8 Reasons Your Committee Should Go Digital.

Memberships? Check. Finances? Check. Communications? Check. Archives? Check. Ready to hand over to the next generation? Double check ✔︎ ✔.

Watch your team excel in these areas, without a spreadsheet. (ha Excel)

Finish Routine Tasks Automatically. While a switch from analogue and manual processes to digital automation may feel daunting, it’s a rewarding decision as it’ll give your team more free time whilst still ticking off all of your tasks.

Now that’s ace.

So what can digital do for you?

1. Increased access. Hello working from anywhere. With an online platform your committee team is automatically reminded of their tasks before they are due. They can also check their to dos and tick them off on the fly. Concerns and ideas don’t need a formal meeting to be resolved, but can be shared swiftly between all concerned members.

2. Instant communication. This one’s a given. With smartphones, laptops, desktops and tablets, communication has become easier and more efficient than ever. Meetings can be scheduled and planned effortlessly. Additions to agendas and corrections to minutes are now updated and communicated to the team in real-time. Create events, receive and reconcile payments for ticketing and memberships, all digitally and immediately.

3. Greater insights into team progress. A great perk of digital is the ability to collect and analyse data to ensure that your team is making the right choices and moving in the right direction.

Data settles disputes.

Why spend fifteen minutes discussing whether you ought to proceed in one way or another when the data can speak for itself.

TidyHQ lets you track, analyse and store all the important data from your team’s activity, which helps improve your impact on the team you govern. After a while you might even wonder how you ever ran your team without it.

4. Ditch the paperwork to improve your archiving. Goodbye three-ring binders. Hello digital archives. By managing your team’s affairs the old-school way ( paper format and individually saved (and altered) documents on computers), paperwork can often become cryptic, cluttered, or even misplaced.

In turn this clutter can either result in a lot of work for the current (or future) committee, or it can lead to an overall lack of transparency. This is not only a symptom of a poorly run organisation or team, but can lead to serious issues such as embezzlement or mismanagement.

By managing all of your team’s affairs online, archiving is all but automated. Your contacts are stored and updated while meeting minutes are stored automatically. Finances are available and easily accessible to the committee. Memberships are paid and updated instantly and paper free, yet remain recorded and traceable. Give your team better governance without all the work.

5. Greater transparency, effortlessly. Transparency is the committee management buzzword for a reason.

With your team’s financial records, your meeting minutes and communication archived digitally for the future, transparency becomes a no-brainer. No more dogs eating receipts or coffee spills on financial records, going digital means that your papers are always safe where you left them.

Not only does transparency seriously reduce the chances of embezzlement and incorrect money handling (both of which according to the New York Times is a surprisingly big issue for youth sport committees). Transparency also improves team morale, inspires greater engagement and ensures easier handovers to future committees.

6. Easier handovers. With your archives, memberships, contacts, financial records and everything else your team requires on a single digital platform, the handover from one committee generation to the next becomes much simpler.

Reduce the work while avoiding the confusion and frustration many teams face with cluttered papers and finances. Instead, committee roles can be transferred at the click of a button and the new committee superstars are ready to carry the team torch into the future.

7. Increased participation becomes a natural consequence of having a digital committee space. Committee members are invited to meetings with attached meeting agendas and receive tasks and updates as soon as they are issued.

In turn they can offer helpful advice or changes which improves your committee’s happiness and productivity.

8. Tracking your successes and shortcomings. So… you think you’re doing well. Or perhaps you think your team is performing below its ability. But to what extent?

By keeping all of your team’s affairs on a digital platform you effortlessly track and store your data from which you can see long term patterns.

Not only is this good for a pat on the back or a necessary call to action, but it can let your committee make long term strategies for the future, informed by both past successes and shortcomings.

There are many roads to Rome. The digital one is merely the highway.