Help centre

Running your production

Meetings

Plan meetings, send the agenda and papers, take minutes as the meeting happens, and carry what is open to the next one.

The Meetings area keeps your production and committee meetings in one place, separate from rehearsals. You will find it under Production in the menu on the left.

A meeting moves through four stages: Draft, Scheduled, Held, and Minutes circulated. The page shows what each stage needs.

The meetings list, grouped into In progress, Coming up and Past, each meeting with its status.
Each meeting opens its own page.

Screenshots show the light theme. The app looks the same in dark.

How to create a meeting

  1. Open Meetings and click New meeting.
  2. Type a Title. A Type such as "Production meeting" is optional. It is only a label.
  3. Choose Who can see this? This decides who can read the meeting and its minutes.
  4. Set the Date, the Time, the Length and a Location.
  5. To hold the same meeting every week or every two weeks, choose it under Repeats.
  6. Add the Attendees. Add all HODs and managers and Add everyone in this department save typing.
  7. Choose where the agenda starts: blank, from one of your organisation's templates, or copied from an earlier meeting. Copying takes the items, presenters, time allowances and summaries, never the minutes. A template gives the items, time allowances and summaries, but no presenters, so add those on the meeting's page.
  8. Click Create draft (or Create series for a repeating meeting).
The New meeting form: title, type, who can see it, date, time, length, attendees and where the agenda starts.
Who can see this? decides who can read the meeting and its minutes.

The meeting starts as a Draft. Only the people who run it can see it, and no email goes.

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How to build the agenda

  1. Add each agenda item. Give it a presenter and a time allowance if you want them. The page adds up the time against the meeting's length.
  2. Under each item, write a short summary of what it is about. It goes out with the agenda.
  3. To send papers, open Meeting pack and choose Attach from Documents. Each person who gets the agenda gets a link to each document. They do not need to sign in.

⚠ Some document categories are for managers only, such as Legal & Rights. If you attach one, everyone who gets the agenda can open it. The page names those people before you send anything.

Save an agenda as a template

If you run the same meeting for every show, save its agenda once and reuse it.

  1. On the meeting's page, beside Agenda, choose Save as template.
  2. Give the template a name, then choose Save.

The template belongs to your organisation, so it appears in the New meeting form of every production. It keeps the item titles, time allowances and summaries. It does not keep presenters.

⚠ If you save under a name your organisation already uses, the new agenda replaces the old template. Only the person who saved a template, or a Manager, can replace or delete it. To delete one, choose it in the New meeting form, then choose Delete this template. Meetings already made from it keep their agenda.

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How to invite people and send the agenda

Prompter sends email only when you press a button.

  • Schedule shows the meeting to everyone it is for. It sends nothing.
  • Send invitations emails everyone on the list who has not had an invitation. Each one has a calendar file and links to Accept, Decline or Send apologies. Nobody needs to sign in to reply.
  • Send agenda schedules a draft first, then emails the agenda, the meeting pack and the invitation together. If you send it again, it goes as "Updated agenda".

Each person's reply shows on the meeting page. Replies close when the meeting starts.

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Guests

To invite someone who is not in your production, such as a funder, add them under Guests with a name and an email.

Someone in the production who is outside the meeting's audience, such as somebody in the cast at a managers' meeting, is a guest of this meeting.

For every guest, two boxes decide what they get: Agenda and Minutes. They always get the invitation. Guests cannot open the meeting in Prompter.

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How to run the meeting

  1. Click Start meeting. The page changes to the Run view. If you started too early, Back to scheduled undoes it until anything is minuted.
  2. Mark each person Present, Absent or Apologies.
  3. Review Matters arising: the actions still open from the previous meeting. Give each one a resolution (Done, Carry forward or Cancelled) and an update.
  4. For each agenda item, write what was discussed. You can write several discussions under one item.
  5. Under each discussion, record what came of it:
    • + Decision (Alt+D).
    • + Action (Alt+A), with the person and a due date. The action becomes their task when the minutes go out.
    • Defer (Alt+F), with a reason: Not reached, or your own words.
  6. To add an item nobody planned, such as "Any other business", type it under the agenda.
  7. Before you finish, set the Next meeting date and time.

Alt+N starts the next discussion. Everything saves as you type.

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How to circulate the minutes

Circulate minutes stays off until the meeting is fully resolved. Every agenda item needs a discussion. Every discussion needs a decision, an action or a defer. Every matter arising needs an update. The page lists anything still missing.

When you circulate:

  • The minutes are locked, and every action goes live as a task.
  • Each person gets the minutes and their own actions by email. Someone who is not in the meeting's audience gets only their actions.
  • The minutes are filed as a PDF in Documents ▸ Minutes.
  • If you set a next meeting, Prompter creates it as a draft with the same agenda, and writes each deferred item into it.

Deferred items with nowhere to go wait under Held over. The agenda of any later meeting offers them to you.

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How to correct circulated minutes

A manager can click Reopen to correct. Prompter asks why, and keeps the reason.

When you circulate again, everyone gets "Revised minutes" with the reason at the top. A new version of the PDF is filed. The meeting page lists every version, and anyone who can see the meeting can open them.

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Who can see a meeting

  • Managers see every meeting.
  • HODs and cast and crew see the meetings that apply to them. A department meeting shows to everybody in that department. A meeting for named people shows to the people named on it.
  • Managers only meetings stay private to the team running the production.

For anybody other than a manager or HOD, Meetings is read-only.

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Tasks

Actions from meetings become tasks. You can also create a task directly in Tasks, under Production in the sidebar.

  • Managers see every task on the production.
  • HODs see their own tasks, their department's tasks (anyone with a role in a department they lead), and the tasks they raised. A HOD can assign a task only within their department, or to themselves.
  • Everyone else sees the tasks assigned to them, in My Tasks: a card on their dashboard and a page in the sidebar. They can tick a task done and keep their own notes.

If a task comes from a meeting the assignee cannot see, they see the meeting's title but not its minutes. So write each action so that it makes sense on its own.

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