Use This Tool to Create a Stress-Free Annual General Meeting Agenda

There might be nothing more hair-raising in annual meeting planning than the moment you spot an agenda conflict—on a stack of already-printed agendas.  If only you’d seen the error earlier, there would be no need to reprint everything for one last-minute change! Honestly, it’s sometimes easier at that point to use a marker and fix the agendas by hand.

Conflicts happen; it’s an often unavoidable part of the annual meeting planning process. Presenters drop out, room changes are requested for tech reasons, and the sessions end up shuffled a bit.  Luckily, there are better ways to alleviate stress in your annual general meeting agenda than breaking out a sharpie.

Try An Online Schedule Builder

Today’s conference planning software is intelligent, well-integrated, and often lives on the cloud. Our OpenWater submission management system, for example, is a cloud-based software with an online portal.  It also has single-sign-on functionality, so you can log in with a familiar credential—perhaps the same one you use for your AMS.

This style of software has tons of advantages for your annual general meeting agenda:

• Check for schedule and session conflicts automatically, before they become an issue
• Access it from anywhere, on any device, to make last-minute changes
• Integrate your agenda with a mobile event app for real-time updating

The attendees of your annual general meeting will appreciate a digital, online schedule just as much as your staff. By and large, attendees want mobile access to a convenient event app that can show them their schedule and let them preview abstracts or session descriptions. It’s much easier to build out these apps when you can either use them to create the agenda in the first place or feed the finished agenda into the app from compatible conference scheduling software.

OpenWater feeds your data smoothly through the whole agenda creation process.

• First, it collects presenter abstracts and/or attendee registrations through a customizable online form builder
• Second, you can run collected proposals through a review process of your own design (unlimited rounds of review, custom scoring rubrics)
• Third, you’ll be able to create sessions and arrange them in a drag-and-drop visual scheduler.  Even if your annual general meeting agenda doesn’t include abstract sessions, you’ll be able to set and adjust the schedule (dates, times, and room numbers) in a simple visual grid.
• Finally, the complete agenda can be fed out to event apps (like Core-apps) with convenient APIs. Session summaries can also be shared in an online gallery, viewable on your website.

There’s less stress and record-keeping when one software handles the whole process of collecting, organizing, and sharing materials with your attendees. You could build your annual general meeting agenda with a pre-populated session list drawn from the accepted proposals, share it online without any printing expenses, then update it the same day as the meeting, so attendees always have an accurate schedule in the palms of their hands—no matter what changes at the last minute.

David Lincoln

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