General meeting happens once a month. And a well made general meeting will take about a month to create. If you take a week to relax, the meeting will probably not be as good. That sucks. But it is just true.

We do these things for a good reason though.

And if you can do a good general meeting, you barely have to worry about anything else for the month.

A well produced general meeting will create a month of activity inside your organization. Good meetings are a building block of organizing. It needs to happen on time and it needs to respect the time of everybody involved. If we can do those two things, we’re really flying.

It’s not like issues aren’t vital and shouldn’t be discussed to their full detail. But also, you’re just gonna have some people who love arguing, like as a hobby or they’re passionate about arguing, or just they have their own perspective and viewpoint. All of that is good and it’s fine to be democratic, but just as a practical reality, we’re going to be there for two hours. 

Now listen especially to this:

Conversations need to begin, conclude, and end at a good point. If we’re having an argument about a contingent’s idea, we need the very strongest arguments for and against that idea to be presented in like a reasonable time frame. And discussion of ideas makes ideas stronger. This is why we have this meeting format. It’s not because we just are, are. We love the idea of voting. We are trying to manufacture an illusion of consent.

I’m not exactly using that phrase the way Chomsky would have, but you get the idea. The meeting is not simply for the, the building of consensus. It is for the creation of ideas that we can execute in a powerful way. So general meetings have ideas, they have discussions, they have logistics and implementation. We have report, we have ideas, we have reports, we have voting and we have, you know, people that are bottom lining all of these things. So booking the location. Let’s talk about this.

Choose a venue. You want accessibility, you want size, and you want cost. This really depends on how large your organization is. You can meet in a library, you can meet in a friend’s house, you can meet at a community center, you could meet at a union hall, or you could meet at an event space that your friend is renting you for cheap. The venue is really not, you know, when we talk about accessibility, accessibility is not just disabled access like a ramp. It is also location that people can access anywhere in town or via bus or just like if a person wanted to come, they could come. Let’s talk about setting up the space.

You want to have seating that is arranged to encourage participation. So rows, you know, just like any kind of auditorium and something where there’s a mic, there’s audio equipment, there’s sign in sheet and these sign in sheets can be physical or digital. And you’d like to be there one hour early because that means you can set up your meeting. Set up. You can set up your chairs, you can, if you have food and you ought to have food, you can bring it in and set it up. By the time that people get there, you should be ready to get to work really quickly. Hybrid meetings are the way to go.

Audio, visual equipment, bring a camera, bring a microphone. Don’t just come empty handed. Even if you just have your phone camera, have it plugged into a battery. Make sure that it’s streaming on like a zoom type thing. Most churches will have like a camera that looks out of the crowd and, and then a webcam that looks back at the preacher. There are lots of setups for this. But the idea is, and this is very important, we want the same experience for people that includes questions and stuff. Okay, bam.

Hybrid meeting setup. What about inviting speakers, Identifying the speakers. Let’s talk about this. Who’s speaking? It’s probably somebody who’s from our outreach list. You want somebody who’s relevant to your audience. So these are probably people who are on our power map.

They also might be a union rep. They might just be from anywhere. From something that’s really important to our month’s agenda. And when you’re inviting speakers, you want to personalize invitation. That can be two sentences, you know, just anything that is personalized to the, to the people that are seeing it. Scheduling speakers, you want to allocate time for the speakers and make sure that the meeting stays on track. We also talked about having sign in sheets.

You want the agenda written down. That’s going to be on the website. You want speaker bios, they will submit that when they become a speaker. Any other key documents, just stick them in there. Bios and other info. Speakers should submit by form. And that should be happening like way before anything else happens.

Like before they’re even confirmed, before they’re announced anywhere. They have to fill out that form. They have to fill out that form before we can even say that they’re coming. Hybrid and remote meeting, best practices technology for hybrid meetings, like we said, this is really all about this has got to have remote engagement. The experience needs to be as one to one as possible. You know, if you are a voter and you have a voting card, I should be able to vote online as well as in person. I should also be able to speak and participate online or in person.

Zoom makes this pretty easy. Zoom users should be able to raise their hand and you should be able to see it in the Zoom panel, just exactly the same as any thing in person. Multi channel communication.

If you’ve got a flyer, that’s great. Send an email, make sure there’s a social media post. Is there a text message that we can send? All of these should be able to be done through fluent CRM. We should just be able to, especially if it’s like something that they’ve have like special interest in according to their tag.

That’s just great. It’s an extra vector for personalization. Send that save the date message like a week or so early. Send a reminder the day of the meeting and yeah, have food there. I know we can’t do this every time, but it’s just if you have an incentive, if there’s a refreshment, people come. And in terms of the kind of food that you are bringing, you want to bring just stuff that breaks down to a group really easily. I can just briefly talk to you about foods that are safe to bring.

You’re gonna look at many sandwiches, mini foods, just things that can be broken into single size servings for people to just take and put on a plate and then have it. You want to look at platters and boards. You know, if you’ve got like some kind of charcuterie, something where people can like take crackers or bread or fruit pieces or whatever and you know, it’s just easy for them to put on a plate and keep moving. That’s great stuff like salads. And these can be pasta salads. They can be just any kind of salads. More exotic salads, like stuff that’s like based on jack fish or something, jackfruit, whatever.

Remember that you want variety of options because everybody’s not gonna eat meat. Guaranteed that, that you’ll run into somebody that’s got a vegetarian or vegan dietary requirement.

Just with 100% accuracy. So just make sure you have that variety. Starchy meals, I’m just making just a whole list, you know, pizza, you know, bread, anything like bread, you know, breads, tacos, burritos, just it just any of this kind of stuff. You know what all these things are, ziti, you know, spaghetti, any kind of thing like that that you can like cut into slices or spoon out. You know, you give somebody a platter of pasta and bread and stuff like that, they’re full and there’s not a lot of extra controversy drinks. I’m not gonna go into details of what drinks are. You know, what they are.

