10 reasons you know you’re a local government clerk
You are one of a kind. A local government clerk occupies a special position in a city or town, helping citizens get what they need and leaders — your mayor and council members — perform their roles better. Without you, civic life would roll to a halt.
And of course, this means your role isn’t easy! Let’s dig into all the ways your role sets you apart in your community, and how Diligent Community can help you do your job even better.
1. That 10 p.m. phone call could be your partner, a friend, your kid...or your city manager.
Let’s face it, depending on the city schedule, it’s probably the city manager asking you to add updated supporting documentation to an agenda item...
How Diligent Community helps: By making revisions and publishing easy. You’ll be ready for whatever comes with a single tool to create agendas, attach documents, insert items and build and publish packets.
2. Other people think in words or pictures. You think in meeting minutes.
Creating accurate and timely meeting minutes requires its own set of skills — finding exactly the right phrase to summarize a complicated topic or difficult vote. Too much detail and the official minutes document gets bogged down. Too little, and it’s hard for the council to revisit their actions or discussion, and citizens only have more questions.
How Diligent Community helps: Meeting minutes are so much easier when you can build them off your agenda and use AI-supported generation from your livestreamed meeting transcripts. Then you can send the minutes through an automated workflow to simplify approvals.
3. More people in town greet you by name than the mayor.
You’re used to being recognized in the grocery store. The clerk position is a special one in a town or city, and you interact with a lot of people, especially when they are trying to get something done. So you also can’t always predict how much time they’ll need for the latest request. The rest of your job must be as efficient as possible.
How Diligent Community helps: By providing a single tool for meeting management, publishing, document storage and more, the board management solution keeps things simple. You have one tool to bring your leadership team up to speed — and keep them there — and the same tool for sharing information with the public.
4. The leadership team’s birthdays are on your calendar, and you know their spouses’ and kids’ names by heart.
So much of what the clerk does is relationship-building, and you’ve got that part down. Building rapport with the board isn't just a skill — it's an art. You’re the glue that keeps everyone connected, balancing professionalism with a personal touch that ensures meetings run smoothly and relationships thrive.
How Diligent Community helps: Diligent Community makes the rote parts of your job easier and quicker so you can focus on maintaining successful working relationships with your superintendent, board and fellow administrators.
5. Other people have nightmares about being late for a test or lost in a maze. You wake up worried your carefully organized documents have been shuffled.
After all, you can’t do your job without being able to find that one document at the right moment. You’ve worked hard to build a sensible system for your records, and you want to keep them that way.
How Diligent Community helps: It offers the capacity for your full document archive, organized in the way that makes sense to your community, and easy searchability to find the right document fast. Granular permissions help make documents available to the right audiences — including the public — while versioning allows you to track document changes over time.
Transform your role as clerk
Discover practical strategies and key tools to improve board effectiveness, enhance security and transparency. Take the first step to a more efficient and transparent government.
I'd love that checklist6. You plan your life around elections. And sometimes runoffs!
You know exactly when everyone’s term is up and more about the candidates than most journalists. You do everything you can to ensure that transition is smooth, which means building in time for onboarding, offboarding and facilitating relationships between experienced and new leaders.
How Diligent Community helps: The local government calendar is predictable in some ways but can still offer some surprises. Diligent Community is an accessible place to offer documents for onboarding and training that covers the entire service lifecycle, from candidacy to the end of term. With support across multiple platforms, your leaders and potential leaders can access information about their roles from anywhere.
7. You have strong opinions on spelling, style, size of fonts...
Your ability to spot a stray comma or inconsistent font at 50 paces is nothing short of legendary. It’s a talent that turns chaos into clarity, ensuring the council’s documents not only inform but impress. Minutiae? Hardly. These systems that make work more efficient and consistent are your old friends. You’ve even had dreams where you’re formatting meeting minutes.
How Diligent Community helps: Built-in document templates make creating and editing your standard board documents straightforward, clean and consistent. And automated workflows make sure nothing falls through the cracks, boosting accountability across the entire team.
8. You’ve got more civic facts in your brain than the town’s welcome brochure — and you’re not afraid to use them.
Yes, you know when your town or city was founded and the latest census figures. But you also know the stories of the founders, what every historical plaque marks and the bios of the colorful characters that make up local lore. You bring zoning laws to the punch bowl — and somehow, people love it.
How Diligent Community helps: With a public-facing website, your government can promote its transparency, accountability and efficiency to potential residents and business owners. And it can share the local color that makes your community so appealing.
9. You open your email and find 334 new public-information requests since yesterday. And that’s just a standard Wednesday.
Public information requests take a lot of your time, but they can’t be ignored. Whether it’s information about current events or something from the town’s past, the clock is ticking for a response. And you have to balance these requests against all the other needs in your office that day.
How Diligent Community helps: Diligent Community helps focus on public transparency, with searchable information on meetings and policies that enable citizens and local media to find answers quickly. Both integrated livestreamed meetings with synchronized agendas and AI-supported minutes reduce the need for individual requests and save you time.
10. You’ve considered adding “cat herder” to your job title — because that’s what managing council members feels like.
What more can we say...
In all seriousness, we’re here to help
Look to Diligent Community to help with all these areas and more. It is a cloud-based software solution specifically designed for publicly elected teams. And it helps local government clerks increase their efficiency and effectiveness by providing a centralized platform that enhances administrative processes, streamlines communication and improves overall efficiency.
We at Diligent appreciate everything you do. And we’re here to help. Let’s talk about what Diligent Community can do to support you and your council.
More to explore
Streamline your meeting minutes: A checklist for local government clerks
Discover how to streamline your meeting minutes with our practical checklist for local government clerks to help enhance efficiency and compliance.
Welcome to the essential guide for local government clerks
Download our guide for local government clerks to gain insights, adaptable strategies and reliable solutions to excel in their crucial role.
Enhancing trust and efficiency: Mastering public meeting management
Learn how to make public meeting prep a dream instead of a nightmare with some high-level strategies and specific technical recommendations to streamline your preparation.
A day in the life of a local government clerk
Explore the essential role of local government clerks who ensure smooth, compliant and transparent board meetings, from agenda prep to minute-taking to public communication.
