How to Write a Meeting Recap

Don't even think about writing a meeting recap yourself!

With workers clocking in over two days a week for meetings and email, writing meeting recaps can be a complete time sink. 

Instead, let AI do the heavy lifting. 

Solutions like Fireflies.ai can automate your meeting recaps and save you from this tedious, erroneous process.

In this article, we’ll tell you:

• What is a meeting recap?
• Benefits of meeting recaps
• How meeting recaps differ from meeting minutes
• How Fireflies.ai can automate meeting recaps
• Some templates and best practices

Let’s begin!

What is a meeting recap?

A meeting recap summarizes key points of a meeting. It includes decisions, action items, and takeaways.

Meeting recaps are usually shared via email or your team's async communication platform, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, to keep everyone on the same page, whether they attended the meeting or not. 

The benefits of meeting recaps

1. Improves memory recall

By providing a clear record of discussions and action items, meeting recaps help combat the effects of the forgetting curve. 

You can use them as a reference point to jog your memory so nothing slips through the cracks. Crucial information stays top-of-mind, helping tackle meeting fatigue during busy schedules.

2. Boosts team accountability

Meeting recaps help improve accountability and transparency. When everyone has access to the same information, it fosters clarity and prevents confusion.

Clearly documenting responsibilities promotes accountability and ensures everyone stays on track and follows through.

Additionally, team members can ask clarifying questions, offer support, and hold each other accountable in a constructive way.

3. Provides a valuable historical record

Over time, meeting recaps become a historical record of your conversations and decisions.

These recaps are handy when revisiting past initiatives, measuring progress, or identifying areas of improvement. Tracing the documented decisions and action items allows you to see how projects evolved, determine what worked well, and use those learnings in future projects.

Meeting recap vs. meeting minutes

Meeting recaps are often confused with meeting minutes, but key distinctions exist between them.

Meeting minutes are a formal record of the entire meeting. They capture everything discussed, often word-for-word, including details like who attended, the agenda items covered, and specific points raised during discussions. A designated note-taker creates meeting minutes. Because of their detailed nature, sharing them might take up to 48 hours.

Meeting recap offers a concise summary of the meeting's key takeaways, decisions, and action items. Instead of documenting every granular detail, it follows a clear and conversational style. These recaps are quick and easy to read, making them more practical for daily use.

How to write meeting recaps using Fireflies.ai?

With Fireflies.ai, you don't have to spend hours writing meeting recaps. Fireflies writes them for you!

What is Fireflies.ai?

Fireflies is an AI note-taker that records, transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes all your online and offline meetings. 

It shares the meeting recap with every attendee based on your settings. The recap contains a complete meeting overview, action items, meeting notes, outline, and keywords. 

Here’s how Fireflies streamlines the meeting recap process for you:

Automatic transcription: Fireflies captures and transcribes conversations with over 90% accuracy. It supports 60+ languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Arabic, German, Dutch, Korean, Russian, Japanese, Hindi, and Italian.

AI summaries: Fireflies generates customizable AI summaries to help you review hour-long meetings in minutes. It identifies each participant's action items so everyone knows the next steps. 

Smart Search: You can use Smart Search to filter the transcript by speaker, questions, metrics, tasks, sentiments, and more.

AI chatbot: AskFred can answer any meeting-related questions or generate follow-up emails, blogs, social media posts, etc., based on the meeting discussion.

Organize your meetings: Create channels for different types of meetings, such as weekly team huddles, sales calls, client presentations, or project updates. This gives you easy access to past meeting recaps and transcripts.

Integrations: Fireflies integrates with 40+ platforms, such as Slack, ClickUp, Monday.com, Notion, Zapier, Zoho, etc. You can push meeting recaps and transcripts to your preferred project management tools, communication channels, and more. This streamlines your workflow and eliminates the need to manually share information on relevant platforms.

