Our Meeting Engagement Metric

Measuring Board Meeting Preparedness

‘What gets measured gets done!’

A phrase well known to project managers and attributed in various forms to historical figures starting from Rhaticus a 16^th century astronomer, through to modern-day management guru Peter Drucker. Regardless of where the phrase originated, it carries a fundamental truth and can be applied to many aspects of life, beyond project management.

Better meeting management will doubtless result from better meeting measurement. Take pre-meeting preparation for example; anyone who manages meetings could benefit from a few hard metrics relating to how well a meeting has been prepared for by its invitees.

Unfortunately, measurement until recently has been the issue.

Meeting Preparation Metrics Challenges

Until recently, analysis showing which parts of a meeting agenda have been read, by whom and how often, has proved to be a difficult if not impossible technical challenge. The PDF document format is the main reason for this, because most agendas are distributed as a PDF based board pack or meeting book. This type of consolidated agenda PDF is commonly dispatched via email, after which it becomes detached from its sender the moment it leaves the inbox and from then onward becomes untraceable and unauditable.

Benefits of the Electronic Agenda

Fortunately, as the electronic agenda becomes the norm for important meetings, the days of the PDF board pack are numbered.

With the right hooks in place, an electronic agenda allows for the precise measurement of pre-meeting engagement.

Our Meeting Engagement Metric

Meetings organised using BoardCloud - our board meeting management system - have built in hooks, which record actions taken from the building and distribution of the agenda to interactions meeting members have with the agenda contents.

When it comes to invitee pre-meeting engagement, we have access to two vital metrics, which form the core of a meeting engagement score. These metrics are based on ‘opens’ of each specific document in a specific agenda.

For a specific document we can measure:

• When a document was opened
• Who opened the document
• How many times it was opened

Thus, we can monitor and record, who opened the meeting agenda BEFORE the meeting start date, which documents were opened and how many times each document was viewed.

Our calculation of a Meeting Engagement Index uses:

• Unique document opens – which answers the question ‘Has the document been viewed?’
• Total document views – which answers the question ‘How many time has the document been viewed?’
• Total documents attached to the meeting – which answers the question ‘How many documents were there?’

Using these numbers, we then apply a composite weighted average formula that represents a combination of unique views and multiple views. We give more weight to unique views vs. multiple views of the same document in a 70:30 ratio.

The formula we use looks similar to this: