Professions · Nonprofits and charities
Meeting notes for nonprofits and charities.
Charity governance runs on minutes, and they are usually written by a volunteer at eleven at night three days after the meeting.
Trustee board meetings have a formal output that matters: a record of decisions taken, who was present, what was declared and what was delegated. In most small charities that record is produced by whoever agreed to be secretary, from handwritten notes, long after the fact. GetNotes records the meeting openly and drafts minutes with the decisions and action items, which turns the secretary's evening into a review rather than a reconstruction.
The drafting is the part to be honest about. Minutes are a governance document, and a generated draft is exactly that — a draft. Trustees still read it, correct it and approve it at the next meeting, and that human approval step is not optional. What changes is that the person doing the reviewing starts from an accurate account of the discussion instead of trying to remember whether the reserves policy was agreed or merely discussed.
Outside the boardroom, the meetings that shape a charity's work are community consultations, volunteer briefings, funder site visits and partnership discussions, most of them held in a hall or a community centre with no online element at all for a bot to join. Speaker labels and 90+ language support matter here in a very practical way, because consultations with the communities a charity serves frequently do not happen in English.
Where it earns its keep
A trustee meeting with one item that took ninety minutes
A difficult decision about closing a service produced an hour and a half of genuine debate, and the minute needs to record the reasoning as well as the resolution. A transcript plus a drafted set of decisions gives the secretary something faithful to edit rather than a blank page and a bad memory.
A funder visit you cannot afford to misremember
The programme officer asks about outcomes, reporting and the plan if the grant is not renewed. What they said they wanted to see matters for the next application. Recorded and summarised, that visit becomes a reference document rather than a nervous recollection.
A community consultation in a hall on a Tuesday evening
Forty residents, several languages, and views that need to be reported back honestly. Speaker-labelled transcription in the languages people actually spoke means the write-up reflects what the community said, not what the two English speakers at the front said.
How GetNotes works
- Record or upload. Hit record on your phone or laptop in the room — or drop in an audio file you already have. No bot joins anything.
- It writes it down. Every word transcribed, every speaker labelled, in 90+ languages including ones that switch mid-sentence.
- Share the minutes.Summary, decisions, and action items with owners — ready before everyone's back at their desk.
Questions, answered
Can GetNotes write our formal board minutes?
It drafts them. GetNotes produces a summary, the decisions taken and action items with owners, from a full transcript of the meeting. Trustees remain responsible for the accuracy of the approved minutes, so the draft must be reviewed, corrected and formally approved. What it removes is the blank page, not the governance duty.
Do we need to tell attendees we are recording?
Yes, always, and note it in the minutes. Voice recordings of identifiable people are personal data under UK GDPR and similar regimes, so you need a lawful basis and you must be transparent. Announce it at the start of the meeting. GetNotes records openly from a device on the table, with no bot joining anything.
Is $19 a month justifiable for a small charity?
That is a judgement for your trustees, but the comparison is usually a volunteer's unpaid evenings or a paid minute-taker's hourly rate. Pro covers unlimited meetings at up to 3 hours each. The free tier gives you one meeting of up to 30 minutes with no card, which is enough to trial it on a real board meeting.
What about consultations held in community languages?
GetNotes transcribes 90+ languages and handles speakers who switch language mid-sentence, which is the norm at community meetings rather than the exception. That means a consultation held partly in Bengali, Punjabi or Somali produces a usable transcript, so the report back to the board reflects everyone in the room.
Other professions
Your next meeting can write its own minutes.
Record it, and see. Your first meeting is free — thirty minutes, any language, no credit card.
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