This morning I received notification of the forthcoming AGM of ShareSoc. This will be an on-line only meeting via Zoom which surely contradicts the recommended format for AGMs even if I personally would only attend on-line due to current disabilities.
This morning I did attend the AGM of Kings Arms Yard VCT (KAY) which was also an on-line only meeting via the Lumi platform. It was well managed and all questions were answered. There were no significant issues raised and all votes were passed with large majorities. One point that was raised however was the increasing director remuneration and I voted against the Remuneration Report for that reason.
I do feel however that AGMs should be hybrid meetings not solely on-line unless there are good reasons to do otherwise. Meeting the directors in person and being able to ask questions in an informal setting gives you a lot more information and enables one to better judge whether they are competent.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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Agreed Roger, not to mention the excellent lunches one could enjoy after an Albion vct AGM pre covid !
As a Not for profit with limited resources, is it worth spending the money on the in person part if no one turns up?
Isn’t it a bit unfair to criticise this decision when you already know the reality?
You don’t know how many might physically turn up without asking them first.
Hi Roger. Its actually quite complicated organising a hybrid AGM in which all attendees, physical and virtual, can speak and see/hear others speak and where voting can take place securely and reliably for all physical and virtual attendees. That’s why corporates use specialist and costly platforms such as Lumi rather than Zoom or Teams. We would make a big dent in our annual budget if we were to do the same so we have to be sure that our members think this is a reasonable use of our resources in both time and money. We intend to consult with members when we have all the facts and see if there is sufficient demand for hybrid. Note that our virtual AGMs have been much better attended than our pre-Covid physical ones. Even when we held our last physical AGM at a very busy Mello show we had less than 20 attendees and i doubt we would even get to double figures if we asked members to make a special effort to travel for the AGM alone.