You didn’t get active in an association to do a lot of paperwork. You probably did it to cultivate an interest you’re passionate about, or to have something social with others. But alas, if you sit on board work, as treasurer, or do you process member information, creating, categorizing, and handling documents is also part of your association work. Depending on the size of the association, how wide it embraces and how many projects it has run, large and small, important and trivial amounts of paperwork follow on top of the association’s activities. It may well end up being completely unmanageable in the end, and to give you an overview of this tedious process and help you through the documentary jungle, here are 4 tips for handling documents in your association.
Keep the association files on a drive, not your hard drive
First of all, please be aware that in an association it is a great help for members to be able to access all relevant papers in a single place. For this reason, leave the same thing as leaving folders of association documents on your own computer and create a shared drive that all members can access with a link. Dropbox and Google Drive are two great solutions for putting all relevant papers forward to the association’s members.
Both services allow you to determine editing rights for individual folders — that is, who can edit the contents of a folder and who can see it. One advantage of Google Drive is its placement of folders in rows and columns, unlike Dropbox, where all the folders are on a vertical string, so on Dropbox with many folders, you often have to scroll far to find a specific folder. With its more manageable location, Google Drive allows you to have easily accessible team folders with all relevant papers for each team, to the cashier, or to the board, so they can quickly click on the folders and documents that are relevant to them. This blogpost provides four tips on better handling documents.
Create fixed rules for naming folders and files
Many tend to name documents arbitrarily when they have just decided that they want to create a new document. It then ends up with a chaos of files where it is impossible to know which documents are what. One solution here is to introduce firm rules on how documents are named on the drive, which all association members must follow. For example, have a rule that all documents related to a particular project must be named with the project in mind, e.g. “BMeetingMarts2019Appendix” or “Football2019RulesFairFootball”, where “BMeetingMarts2019” and “Football2019” are the beginnings that tell which project the documents relate to and that they should be added in respectively. The Football 2019 folder and the directory for the March 2019 board meeting. Avoid using floaters (where you put “_” at the beginning of that file name) to push up folders or documents in Dropbox, Google Drive, or on your own computer’s list of documents. It’s a tinkering solution that might make it easy to find a folder you often have in your hands right now, but in the long run it creates a mess in your documents, because if you push everything forward in the row, there’s no row anymore, and then it doesn’t matter.
Sort in littered personal data
Now that you are well in the process of getting a handle on the papers in your association, you can give yourself a small extra task: Clean up the personal data that is floating on your computer or on the drive you use in your association.
Since May 2018, all associations have been in new waters with the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation. From the fact that associations were not allowed to store certain information that was private, they must not initially store any information about their members that has nothing to do with the work of the members in the association. It is really hard to be hit on the fact that you do not have a clear overview of what information lies where and what one’s association stores of information about its members. So pay in the association where you throw personal data and that it is only in the folders that you have any personal data lying around.
If you are unsure what information you should be aware of, please read some of my Association’s blog posts about the Gdpr.
Make it a habit – otherwise it’s pointless
Switching over to a new way of doing paperwork and handling documents requires persistence. It has to become a habit before it works, and it only becomes a habit when you consistently do so. If you don’t put your effort into making it a habit, but have a more relaxed relationship with your naming of folders and files, or whether you store things on your own hard drive or on a drive on the web, it becomes more the rule than the exception that you work systematically. You can make it easier for yourself to switch to the new habit by separating all processing of files in the association from the communication between the association members, so that you do not send messages into circulation in the same place as you drop your documents.
Use a drive for documents and use another solution for communication, such as the Wiandi app.
Author:
Journalism students at the Danish School of Media and Journalism. Blogger at Wiandi.