Council Meetings & Notifications

This article walks you through running an owners'-association meeting in REDA end to end: create the meeting, invite exactly the right people, record who came, and keep the minutes. Along the way you'll meet a second, lighter kind of event — a Notification — that can borrow a meeting's audience for a follow-up blast. You'll learn how REDA builds a meeting's participant list from your community rosters, the freeze that protects a finalized list, and the one gate that stops you marking a meeting as invited before invitations have actually gone out. If you haven't set up your community's rosters yet, start with Councils & HOA Rosters — this article assumes they exist.

Two kinds of council event

A council event is a record on the Council Events tab, tied to one owners' association through its Council Account. Its name is the Subject. When you create one, you choose between two types:

Most of this article is about meetings; notifications get their own short section near the end. Status always begins at Planning, the working state where you build the event before anything goes out.

Create the meeting

From the Council Events tab, click New and pick the Meeting type. Fill in the essentials:

Choose the audience

A meeting decides who to invite through three selectors that map to your three rosters. Set the ones you want; leave the rest blank:

Only the roles you tick are invited. If you select Owner and Owner Trustee but not Developer, developers on the roster are skipped. The tenants checkbox is all-or-nothing: tick it and every tenant with a council role on an active lease in the community is included.

Generate the participant list

Once the audience is chosen, REDA builds the actual invitee list — the participants. Trigger it by ticking Generate Event Participants or using the quick action of the same name. REDA then creates one participant record (numbered CEP-000000) for:

• each active owner whose role you selected,
• each active board member whose role you selected, and
• each tenant with a council role on an active lease, if the tenants box is ticked.

For every participant, REDA copies across the member's role and their voting rights from the roster, so votes and roles track to the right people. Each participant record also carries the member's contact echoes, an Invitation Sent Date Time (stamped later, when invitations go out), a Meeting Attended flag, and a Comments field. Two running totals appear on the event: Total Participants (how many were invited) and Total Attended.

The copied role tells you where each person came from: owners arrive with their owner role (Owner, Developer, and so on), board members with their board role, and tenants with the Council Role from their lease — Lease Hold Tenant or Tenant for Life. So a participant list read top to bottom shows owners, board, and tenants side by side, each labeled by how they belong to the community.

Freezing the list

When your invitee list is final, you can freeze it by ticking Is Locked on the event. Once locked, no new participants can be added — a deliberate guard so a finalized list can't be quietly changed after invitations have gone out. Try to add a participant to a locked event and REDA stops you:

If you genuinely need to change it, untick Is Locked first (if your community's policy allows), add the participant, then lock it again.

Send the invitations

Invitations go out through the Mass Email action, covered in full in Mass Email to the Community. The important connection to know here is that sending a meeting invitation stamps the Invitation Sent Date Time on the event automatically — and that timestamp is what lets you advance the Status to Invitation Sent. Try to set that status before invitations have gone out and REDA stops you:

In practice you don't fill that datetime by hand — you send via Mass Email, which stamps it for you, and then the status change is allowed.

Record attendance

On the day, use the Meeting Attendance quick action (available once participants have been generated). It opens a roster check-off screen where you mark who showed up; each person you mark updates their Meeting Attended flag, and the Total Attended count on the event reflects the number marked present.

Minutes and completion

After the meeting, record the minutes in Meeting Notes (MOM) — a rich-text field for the full write-up — then move Status to Completed. If a meeting doesn't go ahead, set Postponed or Cancelled; these are bookkeeping states, with no further automation attached, so use them to keep the record honest.

Notifications: lightweight blasts

A Notification event is a stripped-down cousin of a meeting, meant for announcements and follow-ups. It carries only two statuses — Planning and Completed — and no schedule, voting, or attendance. Its most useful trick is that it can point at a Parent Council Meeting (a lookup to an existing meeting). When it does, a mass email to the notification reaches the meeting's participants — you don't regenerate a separate list. That's the clean way to send "here are the minutes" to exactly the people who were invited to the meeting. The send mechanics live in Mass Email to the Community.

Worked example: the Harbour Tower AGM

The manager of Harbour Tower Owners Association runs the annual general meeting:

A Council Event (General meeting): the Meeting Start / End Date Time, Status, Voting Required and Meeting Agenda on the record, with the generated Council Event Participants — each member and their role — in the related list.

The Generate Event Participants confirmation: you choose which groups to include — Participants (Owners), (Executive Body), (Tenants) — and acknowledge the warning, "System will delete all the existing Event Participants and create new. Do you want to proceed?", before REDA rebuilds the participant list.

Reference: the event and its participants

Key fields on a council event:

Each generated participant record holds the Member (the contact), their Member Role and Council Voting Rights copied from the roster, a Meeting Attended flag, an Invitation Sent Date Time, read-only email and phone echoes, and a free-text Comments field.

Where to go next

1. Councils & HOA Rosters — the rosters this article generates participants from.
2. Mass Email to the Community — send the invitations and notification blasts.
3. Contact Roles — where a tenant's council role on the lease lives.
4. Understanding Tickets — for contrast: council events are their own engine, not tickets.

Frequently asked questions