Dansk Puslespilsforening reached out to us in late 2025. They are Denmark's national puzzle association. Eight board members. Volunteers, all of them. Running a national organisation on top of their regular jobs.
They had seen the work we did for Talata Basketball and asked a simple question: could we do something similar for a board instead of a sports club?
The answer was yes. But first we needed to understand what was actually happening.
What we found when we audited their workflow.
We spent two sessions going through how the board actually operated day to day. Not how they thought they operated. How they actually did.
Three things stood out immediately.
First: three recurring email types went out every month, written from scratch every time. Same structure, same recipients, slightly different dates and numbers. Nobody had thought to template them. They just kept writing them.
Second: the deadline tracker lived in the chairman's head. There was no shared system. If you wanted to know when something was due, you asked him. He was the single point of failure for the entire organisation's calendar.
Third: board meeting notes were sent as reply-all email chains. By the time the fourth person responded, nobody could find the original. Items got dropped. Decisions got forgotten. The next meeting always started with ten minutes of "wait, did we agree on that?"
None of this was anyone's fault. These are smart, committed people. The problem was that the information had no structure. It lived in inboxes and in one person's memory, and nowhere else.
What we built.
Every Monday morning, every board member gets one email. Open tasks, who owns each one, and when it is due. Written automatically from a Google Sheet. Nobody has to compile it. Nobody has to send it. It just goes.
Any deadline entered in the sheet triggers an automatic reminder three days before it is due. The right people get notified. The chairman stops being the one who has to remember to remind everyone.
The three recurring monthly emails now live as templates. One row per task in a sheet. One click to send. The person sending them spends two minutes instead of forty. The emails look identical every time.
What changed.
The chairman stopped being the bottleneck. That was the biggest one. He told us after the first month that he felt like he had hired a part-time administrator, except it cost nothing and never missed a beat.
The board started showing up to meetings already knowing the agenda. Because the digest goes out Monday and the meeting is Thursday, everyone has had four days to look at what is open and who is responsible. The first ten minutes stopped being catch-up and started being actual work.
Nobody missed a deadline the next quarter. Not one.
The lesson we keep taking away from these projects.
The problem in most foreninger is not the people. The people are almost always capable and genuinely motivated. The problem is that the information lives in one person's inbox, and nobody else can see it.
When you are the only one who knows what is due, you become the bottleneck. Not because you want to be. Because the system made you one.
Automation does not replace people. It just makes information visible to everyone who needs it, at the right time, without someone having to remember to share it.
That is the whole thing. Everything else follows from that.
Does your forening run on email threads and good intentions?
Book a free 30-minute audit. We will show you exactly what to automate first. No pitch, no pressure. Just a clear look at your setup and where to start.
Book a Free Auditor visit: rhynoflow.com