Administration and record keeping
Admin and keeping good records for audit is an important, and often legal requirement for your board or committee.
Increasingly, electronic records are supplanting the requirement for paper.
However digital tools enable your board to do much more than just file meeting minutes.
Transform your board:
“Our board group has been particularly transformative, enabling continuous governance, improving response times and increasing our agility, resilience and sustainability… Loomio saves us thousands of pounds every year”
- Austen Cordasco Co-operative Assistance Network Limited (CAN) Business support services , United Kingdom
Let's look at how to organize work, administer discussions, keep data safe and store records in Loomio.
Administering discussions
There is a range of features in Loomio to help you administer discussions accessible from the drop down menu to the right of the discussion.
Keep the discussion list current by using:
- Pin discussion to keep important discussions at the top of the list
- Edit discussion to change discussion title or update discussion context
- Move to group when you want to move a discussion to another group or subgroup, or to an archive group.
- Close discussion to remove the discussion from the list. Closed discussions are easily available under the discussion drop down menu and from the search bar, and can be reopened at any time.
- Delete discussion when you do not want to keep a record of the discussion. Note that deleted discussions can not be un-deleted.
Category tags
Category tags are a great way to label discussions so they can be easily found. Set tags and apply to each discussion - try to be consistent.
Common board tags include: Administration, AGM, Board meeting, Report, Finance, Legal, Members, Minutes, Planning, Policy, Resolution, Constitution, General meeting, Strategy.
Group members can search for discussions by tag under the tags drop down menu.
Maintaining the discussion topic
Discussions work best for everyone when you can keep the discussion on a single topic.
If a new topic is introduced in the middle of a discussion, you can select and move specific comments to another discussion, or start a new discussion.
Subgroups
Subgroups help you organize your communications and members so that the right people are engaged in their work together. For example, you can use a subgroup for a subcommittee or working group.
Archiving records
To keep a record of a thread discussion and decisions in polls, use Print thread and print the file to pdf. You can then store a published copy of the thread in your chosen document storage archive.
To keep a complete record of the data in your Loomio group, use Export group data.
Data storage
Loomio's cloud services protect your data by writing to multiple disks instantly, backed up daily, and stored in multiple locations.
All data in threads, comments, polls and file attachments are stored in this way.
Files attached to threads can also be seen under the Files tab.
