Guide2 June 2026
Can an AGM be held online? What organisations actually need to consider
Short answer: usually yes, but it depends on your governing document rather than on general law, and that is the thing most organisations check last.
Daniel Wilkinson
Founder and Operations Director, dwmedia
This is not legal advice. Take advice on your own rules.
The document that decides it
For a company, the articles of association. For a registered society or a housing association, the rules. For a charity, the governing document. These say where and how the AGM may be held, and some of them still assume everyone is in a room.
Many organisations updated theirs during the pandemic to allow virtual or hybrid meetings explicitly. Plenty did not, and are now running hybrid meetings on rules that do not clearly permit it. Worth checking before the notice goes out rather than after a member queries it.
Fully virtual, or hybrid?
Fully virtual means nobody meets in person. Cheaper, simpler technically, and it excludes members who are not confident online. For a tenant-facing organisation that exclusion is a real consideration.
Hybrid means a physical meeting that remote members can join and participate in. More expensive and more complex, and generally the better answer where membership is broad, older, or geographically spread.
Participation is the hard part, not viewing
Anyone can broadcast a meeting. The requirements that bite are about whether remote attendees can genuinely take part.
- Can they be counted for quorum? Depends on your rules.
- Can they ask questions? In practice this means a moderated route for written questions, read out and answered on the record, or a way to bring a remote speaker into the room audio.
- Can they vote, and can the vote be verified? This is the piece worth spending money on. A show of hands in a room plus a poll online needs to combine into one auditable result.
- Is the audio good enough that they can follow it? A meeting a remote member cannot hear properly is a meeting they did not attend.
Accessibility
For tenant-facing and public bodies, live captions are increasingly expected and in-vision British Sign Language is frequently requested. Both are easier to plan in than to add, and both need booking ahead in the autumn AGM season.
Practical timing
Interpreters and captioners book up. Venues with the right access book up. Start the production conversation when you set the date, not when you send the notice.
More in our AGM live streaming guide and on housing association AGMs.
Written by
Daniel Wilkinson
Founder and Operations Director, dwmedia
Dan has run live production since 2014, from single-camera council committee streams to sixty-date arena tours. He has worked in 18 UK arenas including The O2, the AO Arena and the OVO Hydro, and covers 16 or more festivals and 30 or more arena dates a year. He writes these from the job rather than from a desk.