t had a chance to speak be heard next. If someone is not speaking up, or unable to get a word in edgewise, call on them to contribute or try breaking the group up into smaller subgroups and having each group report their thoughts/findings back to the whole. In smaller meetings, you can also do a quick “whip around” where each person gets to say what they think about the topic at hand.
STEP 7 Follow up.
After the meeting, the notes should be sent out to all attendees and also the people who could not make it. Make sure to remind people of their specific follow up tasks, and give them timelines in which to complete them. And, of course, thank everyone for their participation!
