One of the main thing people use Weaver for is to run meetings. This video covers created and configuring a meeting record.
This presentation is to prepare you for creating a meeting so that you can hold a meeting and run a meeting. We'll be setting up for a meeting, we will be setting the date and time, we will be setting the reminder, we will be setting the agenda items for the meeting. Now I am NOT a fan of meetings I wish I could live my life without meetings but meetings serve a very important purpose in getting all of us together and getting all of us on the same page and coordinated well. So it's a necessary evil one of the main things that people use Weaver for is to help them run their meetings very effectively. To do that we need to set up for the meeting.
What I've created here is a simple workspace. The scenario is imagine you've got a neighborhood organization. These are people that are dedicated to making the neighborhood nicer. They want to do a few things for it. They want to increase their quality of life. The main thing that they do is every year they put on a block party and last year they put on a block party and it was pretty successful so they're thinking about getting together and doing the same thing this year. We need to have a planning session for it. We make a workspace and include all the people. Let's take a look at the roles because when you're setting up a meeting you can either do this at this point in time or you may already have people set up there. We have the members role set up with four people in it. You can have, of course, as many people as you want in a role. This is important because the meeting will send notifications to the members of the workspace and it will allow them in. It'll sort of keep track of them. For everybody you want to come to the meeting you want to make sure that they're here in the members. Now of course you can obviously have non-members in your meeting. You can also send email more or less manually to them and they can access this but but typically you will set that up.
If I go to the meetings tab I'll find that there's no meetings there so this is the first meeting we've ever had. It's pretty easy to create one. Just hit the plus button here and you're asked for what's this going to be about.
This is going to be a planning meeting for the block party. We can set up a few other things but we can also set that later. I'm just going to click this it's saying well you probably don't want that start time but that's right I'm going to go in and change the start time so let me go ahead and and do that.
Here's the representation of the meaning you've got all the details at the top so what do we want to do first of all let's you know here let me type some description of the meeting so in the description of the meeting we want to put basic information about what's going to happen at the meeting. What we're going to do. A little bit of information about how to get to the meeting, where it is, contact details. If you're having an online meeting you'll put a link in here into the WebEx or the go-to meeting or whatever you're using to facilitate. All the the information about the meeting that you need that you that you want to be sent to people so they have it ahead of time to get there.
We can set the date and time of the meeting so let's go to here and let's change the meeting to be on Friday at 9:00 in the morning for some reason we've got the title here. How long is the meeting going to be? We're going to plan a meeting. It's going to be an hour it's going to be two hours but it's going to be 30 minutes whatever. It's going to be put that in here and this is for planning purposes so that you can figure out if you've got enough time to handle what you've scheduled. Right now we have nothing allocated but we'll see that that will change later how long before the meeting do you want to send the reminder depends on the kind of meeting it is. Often an hour ahead of time is good. In this case I want to send the meeting reminder about three hours ahead of time. It is telling you the reminder hasn't been sent.
Remember earlier I said it depends on the the role. You can if you want hold a meeting for a different role. You could create a special role but most groups don't use it that way that makes it a little bit more complicated a little harder to do it. Typically you make a working space for a set of people that workspace is a circle. It's a working group and the meeting typically involves everybody from the group like I say you can you can do it differently you can make it a lot more complicated but that's typically what people do.
Now we are currently in the DRAFT state. Meetings have four states that they go through draft is where you're just typing in the first stuff that's what we're doing right now is preparing the meeting then once we've got it to the point where the basic information is there we can put it into plan mode. By planning we mean everything that goes from now until the meeting starts there's going to be some things going on like people are going to be able to say whether they're coming or not and people can extend and they put comments in there and they can do a bunch of things to prepare for the meeting itself. Then of course we're going to go in to run the meeting and that I'll show you some capabilities in a different video about that and then we'll complete the meeting but right now we'll leave it in draft.
We want to create some agenda items. Let's do that the first thing is to talk about to choose a band because this is a this is a nice block party and we like to have a band and there's a there's a co member who typically is involved in the band so we know Betty's probably going to be responsible for this let's go ahead and put that in there. Maybe we'll spend 15 minutes talking about that so we've set up an agenda item.
