The North Carolina Town Clerk Who Turned Eight-Hour Meetings Into 45-Minute Turnarounds

Heather Minor is the person other clerks call when they want to know how to run their office. As Town Clerk and Public relations director for the Town of Longview, North Carolina, her job is availability to her town, her board, and her community. The work doesn't stop when the meeting ends.  

For years, one task made that harder than it needed to be.

The recurring task that made everything harder

Meeting minutes are not optional. In North Carolina, they're legally required public record. For Heather, producing them meant hours of manual transcription after every council meeting.

Heather said, "My process before was literally take this same recorder, plug it into my computer, turn on the player in the computer, play a snippet, pause it, type, play a snippet, [pause] it. So if we had a short meeting, it might've taken two to three hours to do."

This was tedious for normal shorter council meetings, but it turned into a multi-day affair for the town's annual budget retreat. It was a full-day, eight-hour session. It was a multi-day project she'd push to the deadline every time. The minutes always ran long too. She remembers one time it was 58 per meeting. The task bled into days she didn't have.

Days turned into minutes

When Heather started using ClerkMinutes, the recorder still came to every meeting. The difference is what happened after. She uploads the audio and her agenda index to her profile. The software generates structured, readable minutes that match the agenda she submitted.

The budget retreat that used to take multiple days now takes 45 minutes. Standard meetings take often take 20 minutes, start to finish.

Her board even reads the minutes now, which they never did before.

"The Tuesday following the meetings, I come in, plug my recorder in, and I do the meeting minutes the next day," she says. "I'm doing all of this immediately as opposed to putting it off so that I can just get it done and be done with it. And that's one thing I don't have to worry about because I know it's already taken care of.” 

Getting an issue resolved at 4:57 on a Friday

The time savings are one part of it. The support is the other.

"Anytime I've had any sort of issue, it's a same day response. And sometimes nine out of 10 times I will even say same hour response," says Heather. "And then they go one step further and they're like, 'Hey, I know you've got this issue going on. We went ahead and generated these minutes for you. Take a look at them. Let me know if you need me to change anything while we're working on your profile." 

In fact, one rare incident stuck out more than most. Last year, a minutes generation issue surfaced two days before a Monday council meeting. Sections weren't matching the recording. Items were appearing that weren't there. Heather emailed Dustin, the company's founder, because she wasn't sure who else to reach.

"I was freaking out," she said. " It was a Friday. Our meeting was Monday. I had probably put off doing the minutes till the last minute, literally. And I mean, he responded within less than 10 minutes on a Friday, and that's the president of the company."

He flagged a temporary AI provider outage, CC'd his team, and had new minutes generated for her review before the weekend ended.

The clerk other clerks call

"I really liked that they truly valued my opinion in the reviews that I did of the minutes, and then they took the suggestions that I would make to heart and actually made those changes to make our lives easier,” Heather says.   

She recommends ClerkMinutes often. Clerks from across North Carolina and across the country call her to ask about her process. She talks through it in depth, then follows up with a written email covering everything she went over.

Her case comes down to the same thing every time.

"One thing you'll know about the majority of clerks is time is not our friend. We don't have a lot of it, and this is one of the most daunting tasks that we do."