Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write a weekly team update as Event Agency Founders

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Event Agency Founders4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every Friday afternoon you're pulling the week's update from four places at once: Gmail threads with caterers and AV vendors, a Google Drive folder of event timelines and mood boards, HoneyBook or Dubsado for proposal status, and whatever notes you scrawled in a notebook during Tuesday's client walkthrough. You're the only one who knows which vendor quotes are still outstanding, which contracts haven't come back signed, and which leads went quiet after the first call. Writing the update takes 45 minutes you don't have, and half your team still doesn't know what's changed since last week.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Event Agency Founders4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A weekly team update that auto-pulls open leads, unsigned contracts, outstanding vendor quotes, and overdue invoices from your actual working stack — so you're not hunting for numbers on Friday afternoon

Meeting notes from every client walkthrough and vendor call, with action items extracted and assigned, so nothing lives only in your head

A shared, searchable knowledge base your team can actually use — run-of-show templates, vendor contact sheets, client preferences — so the intern isn't asking you the same question twice

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Meeting Notes Knowledge Management Project Management Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Gmail so the Email Agent can pull vendor and client threads. Google Calendar is synced on a schedule so meeting context feeds into Meeting Notes. Notion is synced on a schedule so existing docs and vendor sheets can live in Knowledge Management. Google Drive is reachable from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query files live. HoneyBook and Dubsado are automated through your browser — no API needed — so proposal and contract status gets pulled into your weekly update.

Prompts to copy

Every Monday morning, pull last week's Meeting Notes summaries, any tasks marked complete or overdue in Project Management, and a summary of open email threads about outstanding vendor quotes or unsigned contracts from Email Agent. Format it as a team update I can paste into Slack: open leads this week, proposals out, contracts not yet returned, vendor quotes outstanding, invoices overdue, and top 3 priorities for the coming week.

After each client walkthrough or vendor call, save the Meeting Notes transcript and extract action items — assign anything vendor-related to the vendor coordinator, anything client-facing to me, and anything internal to the relevant team member. Add those tasks to Project Management automatically.

Take all the run-of-show templates, vendor contact lists, and event planning checklists in my Google Drive and import them into Knowledge Management so the team can search for them instead of asking me.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail so Starch syncs your inbox on a schedule. The Email Agent will scan vendor and client threads and flag anything that's gone unanswered more than 48 hours — outstanding quotes, contracts sent but not returned, invoices past due.

2 Connect Google Calendar so Starch syncs your events on a schedule. Every client walkthrough, venue visit, or vendor call that lands on your calendar automatically triggers a Meeting Notes session when the event starts.

3 During each call, Meeting Notes transcribes in real time and generates a summary with key decisions — which florals got approved, which AV quote the client wants revised, which load-in time changed.

4 After the call ends, Meeting Notes extracts action items and assigns them: vendor follow-ups go to your vendor coordinator, client deliverables go to you, internal tasks go to the right team member. These tasks land automatically in Project Management.

5 Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog so your existing planning docs, run-of-show templates, and vendor contact sheets sync into Knowledge Management. Your team searches once instead of asking you.

6 Set up browser automation so Starch logs into HoneyBook or Dubsado each week and pulls proposal status, contract status, and invoice aging — no API needed. This data feeds the weekly update.

7 Configure the weekly update automation to run every Friday at 3 PM: pull Meeting Notes summaries from the past seven days, open and overdue tasks from Project Management, unresolved email threads from Email Agent, and contract/invoice status from your CRM browser pull.

8 Starch formats the update as a structured Slack message or doc: open leads, proposals out, contracts not returned, vendor quotes outstanding, top 3 priorities for next week. You review and send — or set it to post automatically.

9 Use Knowledge Management to build onboarding paths for new coordinators or interns: day-of checklists, preferred vendor lists, how you handle client revisions. When someone joins, they read the wiki instead of shadowing you for a week.

10 Tune the Email Agent to draft first-response emails to new inquiry leads in your voice — pulling event date, venue type, and guest count from the inquiry form — so leads get a reply within the hour even when you're on-site.

11 Each week, the Project Management workload view shows which team member has too many open tasks before a big event weekend. You can reassign before Friday instead of discovering the pile-up on Saturday morning.

