PRP

To save you time and unnecessary work, Robert’s Rules spells out exactly what needs to go into your minutes. Minutes are important because they’re the only surviving record of what was said and done at a meeting. They can be dry and boring. In fact, it’s probably a good sign if they are! Most importantly, they need to be informative and easy to navigate for whatever the reader needs to know six months from now.

According to Robert's Rules, minutes drafted ahead of time aren’t the official minutes until the members approve them. Today's technology has made its mark on meeting minutes. The secretary can now draft the minutes and easily send copies to the members for them to read before the meeting; then members can come to the meeting prepared with any corrections.

Your bylaws belong to your group, and only your group can decide what they mean. Sure, a parliamentarian can help you understand the technical meaning of a phrase or a section here and there. But when you come across something ambiguous (meaning that there's more than one way to reasonably interpret something), then the question remains to be answered by your organization by a majority vote at a meeting.

Even though it's the nature of meetings to have more said than done, Robert's Rules helps keep things on track by requiring that no discussion be undertaken until somebody proposes an idea for action. It's through motions that everything your group ever accomplishes gets its start. The length of time you discuss something and the ultimate decision your group makes are both based on your members' use and understanding of the nature of the different types of motions, their relationships to each other, and how the different motions are best used as your tools for effective decision-making.

At the foundation of every good meeting is a good meeting plan, or agenda. And Mr. Robert is the man with the plan. Robert's Rules provides your group with a standard order of business, which is simply a sequence for taking up each different class of business in order as follows: Reading and approval of minutes.

If a motion needs to be discussed much more informally or at greater length than is possible in a regular meeting, Robert's Rules allows you to refer the motion to a committee, or perhaps to the executive board of your group by adopting the subsidiary motion to commit. For all but the most simple and direct of motions, everyone's interests may be best served by referring a motion instead of spending a lot of meeting time on discussion.

Under Robert's Rules, the subsidiary motion to lay on the table refers to temporarily setting aside a pending motion (or a series of pending motions) to take care of something else deemed urgent. The motion to lay on the table is less about the business being discussed than about the assembly needing to handle something else immediately.

The motion to amend is perhaps the single most-used of the subsidiary motions allowed by Robert's Rules. You use this motion when you want to change the wording of the motion under consideration. You can use it to make a good idea better or a bad idea more palatable. Amendments are really at the heart of the process of perfecting motions before a final vote, and the importance of understanding the basics of amending can't be overstated.

The motion to Suspend the Rules is often used in conjunction with the motion to do whatever you’re trying to do that’s against your rules. Suppose you want to have a professional parliamentarian preside at one of your meetings at which a divisive issue, like whether to fire your executive director, is on the agenda.