Getting Started: Create Your First Meeting

Walk through signing up, creating your first meeting, and sharing the public signup link.

Training video coming soon

In the meantime, the steps below cover everything.

This guide walks you from a brand-new account through to a live public signup link that residents can use to speak at your next meeting.

1. Create your account

Go to /signup and choose the option to create a new organization. You will name your org, set your admin email and password, and land in the app once your account is provisioned.

Every new org starts on a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. The trial includes full access to meetings, public signups, speaker management, PDF and CSV exports, and email confirmations so you can run a real meeting end-to-end before you decide on a plan.

Before you create any meetings, visit /settings and set your organization timezone. Meeting dates and times render in that timezone inside the confirmation emails your residents receive, so getting this right up front prevents confusion later.

2. Land on the dashboard

After signup you are dropped on /dashboard. It will be empty on day one — that is normal. The only thing you need to do here is click Create Meeting in the top right.

3. Fill in the new meeting form

Clicking Create Meeting takes you to /meetings/new, which is organized into Meeting Details, Speaker Settings, and an optional Agenda section.

Required fields

Meeting Title — shown at the top of the public signup page (for example, "June Board Meeting").
Date & Time — the date and start time of the meeting, picked from the datetime field.
Speaker Time Limit — pick from 2 min, 3 min, 5 min, or 10 min. This is shown to the public for reference; your chair still enforces it in the room.
Close Public Signups — choose At start, 15 min before, 30 min before, or 1 hr before. This is when the public signup form stops accepting new entries.

Optional fields

Location — for example, "Community Center" or "Board Room". Appears on the public signup page if provided.
Agenda Notes — a free-text block you can paste your agenda into.
Agenda Items — structured items with their own titles. Each item has a public/staff-only toggle that controls whether the public can sign up against it, and an optional max speakers cap.
Agenda PDF — upload the meeting packet as a PDF (10 MB limit) so it can be linked from the signup page.

Click Create Meeting at the bottom of the form to save.

4. Open signups

New meetings are created in Published status by default. Published means the meeting exists in your dashboard and is visible internally, but the public signup form is not yet accepting submissions.

On the meeting page, click the Open Signups button in the action row. The status badge changes from Published to Open, and the public form at /m/[slug] becomes live. The full status flow is draft → published → open → closed, and only Open allows new public signups.

If a resident reports that the signup link shows a closed or unavailable message, check the status badge on the meeting page. The most common cause is that the meeting is still in Published state and Open Signups has not been clicked yet.

5. Share the public link

Once the meeting is Open, a Signup Link banner appears on the meeting page. The link uses an auto-generated 8-character slug, so it looks like:

https://signup.commtrail.com/m/ab12cd34

Click the Copy Link button in the action row to copy the URL to your clipboard. Paste it into your meeting notice, agenda email, website, or social post. Residents who follow the link see your Sign Up to Speak form with no account or login required.

What comes next

As residents sign up, they appear on the meeting page in the order they registered. From there you can drag and drop to reorder, use the Add Walk-in button to add anyone who arrives in person, and open Display Mode to project the live speaker list during the meeting itself.

Questions or stuck on a step? Email support@commtrail.com and we will help you get your first meeting live.

Still stuck? Email support@commtrail.com — we'll reply within one business day.