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Governance

Officers, committees, meetings and volunteer hours — who holds which office, who chairs what, when the board last met, and how many hours your volunteers gave this year.

These screens are under Meetings & Board (officers, committees, meetings) and Volunteers (roster, hours, opportunities) in the sidebar.

What you can do

  • List your officers and board members, and show them on your website automatically.
  • Keep a list of committees with their chairs, and assign members to them.
  • Give each committee chair a My Committee screen covering just their committees.
  • Record board, membership and committee meetings, with attendance, notes, and links to the agenda and minutes.
  • Track volunteer hours — logged by hand, or automatically when members answer research questions or work on research cases.

Officers

Meetings & Board → Officers. Under Officers & Board, click Add Officer: find the member, type the position title ("President", "Treasurer"), and optionally a start and end date. Leave the end date blank for an ongoing position. Set an officer to Inactive when their term ends to keep the history.

Committees

Meetings & Board → Committees → Add Committee. Name, an optional description, the chair, a sort order (lower numbers first), and Active — inactive committees drop out of the lists and dropdowns.

To put members on a committee, go to Meetings & Board → Officers, scroll to Committees, and click Add Committee Assignment: find the member, choose the committee, and type their role in it ("Member", "Vice-Chair"). The committee's chair is set on the committee itself.

Showing officers and committees on your website

New sites get a Leadership page that lists both, and keeps itself current as you change them. On another page, put [societypress_officers] where the officers should go and [societypress_committees] for the committees. Officers show with their position; committees show with their chair.

Committee chairs

Anyone set as a committee's chair gets Meetings & Board → My Committee when they sign in. It covers just their committees: upcoming meetings and events, open volunteer opportunities and waitlisted sign-ups, recent minutes, and buttons to Record a Meeting, Add an Event or Post a Volunteer Opportunity. Someone who chairs two committees sees both.

There's no separate role to assign. Chair a committee and the screen appears; stop chairing it and it goes away. Chairs can record meetings only for committees they chair.

Meetings & minutes

Meetings & Board → Meetings & Minutes → Record a Meeting.

  • Meeting Type — Board, Membership (general meeting), or Committee. A committee meeting also needs its committee.
  • Title and Meeting Date, Location.
  • Attendance — a count, a list of names, or both.
  • Agenda URL and Minutes URL — upload the file under Website → Files, then paste its address here.
  • Inline Notes — a summary, or the full minutes.
  • Visibility — Public, Members only, or Committee only.

Meetings are kept in the admin for your records and for chairs' dashboards; there is no public page listing them yet, so the Visibility setting doesn't show them anywhere today. Minutes you want members to read belong in Documents, which has members-only access and a Month & year layout made for minutes.

Volunteer hours

Volunteers → Volunteer Hours shows every hour logged, with this year's total and the number of active volunteers at the top.

To log hours by hand, use Log Hours: member, activity ("Library shelving"), an optional committee, hours and date.

Some hours log themselves:

  • Research Help answers — a member answering a question says how long it took, and that time is added.
  • Paid Research cases — time a researcher records on a case is added.

Signing up for a volunteer opportunity does not log hours; add them afterwards.

Export CSV downloads every entry — name, activity, committee, hours and date. For a year's total for a grant report or Form 990, filter the date column in your spreadsheet and sum the hours.

Members can see their own hours for the year on a page with the My Volunteer Hours widget (or [sp_my_volunteer_hours]), broken down by kind of work. The Volunteer Stats widget shows the society's total hours, active volunteers and top contributors.

If something looks wrong

A chair can't see My Committee. Check the committee is Active and that the right person is picked as its chair.

A member isn't showing as on a committee. Check their assignment under Meetings & Board → Officers → Committees is Active. An assignment saved before committees were chosen from a list may show "(not a current committee)" — pick the right committee and save.

The Leadership page shows bracketed placeholder text. Updating to 1.5.58 or later replaces it with the live lists, as long as you haven't rewritten that text yourself. If you have, put [societypress_officers] and [societypress_committees] back where you want them.

A committee is missing from dropdowns. It's marked inactive. Edit it and tick Active.