The Key to a Great Virtual Annual Meeting

A shift in perspective. The COVID pandemic changed the perspective of most of our co-op and condo board clients. They realized they could do board meetings over Zoom and didn’t really need to be in the same room. The second big step was when New York State said that corporations could meet virtually for annual meetings. And virtual meetings are great for the people who are working with boards, both property managers and especially accountants. Now accountants can attend two or three annual meetings a night instead of having to block out their calendar for a whole night if they were coming to one meeting in person. 

The importance of being prepared. I realized that the only way a virtual annual meeting can run successfully is if you spend a lot of time beforehand making sure everything is up to date and prepared. You have to have your ducks in a row.

I have a master spreadsheet for each building that lists the apartments, the updated names of the shareholders, and the share count. And then I create different columns. When someone is present, I put their shares in that column. When they’re not present, nothing goes in there. I also break it down by present-in-person or present-by-proxy, which is important later in the process. And then each building is different with the way that they calculate the votes, so the spreadsheet will have the method, and it calculates everything. So in reality it takes 30 minutes to count most buildings.

An early start is smart. I will always open up the Zoom 15 minutes before the meeting, and I encourage people to come in 15 minutes early. If it’s a meeting that’s not going to be contentious, we leave the microphones open. But if there are people who are taking advantage of the situation and not acting in the best decorum, we will lock the audio and say, “Please raise your hands and we will call on you, and we will unlock your microphone.”

Checking the proxies. Whenever I’m signing people in, whether it’s before the meeting or during the meeting, I ask if there are any proxies that anybody is holding and whoever has them will go through them with me. We give people a little bit of flexibility to come in a little bit late. In most cases, we do need the extra few minutes, and everybody understands because when we did this in person, it would sometimes take a half hour to make sure that everybody was signed in properly.

Casting the votes. Every time I do an electronic vote, I set up a Google form for every building we manage. It has a spot for the name of the person attending the meeting, not the actual shareholder if it’s a proxy. And then we have a little statement at the bottom that says, “Just verify that you have not exceeded your number of permitted votes.” We want them to verify that their math is correct. And then they hit submit.

In an online annual meeting, we’ll usually extend the voting until 10 a.m. the next day. Sometimes sponsors have a bunch of votes they have to do. Then I update my spreadsheet and do the count as the inspector of elections. If there’s an independent inspector, I share my entire screen so they’ll see both the results from the Google form and my spreadsheet. It’s really quick to calculate.

Avoiding chaos. I would say 99% of running an annual meeting on Zoom is having the data at your fingertips to make sure that you know how you’re going to be signing people in, and having that spreadsheet available so that you can easily find people’s names. We don’t want chaos. We want the meeting to be quiet, and we want it to run smoothly.