Save Time and Money With Agenda and Meeting Management Software

Clerks are incredibly important to communities. They are the linchpin of local government operations, managing council meeting minutes, legal documentation and compliance, municipal elections, filing and storing data, handling financial tasks, and so much more. Clerks plan and prepare nearly everything. Without them, communities wouldn’t succeed.

We recently attended the annual International Institute of Municipal Clerks (IIMC) conference to find out what kept municipal clerks up at night — what they must overcome to do their job to the best of their ability. The answer was overwhelmingly not having enough time or financial resources.

Former local government staff members make up a large portion of the staff at CivicPlus®, so we understand these roadblocks, and we also have a passion for local government and its importance in creating thriving communities where residents can enjoy life to the fullest with their family and friends. After collaborating with our team of professionals, we thought, “Challenge accepted.” We created this blog to help you create a plan to save time, enhance productivity, and enable your financial resources to go further to provide the best communications and services to your community.

How To Save Time

Automating tasks is a great way to save time and increase office productivity by eliminating laborious manual and monotonous tasks. Ask yourself this: How much time are you spending creating an agenda for council meetings?

You may be doing this manually, creating multiple documents on your hard drive, laboring through multiple agenda packets, zipping files, and drafting e-mails that are too large to send. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; you need to dig through communication threads to find staff contributions, take minutes, and compile votes.

With our Agenda and Meeting Management software, you can create your agenda through an automated approach, streamlining online publishing, digitizing voting and meeting processes, and improving collaboration through added efficiency and productivity. You could speed up your operations by over 50 percent when you replace your manual procedures with automated ones while also cutting costs on paper and labor. In addition, board members will get private portal access to take notes and vote electronically. Considering these efficiencies, the time and money saved in the long run will exceed your traditional methods. Without a clear and organized process in place, you are constantly having to reinvent the wheel and create makeshift ways to complete requests, which costs time and money.

Save Money

An outdated manual process creates time inefficiencies due to laborious tasks and slow-moving communication and collaboration, altering and slowing your workflow. The lack of productivity in your operations costs your department money by using more effort than needed to complete tasks. Your budget is disproportionally being used on tasks that should already be completed while current responsibilities are delayed. Additionally, your team being overworked can diminish work quality and create inaccuracies in paperwork. Inaccurate information interferes with profitability.

Costly manual operations affect local governments at a higher rate. Clerks have smaller teams, making the financial impact of workflow inefficiencies even greater. A modest group of five can fall behind on tasks quicker than a team of 50, consuming its budget faster than a larger office, making updated digital agendas and meeting management software even more important. Loss of budget takes community nurturing resources away and negatively impacts resident satisfaction.

Importance of Software Integration

Integrated cloud-based systems allow automatic data sharing and cross-department collaboration, which further improves productivity and helps preserve your budget. System unification also eliminates hours of manual data management and the need for external communication outside of the software, which minimizes the risk of technical and informational error and avoids creating additional manual processes to circumvent system inefficiencies and limitations.

Connecting Agenda and Meetings Software With a Codification Solution

With a cutting-edge integration between CivicPlus Agenda and Meeting Management and Codification software, you can instantly post new ordinances to your online code in seconds from your agenda software, reducing the manual steps you usually take while providing residents with an immediate code update. The new additions are posted in your online code as adopted but not yet codified, providing instant access to the new legislation. Perhaps the most exciting feature of transparency is the permanent linking to the meeting within the online code of ordinances. When users read the online code, they can click on a “Meetings” button and access the content that contributed to enacting that law, giving residents unprecedented insight into the decision-making.

Connecting Agenda and Meetings Software With Our Municipal Websites

With an integrated website, residents can access a one-stop shop for transactions with your department and others — all with a single login through a public portal. Within this portal, residents can access and search their code of ordinances, read agendas, watch meetings, access meeting calendars, and sign up for subscriptions through an embedded agenda and meeting management portal. A calendar, subscriptions, and public records request forms can all be embedded directly into a website’s personalized portal. This unification will delight residents as they engage with government services more meaningfully while reducing calls and increasing time spent on strategic initiatives.

Conclusion

Creating operational efficiency through modern digital tools helps you and your team accomplish more with less. You can maximize the long-term health and success of your community within your limited budget by automating much of your workflow and making tasks easier to complete. The added efficiency of a digital solution lets you respond to residents faster and with personalized attention while focusing on the additional functions necessary to foster resident satisfaction and effective community development.

Find out how much time and money you might save implementing our Agenda and Meeting Management solution by answering seven simple questions on our Clerk ROI Calculator.