How to Prepare for a Meeting Using Stormboard

Let’s be honest, setting up and preparing for a meeting can be a huge chore.

You know the drill— you end up shuffling through your notes or searching through emails for meeting minutes from the last time your team met that are nowhere to be found.

When you do finally track down what you are looking for, the notes are in someone else’s handwriting (making them hard to read), or there is no context to them, so it isn’t clear where the meeting left off.

Once you’ve finally organized all the material for the meeting, you send it out via a mass email that your team either doesn’t open — or doesn’t bother reading — leaving them unprepared.

On the day of the meeting, you try and arrive to the meeting space early (only possible if the room isn’t in use) to start transferring your prepared material from a notebook or computer onto sticky notes or a whiteboard.

You only have a short amount of time to get everything set up — the whiteboard, projector, presentation materials, etc., which can end up eating up actual meeting time.

Members of your team who missed your email, or weren’t notified of the meeting, might be late (or not show up at all). And there is always the need to choose someone to take meeting minutes, which can be stressful because they have to keep track of a lot of information quickly with not much time to edit or add details in. This often results in hard to read minutes that sometimes have missing information or lack context.

Why do we keep setting up meetings like this when there is a much easier way?!

Prepping for a Meeting Using Stormboard

Preparing for a meeting using Stormboard not only saves you time but also ensures that everyone on your team is getting the information they need so that your meeting is intentional and actually gets things done.

Set the Agenda

To prep for your meeting, open a new or existing Storm (what we call your digital workspace), and set the agenda by either customizing the sections of your template to relate to each stage of the meeting, dropping the agenda onto a sticky note as a file, or writing down a high-level overview of what needs to be accomplished on a text note.

Get Your Team on The Same Page

If you need your team to do some pre-reading beforehand, simply add your files, links, or even videos to your meeting space, and share the Storm with each participant. Notes, questions, and files won’t get lost in email chains, because everything is in one, easy-to-access place.

They can even leave questions or comments on the material, starting the conversation before the meeting even begins.

You can also get your team’s attention by sending them a message via the Chat Tab or tagging individuals in a comment or message to remind them of any preparation they need to do.

For example, you can have your team read supporting material and comment on a sticky note once they have completed it to let you know that it’s been viewed and read over. Or, you can have your team pre-brainstorm some ideas for a product or project so that the conversation is already happening before you even meet in person!

Don’t Worry About Supplies

Forget about hauling around equipment to and from meeting rooms and tediously drawing and writing on physical whiteboards. With Stormboard, everything is digital and can be accessed at the touch of a button.

The only equipment that you and your team need to meet is a device like the Microsoft Surface Hub, a computer, a tablet, or a mobile device (perfect if you have distributed or remote team members!).

Create Meeting Minutes Instantly

Instead of having to pick someone to write meeting minutes, everything that happens in your meeting is automatically saved and can be instantly exported to an editable Microsoft Word Document.

Keep Multiple Teams Organized

If you are organizing a large meeting with multiple teams involved, Stormboard has an index card feature that allows you to organize people and topics into their own Sub-Storms. This provides heightened organization and eliminates any confusion. No one will have to deal with information that they don’t need!

Get Started

Ready to set up a meeting like a pro? Sign up for Stormboard now, or click here to request a demo!

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