When efficiency and safety go hand in hand

Back in 2022, Holtålen municipality in Norway replaced their manual meeting processes with the meeting tools FirstAgenda Prepare and FirstAgenda Live . In addition to making it significantly easier to distribute their meeting materials, they have also been able to consolidate the preparation, execution and post-processing of their meetings in one place - and with a direct integration to their EDRMS system, Elements. 

In 2022, Holtålen said goodbye to piles of emails with meeting documents and welcomed the digital meeting tools FirstAgenda Prepare and FirstAgenda Live . 

For a long time, they had used their website to publish their meeting material. However, this posed a number of challenges regarding closed meeting material, as it could not simply be made freely available. At the same time, Norwegian law prohibits the distribution of closed meeting material via email, which according to Katrine Ustad, Head of Community Services in Holtålen Municipality, was one of the reasons they discovered FirstAgenda Prepare . 

With FirstAgenda Prepare , we only have to deal with one system in relation to meeting preparation, and with access control, we can easily handle closed meeting material without worrying about security. At the same time, the publishing and distribution of the meeting material has become significantly more manageable, which makes the actual meeting preparation easier - both for the administrative staff and for the politicians." 

In FirstAgenda Prepare , politicians have their agendas and related meeting documents in one place. Here they can use the various preparation tools such as notes, markups and shared comments, which are automatically saved in the system. According to Katrine Ustad, this gives the political meeting participants peace of mind as they always have their material at hand. 

"When we release the agendas, meeting participants automatically receive a notification that the agenda is ready. They can then start preparing, taking notes and sharing comments with each other. This gives them great peace of mind, as they always have their notes saved in the system and helps ensure that meeting participants are always well-prepared for meetings"

- Katrine Ustad

In terms of administrative work, Assistant Municipal Director, Aagoth Johanne Moe, recognizes that the preparation processes leading up to the meetings have become much easier to manage. Among other things, she highlights the centralized access control in the solution as an advantage   

"When you are in charge of the administrative overview, it is a great advantage that we can control access centrally in the organization. This way, we always have a full overview of our users, who has access to what and who might need to be invited to meetings." 

In addition to implementing FirstAgenda Prepare for meeting preparation, Holtålen Municipality also implemented FirstAgenda Live at the same time. FirstAgenda Live is targeted at the meeting itself and, with its seamless integration to FirstAgenda Prepare , allows users to be imported automatically.

Here, users can submit proposals in advance, sign up for the speaker list and participate in voting, while the administration has a full overview throughout the meeting and can subsequently download the complete meeting minutes as a PDF - functions that, according to Aagoth Johanne Moe, streamline the administrative work before, during and after the meeting. 

"Before we had FirstAgenda Live , I used to get the various politicians' proposals on slips of paper and then had to enter them manually. Now the politicians enter their proposals themselves in FirstAgenda Live , which is a huge time saver."

Katrine Ustad is also happy with the event management module, FirstAgenda Live . She emphasizes the clarity of the solution, which benefits both the administration and the meeting participants, but also the audience. 

"The overview of the list of speakers and votes is super clear. This makes it easy to keep track of the speakers and at the same time follow the results of the votes. The big screen display is also great here, as the audience also gets a full overview of the proposals and votes. At the same time, it's great that the audience can see how the politicians have voted."

- Katrine Ustad

When a municipality has to implement three tools - Elements, FirstAgenda Prepare and FirstAgenda Live , it can be a big administrative task. Nevertheless, Holtålen Municipality experienced a smooth implementation and, according to Katrine Ustad, was up and running quickly. 

"The implementation of the solution went really well. Maria from FirstAgenda helped us get off to a good start with training in the administration part, and then we had a specialist consultant from Sikri with experience of the system who did a joint training session with our politicians. The politicians were then allowed to log in themselves and quickly became self-sufficient in the solution." 

Although both the administrative staff and the political meeting participants quickly made friends with the solution, there are still occasional challenges. Here, Holtålen Municipality generally experiences good customer service and communication, whether it is their primary contact Maria or the support at FirstAgenda that they are in contact with

"Our overall perception of FirstAgenda as a supplier is good - both in terms of their support department, but also our communication with our contact person, Maria. We can always write or call and always get a quick and useful answer."