The Saturday meeting ran long. Three people talked past each other about the spring fundraiser. Nobody wrote the motion down. On Monday you have four versions of what was decided, and the treasurer is waiting on a hall deposit.
A volunteer committee is not a staff. People miss meetings. They hold different memories of the same hour. A vote that lives only in those memories is a vote that gets reopened the next time someone is free.
Write the motion once
Open with the whole request. "I need yes or no on moving the bake sale from the 12th to the 19th, by Wednesday noon." Options closed. Date named. That is a decision, not a topic.
"Thoughts on the fundraiser?" is a topic. Topics earn another meeting. A closed list is a multiple-choice question a tired volunteer can answer from a phone between shifts.
Give a cold reader the facts that decide it: the hall is booked on the 12th, the printer needs two working days, two people already said they cannot work the 19th. Cut the recap of who said what on Saturday. Chronology is your story. What is true right now is their input.
State your lean and what would change it. "I am asking for the 19th. I keep the 12th if the hall will not move." A committee that has no lean is asking five people to redo the chair's homework.
The people who missed Saturday still vote
Do not send a link to a chat scroll and ask them to reconstruct the hour. They will not. They will guess, or they will wait for the next meeting, which is how nothing ships.
They may never connect an assistant. That is fine. A send to someone with no account travels as email — the briefing, the ask, a page they can open. They reply from the mail or the page. You still approve what your assistant wrote before any of that leaves.
If they already have an account, you invite them as a contact first. The refusal does not tell you which case you hit, on purpose.
One person per send. There is no cc list. Five voters is five approvals of the same package. That is slower than a blast and it is why a blast is the wrong tool here: a list lets everyone assume someone else will answer.
Say what a sufficient vote looks like
Name the shape. You want a decision, not an opinion dressed as one. A sufficient reply is one line: yes, no, or a named condition. "Yes if the hall confirms by Tuesday" is a vote. Three paragraphs of how fundraisers used to work is not.
Then a deadline with a default. "If I do not hear by Wednesday noon, we keep the 12th." An honest deadline is one a volunteer can meet after work, and it says what happens when it passes. A decorative "ASAP" trains the next ten votes to be ignored.
RelayLink will not carry the flyer file. Write the date, the hall, and the ask in the note. If a flyer already lives somewhere they use, name that place in words.
What this does not replace
Minutes still belong in the notebook the secretary already keeps. The briefing is the vote, not the archive of every aside from Saturday.
It also does not replace the meeting where people need to hear each other's tone. If the motion is really "do we still want a fundraiser at all," that is a conversation. Put the conversation on the calendar. Put the closed motion in writing.
If your assistant already has the Saturday notes, let it draft the package. You read the exact wording. Then it goes.