Setting Up Your Organization

Before you run an assembly, it helps to set your organisation up correctly. The choices here are small in number but they shape sensible defaults across the platform — particularly whether voting is weighted by shares or counted one-per-member. This article covers what to configure and why.

Choose your organisation type

When you create your organisation, you tell Assembley what kind of body it is — for example a company, an association, a partnership, a housing association, or another type. This is the single most important setting, because it seeds defaults:

• Company-type organisations lean toward weighted voting — members are shareholders with capital and voting rights.
• Association-type organisations lean toward one-member-one-vote — every member carries equal weight.

The organisation type is a starting point, not a cage: you can still create individual voter groups of either type later. It simply seeds the default when you build a new group. See Voter Type: Company vs Association.

The participant label

Different organisations call their voters different things — shareholders, members, partners, homeowners. Assembley lets you set the label your organisation uses, and it appears throughout the interface instead of a generic term. It is cosmetic, but it makes the platform feel native to your organisation.

What to prepare next

With the basics set, the natural next steps are:

1. Build your voter register. Create a voter group and add the people who can vote — manually for a few, or by import for many. The group's type decides what details each voter needs. See Creating and Managing Voter Groups.
2. Decide on weighting. If your organisation uses different classes of shares or weighted votes, plan your share classes before importing a large register — they determine each voter's computed weight. See Understanding Share Classes and Voting Rights.
3. Invite your team. If colleagues will help administer assemblies, you can add them to your organisation with appropriate access. See Roles and Permissions.

A note on getting it right early

Two settings are worth a moment's thought up front because they ripple outward: your organisation type (it seeds voter-group defaults) and, for share-based organisations, your share-class structure (it drives every voter's voting weight). Everything else — adding voters, creating assemblies — is easy to adjust as you go.

Where to go next

Continue with Inviting and Onboarding Participants, or jump to Creating Your First Assembly when your register is ready. For the big picture, see How Digital General Assemblies Work.