Trustee Communications Case Study

Governance of small voluntary organisations can be a challenge when there are major developments and projects which need additional time and effort, often at short notice.  A South London based organisation has tackled this by using the best of simple technology to improve communications, enable quick and meaningful decision making and ensure everyone is involved.

SLYCO are an organisation working with young people.  They had an opportunity to get involved in a major new development project which required significant additional support from trustees.   Trustees were based across London and whilst able and committed to attend regular trustee meetings found it difficult to get together in the same place at short notice.

The board agreed to form a sub-committee to oversee the major project and set up three communications channels:

• Conference calls (typically scheduled for 5pm on a weekday evening)
• Email lists (to keep the whole trustee board involved)
• Document store using Google Docs (to keep a central confidential web record of minutes, notes and decision making)

The set up of the three communication channels was quick and simple and done by a trustee with experience of the systems.  It could just as well have been done by any IT volunteer remotely.

As a result, the sub-committee can discuss key issues regularly, quickly and at their convenience with minimal impact on the rest of their working week or home life.  The email list ensures the whole trustee board is kept up to date with decision making and developments (key to this is short summary notes of what was discussed at each meeting) and the document store means the most recent copy of each document is stored centrally and accessible for any trustee (or key staff member as appropriate) to access.

SLYCO still hold regular trustee meetings but have found the combination of conference calls, email lists and document store to dramatically improve trustee engagement, to enable an appropriate level of timely decision making when needed and to overcome the problem of not being able to find meeting notes on demand!  The systems also enabled the organisation to use trustees with the appropriate skills rather than just those with more free time and easy access to local meetings.

Further resources

Conference calls - www.voicemeeting.co.uk (pay for calls by the minute)
Document store reviews - www.ictknowledgebase.org.uk/webofficecomparison
Introduction to email lists - www.icthubknowledgebase.org.uk/emailmailinglists 

Back to articles