I got the following e-mail from Dee:
I am the Secretary of our neighborhood community association, how long should we retain the minutes. I do not want to keep minutes for many years. Thanks Dee
Hi, Dee. Thanks for your question. You don’t indicate if you are talking about Board minutes or membership meeting minutes. According to every reference I can find for document retention, Board minutes should be kept permanently.
I didn’t find any specific references to membership meeting minutes in any of the research I’ve done.
Non-Profit Document Retention Recommendations
What I did find was a report from 2007 compiled by the Collaborative Electronic Records Project at the Rockefeller Archive Center on record retention for non-profits. This doesn’t only give a sample document retention schedule, it actually talks about categories of records and how long to keep them. With that knowledge, you can look at your membership meeting minutes and decide how long they need to be kept.
Another good document I found talks about setting up a document retention policy. Both of these documents have footnotes and a bibliography to source material, so anyone interested in in-depth information on document retention policies has a good place to start.
I hope this helps, Dee. If you have further questions, just leave a comment and we’ll see if we can get some input from some of the other admins reading this blog.
Similar Posts:
- Ask the Admin: Meeting Minutes Retention
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- 10 Tips for Effective Meeting Minutes
- Setting Up a Filing System Part 2: Active vs. Historical Files
- Is It Safe To Copy Documents
Copyright: Administrative Arts
Ask the Admin: Meeting Minutes Retention