Now let's create another agenda item which is to propose a caterer and again this is something that maybe Alex is typically involved in. We'll go ahead and do that and let him know about that. Finally let's choose another item which is design a flyer. Maybe we don't need to assign somebody to that. Maybe that's just something we're going to handle as a group.
We've now created a meeting and this meeting has three agenda items on it. In each agenda item I showed that you could add a person there you can also have a description so you know we want a better band than last year because maybe there was some problems with it. We also can add some attachments to this and this is really important for if there's some background information that's needed that will be this will be a nice way to just or make it available for the people that are come to the meeting I'll demonstrate that in just a moment but we've got all that together so good let's I think we're kind of set for the meeting let's go ahead and put it in plan mode. In plan mode it changes just a little bit. PLAN mode again is for everything from now until when the meeting actually happens. In the mean time between now and the meeting starts people can indicate whether they're going to attend. Maybe I could I could just say yes I'm going to attend. Maybe I'm pretty sure that I'm going to attend or maybe I know I'm going to be out of town so that's great so maybe is going to depend you know on you know the other meeting that I have to go to that may they may run over whatever it is by doing this you've set you can set up a table again these are the four people that are in the members role so if there were more people in there you'd have more entries there each person can come here and update their status you can update it as many times as you want to so if your status changes like I'm definitely I've been called away I'm not going to be there you can go ahead and indicate this and that's just a nice way so that when you're approaching the time for the meeting anybody can go in there and look and see you know who's going to be there and perhaps if a lot of people are going to be vacant then perhaps perhaps the meeting should be scheduled for a different time now what we can do is we can let people know about this meeting. Maybe you had some discussions with some people so they basically know the meeting is coming but now that you've got it entered in here and you've got a specific set of agenda items.
You may want to send some email that's quite easy. We'll send some email about the meeting like this. We use this form again this is going to go to the members so this is the same group of people that the meeting is designed for okay you could change the role here you could you could add some people in here. The subject is going to be the subject of the email message so we've automatically generated a subject here that's good but you can change it if you want to. You can also put a little note at the top "let's get together and make a great plan hope to see you all." Typical sort of thing. We can add some attachments. That's typically all you have to do and I'm going to say send now and that's now going to send the email off to do them so everybody who's part of the meeting will receive an email message. It looks like this I wanted to show what it would look like everybody will get one it tells a little bit about the workspace you've got links to the workspace here's the the message that you put in there there can be some attachments on there and most importantly down here you have the agenda you have the information about the meeting you've got the scheduled time you've got all the pieces that you need in order to to go there.
Typically what people would do is they then click on this and that brings up the web page for the meeting it'll automatically log them in if they're not already logged in and they can then go on and do some things with the meeting record itself. When you receive the email and you access the meeting from that it's possible for other members to come in here and augment what's here in the meeting planning session. That's what we called plan because it's all the things are going to do on the way into the meeting.
Betty for instance may have some documents that she wants to share with people and so it's really easy to do you can attach them with this it's quite easy to grab a couple of couple of files I'm going to attach two files here because I just happen to have two and here I can say you know this local band was reviewed well and then I can upload that then I can say here's a here's a list of other options you don't have to go with that but we can upload that and so you know we save that so now associated with this agenda item these two documents are here. If anybody wants to access them they can go and and click on this and bring that up and see that so everybody this would be something that Betty would do. Obviously Alex might do something similar here might add some extra docs may make a comment and this is a good way to put in all of the points that are going to be made so just so just some things like that some people like to prepare what they're going to say ahead of time attach it as a comment on the agenda item and that way when it comes to get their turn to speak they can tell people just look at the comment and then they can speak to it. Everybody's got the notes right there so they know what to follow along. Alex has actually gone and extended the meeting in this way well that's essentially it.
You've set up for your meeting, you've set a date and time for the meeting, you've set a reminder period, if you remember and so this will automatically send an email 180 minutes before the meeting, and it'll send it to all the people you've set up an agenda, and you've assigned them to people, you've assigned time on that that that agenda item is to last, and those people can then extend that by either putting comments or documents on there. So that's all you need to do to set up a meeting and the next video I'll talk about running the meeting.
