How often should a registered society hold Executive Committee Meetings?

If your non-profit organisation is a registered society, meaning, a society registered with the Registry of Societies (“ROS”) under the Societies Act, 1966 (“Act”), then a specific set of rules and regulations governs some  aspects of its day-to-day operations.

One of these rules, is the obligation to hold regular executive committee (“Exco”) meetings.

Ok to start off, who exactly is the Exco? The Exco, is another way of describing the office bearers (pegawai pertubuhan) of your registered society. They are sometimes referred to as AJK, or Ahli Jawatankuasa. Essentially,these would be the President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer and ordinary executive committee members, that were elected at an Annual General Meeting.

So now, let’s first find out where the information as to how often the Exco should meet, can be found.

While there are general provisions applicable to the office bearers of a registered society under the Act, specific information on when the exco should meet, is actually set out in the Constitution of the registered society and not in the Act itself. 

As mentioned in an earlier post, every registered society needs to have a Constitution. You (or the Secretary of your non-profit organisation) would have had to submit the draft constitution, to ROS for approval prior to receiving your society’s Certificate of Registration.

A sample Constitution is available for download on ROS’ website. 

Assuming your Constitution roughly follows the ROS sample, you should find the following Article or its equivalent (note that a Constitution can also be in English, it does not have to be in Bahasa Malaysia) in it:

Jawatankuasa hendaklah bermesyuarat sekurang-kurangnya sekali dalam 3 bulan.  Notis bagi tiap-tiap mesyuarat hendaklah diberikan kepada ahli jawatankuasa 7 hari terlebih dahulu. Pengerusi dengan bersendirian atau tidak kurang daripada .....orang ahli Jawatankuasa bersama-sama boleh memanggil supaya diadakan mesyuarat Jawatankuasa pada bila-bila masa.  Sekurang-kurangnya setengah (½) daripada bilangan ahli Jawatankuasa hendaklah hadir bagi mengesahkan perjalanan dan mencukupkan korum mesyuarat.

A rough translation of the above:

The Exco must meet at least once in 3 months. Notice of the meeting should be given to the Exco members 7 days prior. The President alone or not fewer than [         ] exco members together can requisition an Exco meeting at any time. At least half of the number of Exco members must be present to verify the proceedings and fulfill quorum requirements.

OK, so you now know that the exco meeting should be held at least once every 3 months. Which means you could convene a more frequently if you’d like to. In our non-profit organisation, I try to convene exco meetings at least once a month. This does not always happen due to the busy schedules of all the committee members, but we try to follow this best practice.

What should you before an exco meeting? Best to prepare a notice of meeting and circulate it to all committee members 7 days prior. The notice would contain a brief agenda for the meeting.  Usually it goes along these lines…Presidents Report, Treasurer’s Report, Secretary’s Report, Special Business, Any Other Business, etc. The exact format is up to you – if your organisation is small, things don’t really have to be super-formal at the early stages.

If there are papers and documents that the exco members need to review, these could be PDF’d and emailed to all in advance to minimise time spent going through them during the meeting (a guaranteed time-waster! J)

It’s a good idea to prepare an attendance list, and get the signatures of the meeting attendees. This is just in case at a later date, a question arises as to how many people actually attended the meeting.

If you are the Secretary, then will have to pay attention right through and take minutes of the meeting ( so yes, it’s definitely not the time to be playing Pokemon GO! J). There are a couple of ways to take minutes. At the most basic level, you could just jot down notes on a sheet of paper and type them up later. This is probably the most effective, especially if people are talking very quickly and it’s difficult to keep up.

If however, you are a very fast typist and are more comfortable on a keyboard, you might want to prepare a standard template for minutes in soft copy by creating a set of standard headings corresponding to the agenda items set out in the notice of meeting, and add columns to fill in the notes of what was actually discussed during the meeting itself. This allows you to easily organise the notes you are taking during the meeting, into what will become the actual minutes of the meeting. It also skips the rather tedious part of having to type up your notes.

