StarChapter of October: Charlotte NACE

Being a board member of the Charlotte NACE chapter is the past year must have been a rewarding endeavor. From setting up the “board buddy” program to winning the Educational Program of the Year at the national NACE EXPERIENCE! Conference, the chapter grew in membership and recognition. We spoke with their board to learn about how they operate and constantly improve membership value. Their biggest advice to board members - Communication, Consistency, and Accountability.

1. What was Charlotte NACE’s strategy for engaging new members in the past year?

Our main objective in Charlotte NACE is to be a welcoming community of event professionals. We want to ensure new members feel comfortable at each of our events and feel like they are making meaningful connections. We begin our process by assigning new members a “board buddy.”  This person on the board is responsible for reaching out to the new member and seeing if they can meet up at our next meeting or see if they need any assistance with the NACE website. They are almost like a mentor and ensure that the new member is getting all the latest information and feels included in their new membership.

2. Tell us about a successful event/meeting you organized last year.

Our most successful event last year, “My Big Fat Gay Wedding”, actually won Educational Program of the Year for 2015 at EXPERIENCE! Conference. Through a combination of speakers and panel discussion, this event educated our membership on how to plan and best support the LGBT community when planning their weddings. The certified professional speakers were joined on the panel by two gay couples in the midst of planning their weddings. The question and answer format allowed attendees to get the answers they needed. The event was set up like a wedding ceremony with a cocktail hour as guest arrived, a ceremony set up for the discussion and reception following, complete with a rainbow layered wedding cake.

3. The NACE network is extensive. Do you get ideas on how to improve membership value from other NACE chapters?

We do! We take members of our board each year to both conference and Evolve to ensure that we are getting the education and connections of other chapters.  We appreciate the open forums that NACE provides in both their conferences and in their webinars. We got a lot of ideas about how to make stronger programs and make registering for events easier through some of the classes we attended. The feedback from other chapters on ideas of how to improve membership value has truly assisted us on finding programs that work.

4. Do you have any tips/advice to share with other board volunteers?

The success of our chapter relies solely on the board members. We all have to work cohesively to help our chapter be the best it can be. To do this, we communicate regularly and hold our monthly board and executive board meetings, without exception. It is the expectation of the President and Immediate Past President that everyone follows through with their commitments. The President and IPP are responsible for holding everyone accountable. To summarize, here are our three ideas of how to manage the chapter:

• Communicate
• Be consistent with monthly meetings
• Be accountable

5. What is in store for the members of Charlotte NACE next year?

We are SO excited about next year! We hope to cross over into another arena next year with 100+ members. We are continuing to grow our chapter and with that come new ideas and resources. We want to truly focus on member value and are working on some ways to host member only events that give our members a value that they wouldn’t have as guests. In addition, we are working on some really stimulating programs.  We are focusing on ensuring that we give our members what they want with strong networking programs and educationally driven programs. This year for Charlotte NACE it is all about growth and awareness for our Chapter. We want to be an organization that represents the Charlotte community as a whole and takes our industry here to a new level.

6. How did StarChapter help you run Charlotte NACE and reach its goals?  

What makes our chapter successful is communication and organization, and StarChapter helps us achieve both! All of our communication with members and guests runs through the site including monthly newsletters, meeting invitations and surveys. All meeting registration is handled through the site and we love the reports that can be run through StarChapter. They help us gain knowledge about our chapter which helps us adjust to the changing needs of our membership. 

StarChapter of September: AAF Cincinnati

Oftentimes, chapters struggle with attracting more members to volunteer for different positions on the board. AAF Cincinnati seems to have figure out how to recruit the right candidates with the right skillset to lead the chapter. Judy Thompson, their Executive Director, provides a unique perspective on chapter management practices, including how to tap into members’ volunteer spirits, and how StarChapter assisted in establishing their brand while removing the technical difficulties of running the chapter. Plus, she talks about successes and failures of the past year, and how they learned from them.

