Writing Effective Meeting Minutes by Satoko. H

Since it is almost like a custom to write a meeting minutes whenever you have a meeting, we are almost unaware of why we make a meeting minute afterward. A meeting minutes, however, is an important step to confirming the decisions that will happen in the future. If you do not make a meeting minute after you had a meeting, you are going to waste the entire discussion that happened in the meeting.

Remember, basic purposes to write a meeting minutes are
· To serve as an official record of a meeting for the future to take action,
· To remember what should be decided next,
· To share the information with readers who were not in the meeting.
These are all for the next steps to take actions, not to preserve the record permanently.

Though there is no standardized format for minutes of a meeting, effective meeting minutes usually contains the detail of the meeting, a chronological summary of the discussion and reports with the names of the presenters. Also, it includes announcements usually at the end, that call for action to be taken in the future.
An example of minutes of a meeting could look like the one below.




There are lots of free meeting minutes templates and formats online. Microsoft Office Online provides one too.

References:

http://non-profit-governance.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_to_take_meeting_minutes

Dobrin, Sidney I, Christopher J. Keller, Christian R. Weisser. Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2002.