USER GUIDE
SimpleAgendas™
SimpleAgendas manages the full lifecycle of your public meetings: agenda creation, staff submissions, approvals, packet assembly, publishing to your website, and minutes.
Before you begin
Three things must be set up before you can run a meeting. Do them in this order:
- Assign roles — until a Clerk is assigned, only site administrators can use SimpleAgendas.
- Add your bodies — the councils, boards, and commissions that hold meetings.
- Build an agenda template — the standing sections your agendas always include.
Open the app from Apps › SimpleAgendas at the top of the admin.
1 Assign roles
Under SimpleAgendas › Settings › Roles, a site administrator decides who plays each part:
- Clerk — owns the workflow and does most of the day-to-day work.
- Department Heads — submit agenda items for their department.
- Approvers — sign off on items before they are placed on an agenda.
- Members — the elected or appointed people who sit on the body.
2 Add your bodies
Under SimpleAgendas › Settings › Bodies, add each body that holds meetings (City Council, Board of Commissioners, Planning Commission, an Authority, and so on).
For each body, pick the public calendar its meetings should appear on — meetings you create show up on your website's calendar automatically. You can also pick a Notification Topic: residents who subscribe to that SimpleSend topic get a text (and an email if on file) when you publish an agenda for that body.
3 Build an agenda template
Under SimpleAgendas › Settings › Agenda Templates, define the standing sections of your agenda (Call to Order, Public Comment, Consent Agenda, Regular Agenda, Adjournment). Set it as the body's default template so every new meeting for that body starts with those sections already in place.
4 Create a meeting
Pick the body, date, and location, and optionally write a rich-text description in the Page Editor. When you save, several things happen automatically: the template's sections are copied in, the staff submission deadline is computed from the body's settings, and a public calendar event is created and kept in sync — including the description, any edits, and cancellations.
5 Build the agenda
Open the Agenda Builder from the meeting page. Type a title into any section to add an item, then drag items up and down to order them — or drag an item into a different section to move it. Numbering updates as you drag, and every change saves automatically.
Click Edit on any item to write its body in the full Page Editor (the same editor you use for website pages). Paste formatted sections straight from Word — headings, lists, links, and tables carry over. Mark items or whole sections as closed session to keep them out of the public record.
6 Attach files to an item
Were you emailed a staff report or exhibit? Drag the file straight from your desktop onto the item's card in the Agenda Builder — it attaches instantly (a paperclip badge shows the count). You can also open Edit on the item and use the Files & Attachments section to upload or remove files.
Each file has an editable name box. Replace the raw upload name (like "36446.pdf") with a clear label such as "Rezoning Staff Report" and click Save. That label is what residents see on the published agenda, so a meaningful name helps people know what each document is at a glance.
Staff submissions and approvals
Department Heads have their own simplified entry point: Document Submissions in the SimpleAgendas menu (it is the only SimpleAgendas item they see). It shows them the meetings open for submissions and their own submissions — nothing else. They send agenda items there with a title, description, recommended action, and file attachments.
You, as the clerk, receive everything in your Submissions inbox. Under Approval Chain you set an ordered list of approvers (for example City Manager, then Clerk). Each submission routes through those approvers in turn — each can approve it to the next person or return it with notes. Once the chain is complete, you place the item on a meeting agenda from the inbox, and its attachments carry onto the agenda item automatically. Leave the chain empty to skip approval and place submissions directly.
7 Generate the agenda PDF
On the meeting page, click Generate Agenda PDF. SimpleAgendas builds a clean, accessibility-ready PDF from your authored content and runs it through automatic accessibility cleanup. Edit the agenda and regenerate any time — the PDF is always rebuilt from your content, so you never open a PDF editor. Closed-session items are left out automatically.
8 Assemble the meeting packet
Once the agenda is finalized and the agenda PDF is generated, click Assemble Packets on the meeting page. SimpleAgendas merges the agenda PDF and each item's PDF attachments, in agenda order, into one packet with a contents page and bookmarks — and builds two of them:
- A public packet (closed-session content left out).
- An executive packet (everything, for the clerk and members only).
Both packets are run through accessibility cleanup automatically. Click Publish Public Packet to place the public one on the meeting's event page for residents to download; the executive packet stays internal.
9 Publish to your public page
Once the agenda is finalized and the agenda PDF is generated, click Publish on the meeting page. SimpleAgendas places the agenda PDF onto the meeting's public event page automatically — no extra upload. If you edit the agenda afterward, regenerate the PDF and re-publish; the public copy is replaced, never duplicated.
When the body has a Notification Topic, a Notify subscribers box on Publish texts and emails your subscribers a link to the agenda. It is checked by default the first time you publish and unchecked on a re-publish, so a cleanup re-push does not message everyone again.
Public comments and speaker sign-ups
Once a meeting's agenda is finalized or published, residents can submit written comments and sign up to speak from public pages on your website. From a meeting, use the Public Engagement & Activity section to copy the resident links and share them.
Comments are held for review. Open Public Comments in the SimpleAgendas menu (or the per-meeting Review Public Comments button), then Approve a comment to publish it on that meeting's public page, or Reject to keep it hidden. Speaker sign-ups appear under Speaker Sign-ups, where you can mark each person called or withdraw a request. You can turn either feature off per body on the Bodies setup screen.
Ordinances and resolutions
Adopted ordinances and resolutions live in their own registry under Ordinances & Resolutions in the SimpleAgendas menu. Each one gets an automatic number for its type and year (for example 2026-001); you can type your own number instead if your city uses a different format. Pick the meeting that adopted it, attach the signed PDF, and set the status (Active, Amended, or Repealed).
A record stays private until you Publish it, or until a meeting that adopts it is published. Published records appear on your public website, where residents can browse and search them by number, year, and keyword.
Next steps
Start with the three setup steps — assign roles, add your bodies, and build a template — then create a test meeting and walk it through the stepper from Build to Publish so the flow is familiar before your first real meeting. On meeting day, use Run Meeting to take the roll, advance through items, and record motions and votes; when the meeting is complete you can generate and publish minutes.
Related guides: see the User Guides index for SimpleSend (used for the notification topics that alert subscribers) and Meetings & Events (the public calendar your meetings appear on).