12 After each event closes, use Starch to archive the Meeting Notes, final run-of-show, vendor contacts, and any lessons learned into a named Knowledge Management folder so the next similar event starts with a real template, not a blank page.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Week of May 12 2026 — two active weddings, one corporate gala in proposal

Sample numbers from a real run

Leads this week	3
Proposals out (not yet signed)	2
Contracts sent, not returned	1
Vendor quotes outstanding (florist, AV)	2
Invoices overdue (50% deposit, Hartley wedding)	1
Action items extracted from calls this week	14
Action items assigned to team (not founder)	9

On Friday at 3 PM, Starch pulls everything automatically. The Email Agent flags that the AV vendor for the June 14 corporate gala hasn't responded to a quote request sent Tuesday — that's been sitting in your inbox unanswered for 72 hours. Meeting Notes surfaces that during Wednesday's venue walkthrough you agreed to a revised load-in time of 7 AM, but nobody had created a task to update the day-of timeline yet — Starch extracted that action item and assigned it to your coordinator. The browser automation checked HoneyBook and found the Hartley wedding still has a $2,400 deposit invoice outstanding, due ten days ago. The weekly update goes to your team at 3:07 PM: three active leads, two proposals out (Nguyen corporate dinner and the Sullivan anniversary party), one contract not yet back from the Sullivans, two vendor quotes to chase, one overdue invoice to follow up on, and nine tasks already assigned to the team for next week. You spent eleven minutes reviewing it. Last week, the same update took you 50 minutes to write by hand.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time from new inquiry to first personalized response (target: under 2 hours on business days)

Contracts outstanding more than 5 days after proposal sent

Vendor quotes unresolved within 72 hours of request

Action items extracted per event week vs. action items completed before event date

Invoices overdue by more than 14 days as a percentage of active events

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Writing the update manually from Gmail + HoneyBook + Drive

You control every word, but it takes 45-60 minutes every Friday and only happens if you have time — which you don't after a site visit.

Notion as a team wiki + manual meeting notes

Notion is a good doc store, but someone still has to write the meeting notes and weekly update by hand; Starch generates both automatically from your calendar and inbox.

HoneyBook's built-in reporting

HoneyBook shows you proposal and invoice status inside HoneyBook, but it doesn't combine with your vendor email threads, calendar notes, or team task list in one weekly summary.

Slack weekly standup bot (Geekbot or similar)

Standup bots collect answers from your team but don't pull live data from your CRM, inbox, or contracts — you're still aggregating manually before the bot posts anything meaningful.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — meeting notes, knowledge management, project management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My agency uses HoneyBook, not a CRM with a direct API. Can Starch still pull proposal and contract status?

Yes. Starch automates HoneyBook through your browser — no API needed. It logs in, navigates to your active projects, and reads proposal status, contract status, and invoice aging the same way you would. The same approach works for Dubsado or any other web-based studio management tool your agency uses.

Does Starch store all my client emails and contracts?

Starch syncs your Gmail inbox on a schedule — messages and labels — so the Email Agent can work with your threads. It doesn't store file attachments or act as a document management system. Signed contracts attached to emails stay in your Gmail or Google Drive; Starch reads and acts on the context, not the file itself.

What if my team doesn't all use the same tools? My coordinator uses Asana and I use a spreadsheet.

Starch connects to Asana from its integration catalog, and Google Sheets is reachable the same way. You can describe a unified Project Management view to Starch that pulls tasks from both sources, or migrate your team to the built-in Project Management app so everything lives in one place — your call.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I sometimes handle client NDAs and financial info.

Not yet. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If a client contract requires SOC 2 compliance from your vendors, that's worth knowing upfront. For most independent event agencies handling client info through Gmail and Google Drive, this isn't a blocker, but it's an honest limit worth naming.

Will the weekly update actually sound like something I wrote, or will it read like a bot?

You control the format. Tell Starch how you structure your updates — whether that's a bullet list by event, a section for each team member's open items, or a short narrative paragraph followed by a task list — and it outputs that structure every week. The more specific your prompt, the closer it is to your voice. Most founders tweak it for two or three weeks and then send it as-is.

Can Starch handle meeting notes for in-person venue walkthroughs, not just Zoom calls?

Meeting Notes works from a transcript. If you record your in-person walkthrough on your phone and upload it, Starch can transcribe and summarize from that. For live Zoom or Google Meet calls it works automatically. In-person recording requires you to bring a recording — Starch doesn't have a mobile app that records in the background today.