All that is just stuff that’s good to have. Let’s talk about the start of the meeting. You want to make sure that everybody has a defined role. If you’re on the administrative committee, who’s the chair, who’s the secretary, who’s taking notes, who’s the timekeeper? It’s great if you have one person there that is just keeping time and making sure that comments and segments are not going on longer than need to be. The chair can do this at their discretion, but a timekeeper makes things a lot easier. Somebody to hold the microphone is also a great thing to have.

You have those four things, suddenly the meeting goes extremely smoothly. From an organizing perspective, you want rotating chairs. There should not be a situation where there’s one person who knows the rules of how to run a meeting. Your organization’s in extreme danger if you’re in that situation. So you want standardized meetings because it’s easy to train. That’s why I’m setting out all this stuff, because now you all know how to do it, and that’s better, right? So opening an introduction.

First of all, before a meeting, any even starts, we need to check your cards and figure out who is a voting member. If you aren’t a member, now is the time. And of course, a lot of times there’s like internal controversy over can they just come to the meeting and become a member and start voting. It kind of depends. But generally I don’t mind that if we have a guest that’s coming, the whole point of the guest is for them to become members. The administrative committee should think about that when they invite guests. Figure out the purpose of the meeting that happens in the introduction.

Talk about who’s new, thank them for being here. You know, in churches, we tell everybody, hey, if you’re new and this is your first time, please stand up.

And then people stand. That’s what you’re gonna have. You’re gonna have the rules. Set an inclusive tone. Talk about step up, step back. You know, progressive stack all the. The rules of polite participation.

You’re going to talk about them, and then you’re going to introduce the agenda. Make sure that people understand that they can always change the agenda before the meeting starts. And always make sure that people understand that. And be extremely careful if anybody tries to push that through too fast or too slow or just. If you are here and you are a citizen of Mosaic, Atlanta, pay attention to the agenda. It is linked before the meetings. It is linked on the RSVP page because it’s a group of volunteers and they’re updating things in real time.

The agenda realistically could change at any time and like it could change at the last minute. But the agenda is a major part of the organization. So what’s happening with the agenda? Use your eyeballs.

Introducing Robert’s Rules. This could also be like Rusty’s Rules, but you want to explain what a motion is, what seconding is, what voting is. And if we make this like a card or something that we hand out or a PDF, that could probably work. We want to keep this simple so that anybody can get in here and use it. Whatever. We haven’t needed to do a Roberts rules meeting more than like once, but we may need to in the future and in those situations, so be it. We are going to have reports and committees.

You have any kind of announcements, stick them up there around this time in the meeting. You’ve, you’ve, you’ve introduced the thing, you’ve introduced the agenda. We know who’s allowed to vote. We’ve got everybody’s roles. Now is the time for those one way communications. The chair is going to talk about anything that just doesn’t require any further elaboration. It’s their place to grandstand for about two to five minutes.

Then you’re going to have committee and officer reports. It’s great if you use a standard template for these reports to keep them secure. Concise reports can come in multiple formats. If, if you know somebody’s in charge of a committee or a group and they can’t come there in person, they can send a voicemail, they can send a video. You need to allocate time for each report. You shouldn’t take more than like, like, like two minutes. But if something important is happening, you don’t need to run a buzzer at the two minute mark.

Just be concise here and let us know what’s going on. You want to talk about joining these committees? We’re going to explain each of the committees that you’ve heard from and hey, you can join and we’re going to let you talk about these committees and sign up. Sometimes this is later in the meeting, sometimes this is earlier in the meeting, sometimes it’s whatever it is. But we definitely want you to have the ability to talk to the people that gave the reports so that you can join work that you’re interested in. What about assignments? You can assign tasks to specific individuals.

Or committees during the meeting. Hey, we’re talking. We’re going to do this next. Okay, do it. The secretary should write that down and we’ll kind of know what happens in the future. Whether it worked out or didn’t work out or something went right, something went wrong, we’ve got to know. Let’s talk about guest speakers.

And remember that these guest speakers are big driver for growth. So if we don’t have time for guest speakers, make time. These can be individual speakers who are allied with us. It can be a panel of speakers with diverse perspectives on something important like education, housing, rent, the veterans, the environment. Name anything. You get the idea. And there’s resolutions creating and voting on resolutions.

We talk about these before you vote. There’s room to discuss them before they’re put to a vote. And for opavote, remote voting. And this will allow both in person and remote attendees to vote, which is great. And we will explain the options clearly before voting begins. You’ll all have a chance to participate.

It’s just great. That will be the body of the meeting. You’ll have rules, you’ll have discussions, you’ll have reports. You’ll have an opportunity to tune in. And this should be smooth, entertaining, feel like home, be not too long. And you should be excited at the end of it to come back and say, oh, man, I thought that could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t so bad. That’s the feeling that you’ll have when you a meeting goes well.

And that’s the feeling that you’ll have most of the time, especially if you’ve done this kind of level of preparation, you’ve got it, you’re good to go. And at the end of this meeting, the chair can just summarize the key decisions, give you an encouragement to get out there and do all of this stuff that we talked about. And the organization can follow up after the meeting thanking people for success, archiving recordings, following up with meetings and minutes and action items. And this might be a week after the meeting. You’ve got a little time, but then you’re planning for, hey, what did we do?

Well, what can we improve? And who do we invite next time? If you guys can do that cycle every month, boy, oh boy, you’re gonna be running very smoothly and you’ll be very happy and things will be great.