An #Association Powered Career

This post was provided by Victoria See, Marketing Manager with MultiView, and offers a compelling story about how association membership has worked for her.  Thanks so much for sharing Victoria!

My association membership got me my job.

You can really stop reading there. That’s the story. My association membership got me my job. Without my association membership, I would not have been hired four years ago by a fantastic company that saw my potential and pushed me to it and even beyond it. Without my association membership, I don’t know where I’d be, but I wouldn’t be succeeding like I am now.

I’ll paint you a picture. It’s 2009. August. The Great Recession had never been greater—or worse, if you’re a recently graduated 22-year-old with nothing but internships under her belt. I was desperate. My internship had ended without an offer because they just didn’t have the money. I was living with my parents. I was sending out resumes and posting my portfolio, doing everything I could think of to find a job.

And then, one day, like magic, I got a phone call. MultiView wanted to know if I could come in for an interview. MultiView? I hadn’t heard of them. If I’d sent in a resume there, I was pretty sure I’d recognize the company name, at least. I was drawing a total blank.

Cut to two days later. I interviewed—and I was hired on the spot. I finally found the courage to ask just how I’d gotten in the door in the first place; and that’s what I found out: my new boss had found me on the AIGA member website.

Yup. As a student member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, I had posted my resume, clips of my work and a link to my website as part of my profile. “Looking for a new designer,” said boss who had perused local profiles. He found my profile and had HR bring me in for an interview. Without that membership, I never would have had this job.

Maybe not all stories are as direct as mine. Maybe a prospective employer sees an association on a resume and is herself a member.  Maybe her company partners with that association. An association membership connotes a seriousness about that profession that little else can.

Associations also provide unique networking opportunities that can help you get a foot in the door. Even most nationwide associations will have local chapters that meet once a month—a monthly meeting of professionals in your industry that you can rub elbows with, collect business cards from and meet with for professional advice. Even if the people you meet don’t hire you outright, they can point you in the right direction or pass on the tips they’ve picked up along in their careers that have gotten them to where they are now.

What’s your association story?

Associations are Grasping for Growth [Infographic]

Top 5 Challenges In Dealing With Multiple Chapters

Lori Halley provided this guest post.  She is the Blog Writer (Engaging Apricot) at Wild Apricot, cloud software for small associations, non-profits and clubs. With a background in associations and non-profits, Lori tries to offer tips and information to help the staff and volunteers of small organizations with day-to-day challenges.  We thought this was an interesting perspective on multi-chapter associations and their communications.

We recently released our final report on the Multi-Chapter Benchmarking Survey that we conducted this summer. The survey report and an additional highlights article, summarize both the benchmarking data and insight into the unique characteristics and practices of organizations with multiple chapters, branches or affiliates. But in addition, we wanted to offer an inside look at some of the specific challenges that multi-chapter organizations or HQ's) face.

As we noted in our post – Insight into Multi-Chapter Relationships – one of the key themes that ran through the survey responses was that multi-chapter organizations have both special, and often complicated, relationships between the central organization (or head office) and the chapters. Since our survey gathered information and insight from both the chapter and central organization point of view, we thought we’d share some of the candid responses we received to one of the open-ended questions in our survey:

What are the key challenges or hurdles central organizations face in dealing with multiple chapters?

Maintaining consistent organizational practices across chapters

In looking through the survey responses, we found, understandably, that establishing and maintaining standard, consistent procedures and practices across a number of often disparate and dispersed chapters was a key challenge. The following verbatim answers illustrate the central organization’s challenges:

• “Getting chapters to function as part of a larger organization and not isolated organizations.”
• “Political tug-of-war about who owns what.”
• “Inconsistent quality of service delivery; variety of locally autonomous groups setting their own processes and policies.”

Communication

Communications were identified as a key challenge for both chapters and HQs. The following verbatim comments demonstrate the communications issues central organizations face in dealing with their chapters:

• “Lack of communication from chapters to the central organization.”
• “Communicating - there are e-mails coming to people from our national organization and from our local organization. Nobody wants to read 7 e-mails a day from our organization's various entities.”
• “Two way communication and insuring timely task completion.”

Membership data management

As providers of membership management software, we understand the many challenges organizations face in maintaining membership databases, managing renewals and growing your membership. But the survey findings confirmed that these processes can be even more complicated when information is captured, stored, or shared between central organizations and numerous chapters. These survey responses articulate some of the “hurdles” multi-chapter HQ's face with their chapters:

• "Integration of local data with national data.”
• “Trying to reconcile membership reports with chapters is a BIG issue - especially since we don't get immediate reports about new members, etc. because we only get reports once a month!”

Leadership development and turnover

Since chapters are often volunteer-led, HQ participants suggested they face challenges in developing and maintaining effective volunteer leaders:

• “Maintaining volunteer personnel”
• “Leadership or talent development at the level of the boards of local chapters”
• “Lack of involvement from chapter officers”

Website management

Our survey findings suggest that website management is a challenge for both HQ and Chapters – with 62.7% of chapters being responsible for developing their own websites, and just under 13% receiving technical support and guidance from their central organization. Here are some of HQ’s challenges:

• “Keeping consistent with website and processes.”
• “One of the hardest challenges is that a lot of our Branch leaders do not handle technology very well.”
• “Getting the local chapters to find and develop web experts to manage their local pages.”

What challenges do you face in dealing with your multiple chapters?

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Member Relationships [Infographic]