Meeting minutes

Does anyone have a template that they use for taking minutes at leadership meetings?

lehrschallbrian wrote:Does anyone have a template that they use for taking minutes at leadership meetings?

I simply use a Word document with no template. I include a list of those attending, who did what (invocation, benediction, scripture study, training, etc) and provide a synopsis of what was conducted.

We work from our agenda and write the minutes in and around the scheduled items.

I have found that organizing my minutes is critical to their effective use. I don't use a template, but I might as well. For Ward Council, I have the following headings followed by bulleted lists:

Attending
Invocation
Assignments
Spiritual Welfare
Temporal Welfare
Discussion
Calendar
Benediction

Assignments are listed by person/calling then a sub-list of assignments. I only recently divided the spiritual and temporal welfare items to try to avoid spiritual welfare items getting lost in all the medical issues we review regularly. Perhaps I should separate medical issues as well....

I email this to the ward council, except for the attending/invocation/benediction. In the past, I have reorganized the minutes after each meeting to make them more usable for people, but I find that if I record the minutes with these headings and using bulleted lists, it saves me from having to spend the extra time reorganizing.

An approach that I have found helpful in different callings is to have minutes divided into two columns: discussions and actions. So in that way, the discussions column could start out with the agenda leaving sufficient space for notes, and then the actions are noted adjacent to the relevant discussions. Hymns, prayers, attendees, etc. would be noted before and after this section though.

Attached are a couple of agenda examples that could be adapted. The Bishopric really like to have one that works as a "checklist" for them so they can mark off completed calling assignments.
We normally send out the agenda for WC and PEC as a .pdf file along with a .pdf file of the next 3 months of calendars.

This is the minute template that
I use as the EXEC SEC for Bishopric:
(1) Welcome by:
(2) Opening Prayer:
(3) Assigned Spiritual Thought:
(4) Minutes of the last meeting:
(4a) Up-Date form the last meeting:
(5) Correspondence:
(6) Ward Calendar:
(7) Stake Calendar:
(8) Ministering/Welfare:
(9) Missionary Update:
(10) Temple/Family History event:
(11) Reports:
(A) E/Q
(B) R/S
(C) Y/M
(D) Y/W
(E) Primary
(F) Public Relations
(G) Nursery
(H) OTHER
(I) Bishop's Assignments:
AOB:
Closing Prayer:
Next Assigned Spiritual Thought:

I take notes on each subject on a separate sheet of paper.
Hope this helps
Bro H Paignton Ward/Plymouth Stake/UK

Do you have any reference to this ?