Yet another option is to record the whole meeting and then transcribe it line by line. Be warned though this is an extremely tedious taks… especially if you are just a volunteer, and have a full time job elsewhere! The likelihood that you’ll actually have the timeto sit down and transcribe an hours’ worth of recorded conversation, is pretty low.. and if the meeting drags on, you might just never finish transcribing the minutes J.

OK so once the minutes are typed up, we’re done right? Ooops, not so fast J. There’s still a couple of things left to do. First, the final minutes should be printed out, signed by the Secretary, PDF’d and emailed to all members. The printed copy should also be filed.

And last but definitely not least, make a list of post-meeting action items which need to be followed up on, circulate it to the task leaders and follow up on their progress before the next meeting. Otherwise,  action items discussed at the meeting are likely to remain in the minutes, never to be implemented J.

Comments, questions or suggestions, email me at spiral1701@gmail.com.

Tips on Creating SOP's for your Non-Profit Organisation

Processes? Procedures? Rules & Regulations? Errgh, how boring… volunteering is meant to be fun J! I hear you say. Now, while I do understand that pretty much only lawyers and accountants find procedures, rules and regulations fun,  putting into place some simple processes really does help with the running of any organisation – not just a non-profit organisation. Especially when your organisation is small, has no paid or full time staff, and is run entirely by volunteers.

More often than not, a small, newly-set up non-profit organisation or social enterprise is self-run a few individual volunteers (who are usually working full time elsewhere!:-)) and who are tasked with running the organisation.  What usually happens is that this small group ends up doing everything and kind of just “knows” what needs to be done. Half the time, they’re just rushing to stay on top of the deluge of communications, things to do and activities to run – and have no time to record exactly what they do or how they do it.

This system probably works pretty well most of the time as long as everyone does what they’re meant to, but sooner or later, you’re going to hit a snag when the people who normally do the job, can’t do it for some reason. Maybe they are going to be away overseas, or are not well, or are busy over the festive season, or something has just come up that’s going to prevent them from being able to do the job for a period of time or permanently. Another volunteer needs to take over - and then…the questions start. “What do I do?”, “How do I do it”, “What are the steps involved?”

Which brings me back to the importance of creating standard operating procedure or processes or SOPs.

Question 1 – when should our non-profit organisation start creating SOPs?

The answer is, right NOW J Don’t wait until they’re needed. SOPs need to be created in advance, and not at the last minute. Last-minute SOPs tend to miss out important steps and details, so plan ahead.

Question 2 – what sort of stuff requires SOP’s?

OK so for the super-organised productivity nerds among us, there is no limit to SOPs. Every single activity could be improved and done quicker and more efficiently, therefore, every single activity could benefit from a SOP. But, that would be simply be overkill in a small non-profit organisation or social enterprise. Bear in mind, most people dislike structure, rules and regulations. You don’t want to scare off volunteers by handing them a ISO-certification level manual crammed full of complex SOPs. You probably won’t see them again after that J!

 Just stick to the most important key processes. Stuff that needs to be done daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. How to put an event or activity together. How regular communications like emails, newsletters, social media posts etc, get created and sent out. Practical stuff like that.

Question 3 – How do we create the actual SOP?

Talk to all the volunteers who normally do the job. Ask them questions about what they do, step by step. Ask them to share tips and shortcuts around the process. Ask about pre-preparation ie. what needs to get done behind the scenes before the event/activity. What happens during the event/activity. What happens after or rather, are there any follow-up aspects that need to be taken care of after the event. Next, type it all up and there’s your SOP!

Don’t forget to let the folks that normally do the job, review your SOP before you finalise it though. They may have stuff to add or have suggestions on reorganising the steps. All this input helps create a comprehensive SOP.

Question 4 – Do I need to have an MBA before I am qualified to create an SOP?

Absolutely not. The only skill you need is the ability to type, probably (unless you’re really old school and prefer to write things down, on pieces of parchment…:-). Seriously, an SOP can be nothing more than a series of steps described in simple English, typed up in a plain old MS Word document . That’s it. No fancy software programmes or killer apps are needed. (Though if you or someone on your team just happens to be a wizard at creating detailed flowcharts, colourful graphs and pie charts and whatnot, then knock yourselves out! J Just make sure the rest of us mere mortals can understand them easily…J

Question 5 – Should I use my laptop or my phone to create the SOP?

