Automate creating minutes from board meetings

The challenge: Anyone who has been roped into being secretary for an HOA, community group or not-for-profit knows what a burden publishing minutes is without a professional admin. Plus, if you are busy recording what everyone else is saying you can’t participate yourself. Dissatisfaction on my own HOA prompted me to search out a low cost, fairly low-tech way to automate creating minutes. Please let me know how this works for you and any modifications you’ve made.

The tech: Since our members and management are pretty tech phobic, I built this assuming a single Zoom Pro account where members join as guests. After the meeting I use Co-pilot in my personal subscription of M365/Word to produce the minutes. We still have a human review the output especially for attendance, but have found that the quality of the output is impressive.

How to do it:

  1. Start the meeting in Zoom Pro and confirm that AI Companion is on. Alert participants that they are being recorded. Best practice is to ask each participant to introduce him or herself by first and last name.

  2. At the end of the meeting Zoom will automatically create a summary and a list of to-dos. It’s very useful, but it’s not in the format required for minutes.

  3. After the meeting, use Zoom.com to retrieve the transcript. (Inexplicably it isn’t available via the Zoom Workplace app.) Open the agenda in Word and paste the transcript below the agenda in the same file. Edit the prompt below to include the name of your organization, its officers and other things specific to your group. Open Co-pilot and paste your version of the prompt into the dialogue box. Hit enter and in a few minutes Co-pilot will display a credible version of minutes. Copy and paste it into a new Word file.

  4. Remember to have a human read and if needed correct the AI generated minutes. They will also want to remove extra spaces and numbers which were links from the generated text to the original transcript. If someone joined the Zoom meeting under a different name (eg: Mary’s iPhone) the editor can use the transcript to identify them and use search and replace in Word to correct any errors.

The prompt:

Assume you are the assistant to the secretary of _____ and you need to produce minutes of the meeting following the same format as the agenda. This file includes the agenda at the top and the transcript of the meeting below it.

For each of the headings on the agenda please use the transcript to produce a summary of what was said and any decisions that were made. If there was a motion report the text of the motion including who made it, who seconded it, and the result of the vote. Please list the time of calling the meeting to order and the time it was adjourned.

Under the section for attendance please use first and last names to report which board members and staff were present and which were absent. Then list the other people who were present.

______Board members:

President:

Vice President:

Treasurer:

Secretary:

Other board members:

Staff: