The Board Area: Shared Mailbox, Minutes and Tasks in One Place

Almost every choir has that one address: info@ or board@, where performance enquiries arrive, along with invoices, post from the association and a singer's question about her membership fee. And almost every choir has the same uncertainty: has anybody dealt with this? Who, exactly? Wasn't this discussed at the last meeting? This is precisely where Chorilo's board area comes in. It brings the shared mailbox, the meetings, the minutes and the tasks arising from them together in one place — and makes it visible who is looking after what.

The area is currently in a closed beta. If you would like to try it with your club, write to our support team at support@chorilo.com — we will enable it for your choir, and we are grateful for every piece of feedback from real committee work.

What the board area covers

The board area is a separate, self-contained part of Chorilo. Only those who have explicitly been given the right to it can see it; for all other members it simply does not exist. Inside are four things that belong together in board work anyway: the shared club mailbox, the meetings with their minutes, a register of all decisions and tasks, and an overview of who is responsible for which area of the club. Because everything sits in the same place, nothing has to be copied, forwarded or typed up again.

The shared club mailbox: reading together instead of forwarding one by one

The mailbox is the heart of it. You connect an existing club mailbox — your own club address, GMX, web.de, IONOS or Gmail — and from then on the board sees the club's post together in Chorilo. Not as a forward, and not as a communal account where everyone knows the same password, but as shared work: each person signs in with their own Chorilo account, and you decide per mailbox who may see and use it at all. Anyone not on that list does not see the mailbox. Credentials and contents are stored encrypted, attachments stay with your provider and are only fetched when needed.

That puts an end to the classic forwarding chain. Until now, an enquiry about singing at a June wedding meant: the person with the password reads the message, forwards it to the chair, who forwards it to the librarian, and three weeks later somebody asks the group whether anyone ever replied. In Chorilo the message is with everyone it concerns from the start — and what is happening with it is written right next to it.

Assigning, notes and snippets: sharing out the work visibly

Every message has a working state: new, assigned or done. With one click you assign a message to someone on the board — their name then appears on it, they get a note on their phone, and everyone else knows this one is taken. Once it has been dealt with, it is marked as done and leaves the inbox without getting lost. The tabs show you at any time what has just come in, what has been assigned to you personally, what has already been answered and what is closed.

Then there are the small things that make the difference day to day. Under every message you can leave internal notes that never go outside — something like "Spoke to the parish office, the date works, I'll reply tomorrow." You write replies straight from Chorilo, with the club's signature and from the club address, no matter which private account you happen to be working from. Recurring answers — your fee information for performances, the welcome note for prospective singers — are saved once as a snippet and inserted with a click. And if the wrong message does go out: for the first few moments, a sent reply can still be pulled back.

Turning an email into a minute entry

The most important step is the one that normally gets lost: from email to decision. From any message you can create an entry for the board's work directly. There are two routes. The first is a task: you type what needs doing, pick the person responsible and, if you like, a date — the entry lands in the board's register, without a meeting having to take place for it. The second is an agenda item: it either goes straight onto the agenda of a meeting you have already planned, or it is queued for the next meeting and offered to you when you set that one up.

Both keep their link to the email: the message shows what became of it, and in the minutes you can see that the item came from an email. The June enquiry is no longer something someone has to remember — it is an agenda item that is on the table at the next meeting by itself.

Meeting and minutes: taking notes without taking notes

You create a meeting in advance as a draft and fill the agenda — with the items queued from the mailbox and the open points from the last set of minutes, which can be carried over if you wish. During the meeting everyone with the right permissions writes in the same minutes; each entry is an agenda item, a note, a decision or a task. Decisions also record the outcome of the vote, and tasks get a responsible person straight away.

If you like, Chorilo listens in through the app during the meeting and suggests entries for the minutes, which you accept or discard. This only happens when everyone present has agreed — each person decides for themselves, and without everyone's consent there is no recording. The audio is deleted shortly after the meeting is closed; what remains are the minutes. At the end you close them: from then on they cannot be changed, can be downloaded as a PDF and stay with the club permanently.

Decisions and tasks no longer disappear into a folder

Everything decided or handed out in meetings collects in a register: decisions on one side, tasks with the people responsible on the other. Tasks can be ticked off there and reopened if needed, and the entries created from the mailbox sit alongside them as equals. A search field looks through all closed minutes: you ask a question such as "What did we decide about the fee for supporting members?" and get an answer along with the places in the minutes it came from. That replaces leafing through old files — and asking the group whether anyone still remembers.

Who actually does what?

Next to it sits a plain overview of how responsibilities are shared out: the rows list the club's areas — finances, music library, press, website, social events, licensing, choir dress — and the columns list the offices on your board. One click marks someone as responsible, another marks a deputy. It sounds mundane, but it answers exactly the questions that come up in every club: who looks after social media? Who steps in while the treasurer is on holiday? And when an office changes hands, the successor can see at a glance what belongs to it.

Why this makes board work noticeably easier

Board work in a choir is voluntary. The time for it is carved out between work, family and rehearsal, and it is rarely the actual job that eats it — it is everything around it: hunting for that email, asking again who took something on, typing up the minutes on a Sunday evening, handing knowledge over to a successor. The board area takes that surrounding work away. Nothing sits in a private inbox alone any more. Responsibility is not a matter of memory; it is written on the message and on the task. Minutes come into being during the meeting rather than afterwards. And when an office changes hands, no password is passed along — an account is simply switched over, while the whole history stays with the club.

How to join the beta

The board area is currently being trialled with a manageable number of clubs so that we can develop it calmly and thoroughly. Write to us at support@chorilo.com with the name of your choir and a sentence about how your board works today. We will enable the area and get back to you if anything is unclear.

And if you have ideas or criticism: that is exactly what the beta is for. Much of what is described above grew out of conversations with boards who told us where things get stuck for them. We are glad to keep listening.