Trustee meeting packs

A trustee meeting pack is the same thing as a company board pack: one document in agenda order, with a contents page and page numbers. The difference is who reads it. Trustees are usually unpaid and part-time, often from outside the charity’s field, and jointly responsible for decisions they might spend eight hours a year discussing.

So the pack has to work for someone who last thought about the charity three months ago, is reading on a train, and doesn’t carry the background the staff team takes for granted.

What the regulator expects

The Charity Commission’s guidance for trustees in England and Wales, The essential trustee (CC3), says trustees must act in the charity’s best interests, manage its resources responsibly, and act with reasonable care and skill. It doesn’t prescribe a format for meeting papers. In practice, though, trustees need to be able to show a decision was properly made: they had the relevant information, they considered it, and any conflict of interest was declared and dealt with.

The pack is your evidence for the first of those. If a decision is questioned two years later, people will ask what the trustees were given, and the answer is whatever was in the pack. That’s a good argument for one archived, page-numbered file over eleven attachments to an email nobody kept.

Charities registered in Scotland are regulated by OSCR, and those in Northern Ireland by the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland. Each publishes its own trustee guidance. The voluntary Charity Governance Code covers good practice on board effectiveness and is worth reading too. None of this is legal advice: what follows is common practice, not a requirement.

The order a trustee pack usually runs in

• Agenda, which doubles as the contents page, with the page each paper starts on.
• Apologies and declarations of interest. On a charity board this matters. Put it at the top, so a trustee who is also a supplier, a beneficiary’s parent or a trustee of a partner charity declares it before the item comes up.
• Minutes of the previous meeting, for approval as an accurate record.
• Matters arising and the action log. With months between meetings, this is essential. An action can quietly vanish in that time.
• Chair’s and chief executive’s report. If the charity has no paid staff, the chair’s report is the whole story.
• Finance. Management accounts against budget and the cash position. For a charity, also the split between restricted and unrestricted funds, and reserves against the reserves policy. A charity can be solvent overall and still unable to pay its rent because the money is restricted.
• Fundraising and grants. Applications in, decisions back, the pipeline, and any grant conditions the board is being asked to accept.
• Safeguarding. If the charity works with children or adults at risk, make it a standing item, even when there’s nothing to report. A nil report is still a report, and the minutes should show the question was asked.
• Risk register: reviewed, not just reprinted, with the trend since the last review.
• Policies for approval. Charities have a lot of policies that need re-approving. Bring them on a rota so they don’t all land at once.
• Papers for decision, each with the recommendation up front and the proposed resolution at the end, worded so the minutes can quote it.
• Any other business, and the date of the next meeting.

Three things that are different from a company board

Send it earlier

There’s no fixed rule, though your governing document may set a notice period, and that comes first. Company boards, whose directors read papers as part of the job, often aim for five clear working days. For volunteers, a week is more realistic: they have to fit the reading around their own working week. A pack that lands the night before gets skimmed, and the meeting spends its first half hour going over what the papers already said.

Assume it is read on a tablet

Plenty of trustees read papers on the move, on a tablet or phone. That’s where bookmarks earn their keep. A trustee who can tap straight to the finance report is far more likely to read it than one scrolling through ninety pages to find it.

Confidentiality is a real constraint, not a label

Trustee papers often cover safeguarding cases, individual beneficiaries, staff and grievance issues, and grant decisions that haven’t been announced. Before you put papers like that through an online tool, find out whether it uploads them and what happens to them afterwards.

Board Pack Factory builds the pack in your own browser. Nothing is uploaded, because there’s no server to upload it to. Merging, cover, contents, numbering and bookmarks all happen on your machine.

A checklist before you send it

• Declarations of interest are near the top, before the items they relate to.
• The finance paper shows restricted and unrestricted funds, and reserves against the reserves policy.
• Safeguarding is on the agenda, if the charity’s work calls for it.
• Every paper for decision leads with its recommendation and ends with its resolution.
• The pack is one PDF, with a contents page, page numbers and bookmarks.
• It goes out early enough to be read, and within any notice period that applies.

Assembling it

The mechanics are the same as for any pack, and the ten-step guide walks through doing it by hand. Or add your PDFs here, put them in agenda order, and you’ll get a cover with the charity’s name and meeting date, a contents page with the right page numbers, dividers, continuous page numbers and a bookmark for each paper.

The example pack is for a company board, but a charity pack comes out exactly the same. The free template also has a blank agenda sheet you can use for your next trustees’ meeting.