Free templates · for nonprofit boards
Free Board Meeting Agenda & Minutes Templates
An agenda and a set of minutes are the two documents a small nonprofit board touches at every single meeting, and they are the two most often improvised — which is why so many meetings run long and so many minutes say nothing more useful than “the motion passed.” These are free. The agenda comes twice: blank and genuinely fillable, so you click a highlighted field and type, and then filled in for an invented organization, so you can see what a working agenda actually looks like. The minutes template follows in the motion-and-vote format an auditor is looking for. They are general templates, not legal, tax, or compliance advice — your own bylaws set quorum, notice, and what your minutes must contain.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Gives you a board meeting agenda with the three things most small-board agendas are missing: a consent calendar that clears the routine approvals in a single vote, a time against every item, and a column saying whether the board is being asked to Decide, Discuss, or just Receive — so nobody spends half a meeting working out whether a discussion is heading toward a vote.
- Gives you a minutes template built around motions rather than narrative: each decision recorded as a numbered motion in the words it was put to the board, the mover, the seconder, the vote broken out for, against and abstaining, and a place to record a recusal with the times the director left and returned.
- Shows the agenda filled in for an invented organization, with the typed-in words marked in amber, so you can see what the consent calendar absorbs and why the hardest item belongs early rather than last.
- Names, for each document, the one clause not to delete and why — the decide-or-discuss column on the agenda, and the motions-and-votes table on the minutes, which is the part a bank, an auditor, or a funder will actually ask to see.
- Carries the mistakes small boards actually make: sending the packet the night before, approving the routine items one at a time, recording only that a motion passed, and never approving the minutes at all so they sit in draft for a year.
- Tells you where your own bylaws and your state's nonprofit corporation act take precedence — quorum, notice periods, whether the board may act by email, and what the minutes must contain.
- Fillable PDF, US Letter — click an amber field in any PDF reader and type, and every cell in the consent calendar, the business table, the attendance list, the motions grid and the action list is typeable. Nothing to sign up for, nothing saved anywhere but your own copy.
Own it, don't rent it
Need the policies a funder actually asks for?
These are 2 of 16. The full pack adds the governance paperwork a small nonprofit is asked for and rarely has: a conflict of interest policy and its annual disclosure form, a document retention and destruction policy with a 32-row retention schedule already filled in, a gift acceptance policy with 20 kinds of gift already sorted into accept, review, and decline, a whistleblower policy, a board member role description and commitment agreement, a board resolution form, a 23-step annual governance calendar, five volunteer documents, and a records register — plus a printable map from each governance question on the annual return to the document that answers it, a router taking 46 real situations to the right page, a 40-page guide giving every document its own page, a fully-minuted worked meeting, and an editable Word version of all sixteen alongside the fillable PDFs.
A one-time purchase you keep and can edit — files that sit on your own drive rather than a template page that changes, gets gated, or quietly disappears, and nothing that stops working when the grant that paid for it ends.
General document templates and guidance — not legal, tax, or compliance advice, and not a substitute for any of them. Downloading them does not create a lawyer-client or accountant-client relationship. Your own articles and bylaws, and your state's nonprofit corporation act, set the number of directors, quorum, notice periods, how a meeting may be called, whether your board may act by email or written consent, and what your minutes must contain — and where those and these templates disagree, your governing documents win. A few states also open certain nonprofits' meetings to the public. Have a lawyer who knows nonprofit law in your state review anything here before your board relies on it. The example organization, people, and figures are invented. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.