A board's first month with Savoir

Setting it up takes an evening. The month that follows is the interesting part: it is where a board finds out what its building actually asks, and how many e-mails it no longer has to write.

The first evening: five steps

1. Create the account and the community — two minutes. The syndicate's name, its province, and the plan its member count suggests.
2. Upload the documents — a few minutes. Declaration, by-laws, minutes, insurance policies; each file is processed as it lands.
3. Brand and test the assistant — a few minutes. Its name, the syndicate's logo, the colour; then ask your own questions before anyone else's.
4. Invite the building — a few minutes. By e-mail, by link, or with the QR poster in the lobby.
5. Go live — the same evening. Members ask their questions, and the board reads the first ones in its review queue.

Test it yourself before inviting anybody: the question a co-owner asks first is nearly always the one the board already receives by e-mail.

The first week: the review queue

An answer is not always possible. When the documents say nothing, the assistant says so rather than inventing, shows the contact the board has set, and passes the question to the board.

Those questions — the unanswered ones, and the ones a member flagged — wait in the review queue, with the name of whoever asked. The answer the board writes is used the next time. It is the most profitable part of the first month: every question handled once stops coming back.

Monday morning: the digest

Each board member who asks for it hears, on Monday morning and in the community's own time zone, what the building asked that week. It is a three-minute read, and it is often where a board sees a subject coming — works, an increase, a misunderstood by-law — before it reaches the general meeting.

The end of the month: the numbers

The console counts four indicators, the questions over time, the most frequent subjects, the most cited documents and the questions nobody could answer, with a CSV export of the whole range.

Two uses, and the second is the better one:

• Seeing which document the library is missing, because unanswered questions resemble each other.
• Arriving at the annual meeting with a page of numbers rather than an impression.

The analytics count volumes and subjects, with no names. The review queue does name the person: that is a question waiting for the board's answer, not a measurement.

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