It doesn’t really matter, as long as somehow, the text can get onto your phone. Now if you have a Samsung phone, and better still, a external Samsung phone keyboard like I do, you could even create the SOP on your phone’s memo or note-taking app. I’m sure this is possible on other Android devices as well as IPhones too. Why do you need the text on your phone? So that you can easily copy and paste it into watsapp or even an email, when you need to. Having the data on your phone makes it super-easy to communicate. Let’s say a volunteer sends you a watsapp message asking “I’d like to volunteer tomorrow, what do I do?” you could just copy the whole SOP from your note-taking app and paste it straight into Watsapp.

Having said that, the text should also go in a word document or excel spreadsheet and be stored on your laptop, preferably in a folder marked “SOPs” (OK, so it’s not the most creative name around, feel free to come up with your own! J). The SOPs may evolve with time as you might need to edit them to delete irrelevant stuff and include other details as time goes by, so always mark each version of the document that you save, with the date. Don’t delete old versions as you may need to refer to them later.

Hope the above helps! Questions or suggestions, email me at spiralcom1701@gmail.com.

A simple system for tracking events and activities organised by your non-profit organisation.

If you help manage a small non-profit organisation as a volunteer with a full time day job, you’ll definitely have learnt a few shortcuts to systemise operations so that you can get as much done in as little time as possible.

I’d like to share with you a super-simple and easy-to-update system for recording and updating events and activities.

Firstly, let’s connect with the “why” behind this exercise. Why it is a good idea to maintain an easy-to-get-to running list to track all the activities and events your non-profit organisation runs?

Well, for one thing, it can easily help you keep track of key dates for later reference, which, in the absence of a system, you’ll most likely forget.  And, this list could be the foundation document for the President’s Report or other report that you might need to prepare before your registered society’s AGM, or for a proposal to raise funds, or to do a write-up for an impromptu presentation if you need to put something together quickly at short notice. 

It’s really simple, and you won’t need any fancy tools or apps. In fact it's really up to you to work out what suits you best. You can use a simple notebook, or a plain old word document, or a simple spreadsheet.

First, create a list/tracker. Step 1, note down your events – dates, venues and other important details you want to capture. Step 2, create a table with 3 columns (left to right) captioned “DATE”. “EVENT” and “DESCRIPTION”. Step 3,  populate the table with the events your organisation has held to date. If you can’t trace the information back far enough, just start from where you can. Better late than never! :-)

In order to maintain the system, you just need to create a reminder that will remind you to update the tracker at a regular interval. The key word here is "regular". You could link this reminder to the event itself, or to time.  A suggestion would be to make it a standard operating practice to either update the list every time your organisation has an event, or, if this is too tedious, make it a standard practice to update the list once a month.  I wouldn’t recommend going beyond 1 month, as by then there may be too many events and you may end up putting it off . One way of doing this is to put in a calendar reminder on a monthly basis. Every month, you'll get a reminder to do your updates. And when that happens, you must do it (or else the system won't work :-). 

Questions or suggestions, do feel free to email me at spiralcraft1701@gmail.com.

An Overview of Trademarks for Social Enterprises and Non-Profit Organisations

Social enterprises and non-profit organisations would of course be very familiar with the word “trademark”. 

You would probably have heard how “valuable” some trademarks, slogans and brands are as well....for example, everyone knows that the“Apple” brand and its corresponding apple-shaped trademark, is worth millions. Same goes for Nike’s “swoosh” and its trademarked slogan “Just Do It”. 

As your small social enterprise or non-profit organisation begins its journey, you might feel as though you need to know more about trademarks. The resources and links below will hopefully give you a better idea of what trademarks are and how they are protected in Malaysia (and internationally).

