One of the things that must be done with every chapter is to have chapter meetings throughout the year. Some may look at this as a challenge but in true essence, it’s basic and can lead to greater things. One thing that must be established right off the bat is that there is a difference between a chapter meeting and an event (social, charitable or training). Now can you do both, yes. But sometimes business has to be done to get info out to the membership but also to make sure questions get answered and when you combine multiple things, certain issues get missed. Later we can talk about the social, charitable or training events but for now we’ll go over a “business meeting.”

Set up an agenda.

Many times we forget to establish an agenda and, because of this, meetings go on longer than they should or need to. Side discussions also usually start up and the focus of the original topic gets missed or forgotten. Try to keep your agenda to a reasonable list of discussion topics. Having a list that makes a meeting go on for hours loses your members’ interest and becomes nonproductive.

From your agenda the core portion of your meeting is now established. It’s important to make sure that attendance is taken and someone is taking accurate notes (minutes) and recording votes during the meeting.

Conducting the meeting.

Once the agenda has been properly established, you can start the meeting. A proper “bringing the meeting to order” starts the meeting off well and lets everyone know that business is now being conducted.

Step 1: First, you want to make sure that you review the minutes of the last meeting to bring everyone up to speed on current issues as well as issues that were tabled previously that could be voted on during this meeting.

Step 2: A vote should be taken to approve the previous meeting minutes, which solidifies the past and preps the issues of the current meeting (which should be in your agenda).

Step 3: From here we go into reports from your board. Not all members have to give reports, but certain reports must be vocalized (i.e., financial and membership reports).

Step 4: After these initial steps comes the “body” of the meeting -- where the agenda comes into play. During this time specific subjects are discussed. Some are tabled to the next meeting and some are voted on. This is also called “Old business and new business.” This all depends on the subject and the amount of members you have at your meeting (remember that there needs to be a certain number of members present to vote on issues).

Sometimes meetings can end this way, while others have additional parts attached to them. Items such as new member introductions, information about upcoming events or just information about the next meeting are subjects that can be brought up.

This is, of course, a broad overview of a meeting and one can go further into running a meeting depending on the subject or reason for the meeting.