Here’s how you can invite Fireflies to write meeting recaps:

Step 1: Go to the Fireflies web app. Log in using your Google or Microsoft account, or create a new one.

Step 2: Allow Fireflies to join all your calendar meetings from the homepage dashboard. 

Now, choose which meetings Fireflies should join. 

Fireflies syncs with your calendar and joins and records meetings based on this setting.

Alternatively, you can also add Fireflies to a live meeting.

Step 3: Set the "Send email recap to" setting from the homepage dashboard.

Here, you can decide who will receive the meeting recap email after the meeting ends. 

You can send recaps to:

• All meeting participants
• Just your internal team

Or, you can set it to “Only me.” 

Based on your settings, Fireflies shares the meeting recap via email shortly after the meeting ends.

Simply click View meeting recap to access the complete recap, including the full transcript and summary. Alternatively, log in to the Fireflies app to view your meeting recap.

Easy, right?

Meeting recap best practices and template

While Fireflies can greatly simplify the process of writing meeting recaps, what if you want to write meeting recaps the traditional way?

Here are 8 tips and best practices to keep in mind before writing manual meeting recaps:

1: Start with the meeting objective

Begin by stating the meeting's purpose. Was it a brainstorming session for a new marketing campaign? A weekly team huddle to discuss project progress? A quick catch-up with a client?

Setting the context helps everyone understand the discussion's focus and how the recap pieces fit into the bigger picture.

2. Summarize key points

Write down all the relevant and important information from the meeting. Try to keep this as simple and concise as possible. Focus only on the major decisions made and key discussion points, and don't include minor details that don't contribute to the meeting's overall objective.

Use bullet points or short paragraphs for easy reading. You can also sort these points by priority so critical information doesn't get lost in the recap.

3. Highlight action items

The progress of the entire meeting depends on clear action items. A meeting recap should compile action items for each individual so they know what the next steps are. When writing action items, be sure to include the following details:

• The task: What specific action needs to be taken?
• The owner: Who is responsible for completing the task?
• The deadline: By when does the task need to be finished?

4. Provide context

Include all relevant background information, documents, or references discussed during the meeting. 

This adds clarity for those who were not present, helping them understand the key points and decisions made during the meeting.

5. Give your meeting recap a clear structure

Organize your meeting recap in a clear and structured manner to help users navigate the key information quickly and efficiently. 

Here is a meeting recap template you can use:

6. Proofread the meeting recap

Take a few minutes to proofread the meeting recap carefully before hitting send. Review the entire recap for accuracy and clarity. Also, make sure the action items are assigned to the correct people.

Once done, read the meeting recap thoroughly to assess its readability. Look for awkward phrasing, grammatical errors, or ambiguous language that might cause confusion.

7. Share the meeting recap only with relevant people

Before sharing, create a list of people who should receive the meeting recap. Only include decision-make­rs, stakeholders, and team members actively involve­d in the discussion. 

Share it with anyone who was invited to the meeting but couldn't attend so they are in the loop and know the next steps.

Also, try to share the meeting recap within 24 hours of the meeting so the conversation is still relatively fresh in attendees' minds.

8. Encourage discussion and feedback

Ask your team to provide feedback or ask questions if something is unclear. This approach promotes transparency and effective communication among all team members.

At the end of your meeting recap, include something like:

“If anything from the meeting recap isn't clear or if you have questions, feel free to ask. Your feedback is important, so please don't hesitate to reach out. We want to ensure everyone is on the same page and understands the next steps.”

FAQs

Parting thoughts

The key to productive meetings lies in sharing effective meeting recaps. Without them, valuable insights and ideas risk being lost.

However, creating meeting recaps manually involves multitasking between note-taking, capturing action items, and actively participating in the discussion. With so many tasks, missing details or making mistakes is easy. This is where Fireflies.ai comes in to streamline and automate the process.  

By effortlessly generating meeting recaps, Fireflies allows teams to focus on what truly matters: driving progress and achieving goals.