Council meetings are a vital aspect of the local government process, but many councils struggle to minimise stress and risk around meeting deadlines.
To combat this, local governments can make use of innovative software solutions that can help keep meetings on time and on track, ensuring councils can easily engage with stakeholders and make better, faster decisions for their communities.
Councils often prepare for meetings by gathering an agenda and business papers in simplified formats such as Microsoft Word documents, or hard copy documents. This limits integration and streamlining opportunities, as well as exposing councils to continued risk.
Meeting councillor needs
For more than eleven years, Gympie Regional Council relied on a MS-Word-based platform to create and host its council meetings.
However, as the needs of the Gympie community evolved, the system failed to keep pace and the team needed a more modern, user-friendly solution that would ease the burden on meeting administrators, report writers and councillors. The team at Gympie needed something easier.
“Our system was lacking in functionality and while the demands of our community and council had changed, the platform hadn’t,” a council spokesperson said.
“Council was transitioning to cloud-based-operations, and we wanted to make life easier for meeting staff. Accessibility was also a key factor. We needed a seamless experience.”
That’s when Council discovered Resolve, an automated, web-based meeting management solution that could do all the heavy lifting.
The team at Gympie said Resolve really stood out to Council upon discovering its Online Councillor Portal and Live Streaming capabilities.
“The whole system really offered us a complete ecosystem, which was what we were looking for.”
Streamlined and user-friendly
While meeting management software like Resolve is a powerful tool, many councils are reluctant to make the switch, believing that the difficulty in learning and integrating new systems outweighs the benefits.
While Council had initial reservations about training staff to use the program, they were alleviated once they saw how easy and user-friendly Resolve was to use.
“We were a little concerned about training report writers because it was so different to what they were used to, but the intuitive nature of the platform meant they picked it up quickly.
“While creating reports was a different process, the preview function and ease of making changes has made them so comfortable with the system.
“We really didn’t get a chance to give people much of a warning on the change, but everyone adapted so well, and the feedback was great. It just shows how user-friendly the system is.”
Since adopting Resolve, Council has experienced significant improvements in day-to-day activities, meaning staff can spend more time on other tasks.
“Our meetings are simply much smoother.
“There’s less time going back and forth, and it’s just made us all so much more efficient. We also now use Resolve across a variety of meetings because the flexibility of copying a report across meeting types is just so easy.
“Resolve has enabled our team and executives to make better decisions faster, and at the end of the day those decisions contribute to a better community.”
To find out more, visit redmansolutions.com.au/agenda-and-meeting-management
