How Can Meeting Minutes Be Stored?

Administrative assistants and club secretaries can store meeting minutes in a variety of ways. It is best to have both an electronic and a hard copy so that one can serve as a back-up for the other should one copy be lost or inadvertently ruined.

Save meeting minutes on your computer in the same location when your organization has a meeting. Give it a similar file name each time so that it is easy to locate the exact file you need in the future. For example, you might title nonprofit board meeting minutes “Board_Minutes_21 April 2011,” and then the next month save it as “Board_Minutes_20 May 2011.” If you have different kinds of meetings to keep track of minutes for, save each in a different folder. One might be labeled “Board Meetings” and another “Staff Meetings,” both of which are kept in a “Meetings” folder on your computer.

Save your minutes using an online document storage service. These services typically charge a fee, but if your computer or server goes down, you can access the Internet from another location and retrieve your files.

Online storage companies may offer a free trial period for you to test their product. LiveDrive, for example, offers a two-week free trial and charges $6.95 per month for one computer back up and $16.95 per month for up to three computers to back up online, as of April 2011. Both plans have unlimited bandwidth (amount you can upload and download). Elephant Drive has a 15-day free trial. It offers an individual plan with up to 100 GB of storage for 2 computers for $9.95 per month or $99.50 per year. The family plan covers up to five devices, has up to 500 GB of storage for $19.95 per month, or $199.50 per year.

Print out a copy of the meeting minutes. Put dividers labeled with the month and year of the meetings in a binder. Insert the copy of the minutes into the correct month and year section. As your binders fill up, label the spine with the year of the minutes within, and start a new binder. Consider keeping two hard copies of your meeting minutes stored in two locations in case something happens to one of them.