1. What was AAF Cincinnati's strategy for engaging new members in the past year?

 This past year, we focused on getting prospects to come to our no-charge "20 Minutes+ A Beer" functions, where our Membership Committee would zero in, get business cards, and engage the potential members. Unfortunately, the conversions weren't in the quantity we had expected. While we will keep doing that, we will also be looking at other ways to get people more involved. For our Board retreat in August, we brought Carol Weisman as our facilitator. Carol is a consultant with an impressive track record for helping non-profit boards. With Carol's help, we hope to get our 2016-2017 club year off to a great start.

2. Tell us about a successful event/meeting you organized last year.

One of our more successful luncheon meetings this year featured generational scholar Chuck Underwood on the topic "Connecting with Millennials: It's About Core Values." We have had Chuck as a speaker before, but his topics have involved Boomers and GenX. With the current interest in targeting Millennials as purchasers as well as entry-level employees, the time seemed right to bring him back. 

Attendance was good but below what we had expected, and those who attended were truly impressed. GenX participants were especially impressed with how Mr. Underwood knew and accurately defined the differences between them and their younger Millennial co-workers. And Boomers were pretty pumped over the similarities in Millennials and their own Boomer generation. It was one of our most talked-about luncheons, one that our members and prospects alike will remember while utilizing some of the good advice that Chuck provided. In fact, some actually decided to purchase Chuck's latest book on Amazon after attending that luncheon meeting.

3. The AAF network is extensive. Do you get ideas on how to improve membership value from other AAF chapters?

AAF has a very strong network of Executive Directors across the country. While we all get together in person just once a year at our June National Conference, we stay connected throughout the year, using our shared email addresses as well as an active LinkedIn and Facebook connections. We reach out to each other when we are facing issues, when we enjoy a fabulous success, and when we are looking for brilliant new ideas and new ways of doing business. As an example, in discussing the need for more non-dues revenue, another executive director told me what great success they'd had in charging for non-members to post Job Openings on their StarChapter website. So, as a trial, I asked my intern to figure out what we had to do to begin charging non-members to post jobs there. She helped me set it up; we set the charge at $75 per posting. And without promoting it or reaching out at all, we let it just sit there, and earned $600 over about six months. In the coming year, we plan to promote it and see how it will grow our non-dues revenues.

4. Do you have any tips/advice to share with other board volunteers?

My best advice for other chapter leaders (and I was a volunteer leader AAF Cincinnati long before becoming its Executive Director) would be to encourage participation by each of your members. So often, there are potential leaders who simply go undiscovered because no one asks them to help out with one small task. Remarkably, that one small task can be all it takes to tap into their volunteer spirit. I've found over the years that, if you go after ONLY those who raise their hand first, you can overlook a lot of untapped talent.

5. What is in store for the members of AAF Cincinnati next year?

With our half day Board Retreat in the last week of August, I am looking forward to a most exceptional year. Our volunteer President has decided to stay on for a second term, to reach some of the goals that weren't reached in his first year as a president. This year's Board nominees were recruited more methodically than in the recent past, zeroing in on the qualities we'd been missing. Key was that nominees had all received explicit endorsement from their companies' senior management. Further, the nominating committee was instructed not to tell any "little white lies" about the workload inherent in accepting a board role. Instead, we focused on ensuring potential candidates that, while the responsibilities weren't always easy, the outcomes were always rewarding. Further, we explained those rewards in terms those candidates would find meaningful.

6. How did StarChapter help you run AAF Cincinnati and reach its goals?  

StarChapter has made a huge difference in how we manage our organization. The simplicity of website updating and messaging consistency has helped us to focus on establishing our brand, rather than just dealing with the technology. What's more, we have found the StarChapter "help" assistance to be consistently easy-to-reach and useful (without being patronizing) in their explanations, instructions and advice -- most refreshingly so! Having contracted with another company with a similar -- but far more expensive -- product, I used to wait for 2 hours or more on "hold" for their 800 # help line, only to get someone who enjoyed making me feel like an idiot.  So, StarChapter is a joy! With StarChapter's newer bells and whistles, which never causes the customer price increases! We find them and utilize them at our own pace. Nobody is pushing us to utilize and we can implement whatever we'd like whenever we'd like. I couldn't be happier!