1. What qualifies for registration as a trademark?

Section 3 of the Trade Marks Act 1976 provides a list of stuff that could qualify for trademark registration. The list includes words, logos, slogans, heading, brands, names, signatures...basically, just about anything linked to sales and marketing of any product or service under the sun, could be a trademark. The "legalese" definition of a trademark, for those who are interested, is as below:

"… the mark is an indication of a connection in the course of trade between the goods/services, and, the owner of the trademark" (FYI, the “owner” is usually referred to as the “registered proprietor”).  

2. How is a trademark created and which statute contains the law governing trademarks?

The Malaysian Intellectual Property Office (MyIPO) provides a lot of useful, free information on trademarks as well as other forms of intellectual property. Some basic info on trademarks is here.

In short, trademarks are regulated by the Trade Marks Act 1976 (including all subsequent amendments thereto) and the corresponding regulations. 

3.Who can apply to register a trade mark?

Any person, whether a Malaysian citizen or not, who is the owner of the trade mark used or proposed to be used, by him in Malaysia, may apply for the registration of a trademark in Malaysia. The owner may be an individual, partnership, company or organization.

4.When can you apply for a trademark?

An application for trade mark may be filed at any time, whether it has been used, or has yet to be used. 

5.What can be registered as a trademark? 

Section 10 of the Act provides a list of what kinds of marks do and don't qualify for registration. Essentially, a trademark should be distinctive. This is a complicated way of saying that a trademark should be "different from other trademarks". For a more detailed list of the do's and don't, go to Section 10 of the Act.

6.What cannot be registered as a trade mark?

Some logos or words are statutorily prohibited from registration. See Section 14 of the Act and also, 

Also, Item 7 of the MyIPO Trademark FAQs.

7.What are “Classes” and why do I need to know about them?

Basically, trademarks (for products) and service marks (for services) are registered under different classes, which are arranged according to descriptions of the products and services. You can review all the trade and service mark classes here. As a general rule, service marks are always registered under Class 42. 

8.How do I do an online search and how do I file my application?

Before opting to file a trademark application, you should do a search first. This basically means that before 

filing your application, you should first check what other similar or even identical marks have already been grated registered trademark status, in your category of goods or services. This will help save you the time and costs involved in applying to register a trademark which is identical or 

similar to trademarks registered earlier on by other parties. 

All searches can be done at the Public Search Room, at the MyIPO. A fee of RM 20 per hour will be charged.Alternatively there is an online search option here. However, it is better to do a manual search just in case the online records have not been updated. A manual search can be done by completing and submitting Form TM4A and annexing a representation of the mark. Form TM4A and other forms can be downloaded from MyIPO's web portal, here.

As for the actual filing, there’s a list of forms and documents forming part of the application and a list of filing fees, here.. 

According to MyIPO’s website, each applicant must file form TM5 (5 copies) and submit a Statutory 

Declaration declaring ownership of the mark and pay the prescribed fee. If payment is by cheque/money 

order/postal order, it should be in the name of Perbadanan Harta Intelek Malaysia. 

One also needs to submit other supporting documents such as Form 49 for a company (sole proprietor and partnership), documents for Priority Date Claim (PDC) and others.

MyIPO’s website goes on to state that an application can be filed at, and inquiries can be made at, the 

following address :

    Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia (MyIPO)
    Unit 1-7, Ground Floor, Menara UOA Bangsar
    No. 5 Jalan Bangsar Utama 1
    59000 Kuala Lumpur
    Tel: +603-22998400
    Fax: +603-22998989

9.Is it necessary for an applicant to appoint a registered trade mark agent for purposes of filing an application?
 A local applicant may file a trade mark application directly himself. A foreign application can only be filed 

through a registered trade mark agent.

10.Who is a registered trade mark agent?
 A registered trade mark agent may be an individual, firm or company who has been registered in the 

Register of Trade Marks Agents. 

They are appointed by the applicants to act on their behalf, in obtaining trade mark registration.

While small social enterprises and non-profit organisations would of course need to economise and manage resources wisely, when it comes to intellectual property matters, I would suggest that you get the assistance of a registered trade mark agent right from the start. 

