The situation
Fourteen board members across nine countries. Papers distributed as a zip file five days before each meeting, occasionally superseded by a second zip file two days before. Version confusion was routine, and the secretariat spent the week before every meeting answering the same question: is this the current one?
What changed
The society moved board documents into a restricted area of its main site rather than a separate tool. That decision mattered more than any feature: members already had an account, already knew the address, and did not have to remember a second password.
- One page per meeting, in agenda order, with each item linked to its own paper.
- Documents replaced in place, so the link in the calendar invitation never goes stale.
- Access driven by role, so committee chairs see their own papers without a separate request.
“The measure of success was that nobody mentioned it after the second meeting. It simply stopped being a topic.”
The result
Secretariat time spent on document distribution dropped from roughly two days per meeting cycle to half a day. More usefully, the proportion of board members who had opened the papers before the meeting rose from an estimated half to nearly all — measurable for the first time, because the documents finally lived somewhere that could be measured.
