How to schedule a board meeting everyone can attend

A board meeting has two guest lists, and confusing them is what makes the date impossible to find. The first list is the people whose presence makes the meeting valid: the directors, the trustees, the committee members named in the by-laws. The second is everyone else: the auditor, the accountant, the general manager, whoever is taking the minutes, a guest invited for one item on the agenda.

Only the first list belongs in the availability poll as a constraint. Poll both and you collect fourteen answers where you needed eight, and the date that comes out suits the observers rather than the people who vote.

• Voting members. Count them and name them before you write anything. This is the list the poll is for, and its size is the number every row of the results table gets compared against.
• People needed for one item only. A treasurer presenting the accounts, a lawyer on a single resolution. Ask them for their availability separately, then place their item inside the slot the board picked.
• Observers. They are told the date, they are not asked about it. Sending them the poll link is the fastest way to make an eight-person decision look like a twenty-person negotiation.

Quorum is the minimum number of voting members who have to be present for the meeting to take decisions. Your by-laws give the number: half plus one, two thirds, or a fixed figure like four. Read it before you write the poll, because it is the number you are actually trying to reach.

A board of nine with a quorum of five does not need nine yeses. It needs five, from members who count towards quorum. Chasing unanimity when five would have done is how a committee meeting date slips from mid-November to December: the two directors who never answer hold the whole board hostage.

So write the quorum down next to the poll, and read each row of the table against it rather than against the full list. A row with six yeses on a board of nine is a meeting that can be held. A row with nine yeses is a bonus, not a requirement.

Most by-laws require the convening notice to go out a fixed number of days before the meeting: seven, ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty-one. That notice period has a consequence people discover too late. The poll has to close before the notice goes out, and the notice has to go out before the earliest date on the poll. Which means the first date you propose cannot be next Tuesday.

1. 1

   Find the notice period in the by-laws

   It is usually one line in the article on board meetings. Say it is fifteen days, counted from the day the notice is sent.

2. 2

   Count backwards from the earliest date you want to propose

   Fifteen days before that date is the day your convening notice must leave. Nothing you propose can sit closer than that.

3. 3

   Give the poll three or four working days of its own

   Board members answer between two other things. A weekend in the middle is worth half a day, no more: ask on a Monday and you have answers by Thursday.

4. 4

   Announce your closing date when you share the link

   Pollendar has no closing feature, so the deadline is yours to state: put it in the poll title or in the message that carries the link, and stop counting after it.

Run those three numbers together and the arithmetic is honest: four days of polling plus fifteen days of notice means the earliest board meeting you can schedule today is about three weeks out. Proposing dates inside that window only produces a date you then cannot convene.

A board meeting is ninety minutes, not an afternoon. Asking a director whether they are free on 12 November gets you a yes that evaporates the moment you announce 09:00. Propose the hours, not the days, and the answers mean something.

Three candidate days with two slots each (an early morning and an early evening) gives six rows and asks very little of anyone. It also exposes the split you would otherwise argue about for a week: the directors who hold day jobs tick the evenings, the retired members tick the mornings, and the table shows you which half of the board you are choosing between.

Every board has one. They answer email from a phone, at the weekend, and they are not going to register anywhere to tell you they are free on a Thursday. That is a real constraint, and it rules out most of what gets proposed in meetings.

• Nobody signs up to vote. A participant opens the link, gives a name, ticks the rows and closes the tab. An email address is only asked for if you turned on the option to collect one when creating the poll.
• You do not need an account either. Signing in with Google is optional and does one thing: it lets you find your own polls again from another device. Keep your admin link and you can skip it.
• One link, however you send it. Paste it into the email you were already writing, or send the invitations from the poll itself. Both end up in the same results table.
• Directors abroad see their own clock. Hours are converted for each reader, so a board member in Montreal votes on 18:00 Paris time without doing the subtraction. More on that in scheduling a meeting across time zones.

Rows stay in calendar order, so you keep your bearings. The highlight is what points: green marks a slot every single voter said yes to, amber the next best one after it, or the leading row when no slot is unanimous. On a board, that second case is the normal one.

Nothing is unanimous here, and the poll is still finished. The Thursday slot has five yeses out of six, so it clears a quorum of four with one to spare: exactly the margin to aim for. The Tuesday slot has four yeses and a maybe, which is the same meeting resting on one person reading their calendar correctly. A “maybe” counts as neither a yes nor a no, and neither does a director who has not answered: do not read an empty cell as an objection, and do not read it as consent.

Add to calendar sits on the highlighted rows, in iCalendar (.ics), Google Calendar or Outlook Web. If you asked participants for their email when you created the poll, the calendar event can invite the members who said yes, which saves you retyping six addresses.

The poll did its job the moment the row went amber. Everything that gives the meeting legal weight comes after, and it is worth doing in one pass rather than in six replies to a thread.

• Send the convening notice once. Date, time, place or meeting link, and the agenda with the resolutions to be voted on. This is the document that commits people, and the one that gets quoted if a decision is challenged later.
• Say what you are doing about the people who said no. One line is enough: whether you expect a proxy, a written vote, or simply their absence. Silence is what produces a surprise on the day.
• Keep the poll link in the file. It is a dated record of who was asked and what each person answered, which answers the question “why this date and not another” without a search through anyone’s inbox.
• Record attendance separately. Quorum is counted in the room, from the attendance sheet or the connection log. The minutes name who was present; the poll only ever named who thought they would be.