While a lot of information is available online, navigating the morass of rules, regulations and procedures is not at all a simple process. 

 You could make mistakes or waste time trying to work out what you need to do. Besides, online resources, including this article, cannot be taken to amount to proper legal advice. 

It is best to use a qualified trademark agent or intellectual property lawyer as such professionals are well-versed in the rules and regulations. Such agents are usually located in legal firms or in intellectual property consulting companies.

For a list of registered trademark agents in Malaysia go to MyIPO's List of Registered TM Agents.

11. How does one secure protection abroad?Does a Malaysian filing give you automatic protection in all countries in the world? 

No,so if you plan to expand your business to penetrate new markets in other countries, you’ll need to apply 

for registration separately in each of those countries. However, a Malaysian application can be used as a 

basis for claiming priority in countries which are parties to the Paris Convention and are members of the 

World Trade Organization (WTO).

In terms of costs, this is certainly an issue - as the more jurisdictions you need to protect your trademark in, the higher your application, prosecution, enforcement and renewal costs. Be sure to ask your trademark 

agent about these costs.

12.How long is a registered trademark valid? 

 In Malaysia, trade mark registration is valid for ten years from the date of application. The trademark may either be renewed every ten years, or allowed to lapse upon the expiration of the validity period. 

13.How long does it take to register in Malaysia and what is the process? 

A flowchart showing the end to end process is available on MyIPO's website. Flowchart and Expedited Examination Flowchart.

It should be noted that the exact timeframe will depend on whether there are any objections (from the Registrar) or oppositions (from third parties) to your application. If there are, you’ll need to overcome them before proceeding to the next step. If not, you’ll sail through the stages right up to registration. Given that the outcome depends on whether there are objections/oppositions or not, it’s not possible to 

predict exactly how long the process will take. 

14.Why register a trademark? What rights does the registered owner get? 

 Again, the MyIPO gives you a brief but clear explanation here under "Importance of Trademark Registration. In summary, registered proprietors (owners) get exclusive rights over the use of the mark in the course of trade. They also have the right to commence legal action for infringement against others who use their marks on products or in relation to services, without permission or a license.

15.Is trade mark registration compulsory?

 The purpose of trademark registration as discussed earlier, is really to obtain exclusive rights for purposes of exploitation and commencing infringement actions. However, registration is not compulsory.

16.What happens if the trade mark is not registered in an action for infringement?

So what happens if you didn’t register, and you find someone using your trademark? The reality is, the use of a registered trademark or service mark or even an unregistered one, without the permission of the owner, still amounts to an infringement and you as the owner of the mark would potentially still have a case.

However, there is a key difference. Registration of the mark is conclusive evidence of ownership of the mark and the exclusive right to deal with the trademark. It is therefore easier to win your case if you are the 

registered proprietor. 

If your mark is not registered however, it doesn’t mean you can’t commence legal action, but you won’t be able to so under the Act - instead, you’ll be in for a much harder time trying to establish the elements of what is known as the common law tort of passing-off. This case outlines a trademark dispute with the element of passing-off thrown in as well. 

17.What actions are prohibited under the Act? 

a) Unauthorized use of a similar or identical mark in respect of the same goods or services in a way that confuses or deceives the public;

b) Unauthorised use of a mark which is identical/highly similar to the registered mark, such that it imports a reference to the registered proprietor. 

18.Other than civil remedies involving the owner funding his own litigation in court, what other 

enforcement actions and criminal sanctions are available under the Act? 

As long as you are the registered proprietor of the trademark under the Act, you may avail yourself of the 

enforcement strategies under the Trade Descriptions Act 2011. Under this piece of legislation, you can apply to court for a declaratory order declaring that the particular trademark or get-up is is a false trade description. 

Under the Trade Description Act 2011, the enforcement division of the Ministry of Domestic Trade, Co-operatives and Consumerism can act on the complaint.

 This is especially useful when the trademark owner does not know who the infringer is - only that there are products in the market bearing a mark similar of identical to his registered trademark, and yet they were not manufactured or distributed by him. 

This article provides an overview of the Trade Descriptions Act.