As the association professional who works with and manages volunteers, geographic or specialty components, and volunteers who manage components, the work of the component relations professional (CRP) requires wearing many hats—and not just the same hat of a different color, but hats that serve different purposes.

Measuring success as a CRP and the success of our work with components requires strategic-level competencies, as outlined in the ASAE Job Task Analysis. Tasks include establishing policies, processes, and resources to support components and volunteers. It also includes developing recruitment and retention strategies that help to maintain strong relationships with the groups that CRP's interact with.

Components and volunteers are a large part of the parent organization's value proposition and should be viewed in that way. How do you know if you are hitting the mark and making a difference as a CRP? By using key performance indicators for your components and volunteers.

Promote key performance indicators as a tool to help components and volunteers drive their own success.

KPIs provide a mechanism for developing measures of success and benchmarking within the organization, and they provide the opportunity for CRPs to help parent associations and their components and volunteers with:

• alignment, by ensuring everyone is headed in the same direction and is on the same page
• quality control, by incorporating a minimum level of quality throughout the system (parent to component to volunteer)
• mitigating risk, by helping to minimize legal, financial, and brand liability

There are two primary focuses for KPIs: those that focus on the organization and those that focus on members.

Indicators that focus on serving the organization include the compliance items such as legal requirements (bylaws, federal and state regulations, and organizational policies and procedures), financial responsibility (budgets, financial policies, taxes, and audits), brand (managing the organization's public "face," as components and volunteers are the peer-to-peer connection to your members).

Indicators that focus on serving the member measure how components and volunteers are reaching members where the parent association cannot and include:

• Mission and vision: Are the components and volunteers working toward the same vision as the parent association?
• Member engagement and satisfaction: Are members happy with what the components and volunteers are doing and offering?
• Recruitment and retention: What are components and volunteers doing to recruit and retain members, and how are they contributing to growing membership in component and lead organization?

How can CRPs gather and use KPI information?

• Promote KPIs as a tool to help components and volunteers drive their own success, and let them know what they will get out of tracking and documenting these measures.
• Use a dashboard with the most important indicators listed at the top. Member-focused gauges, such as engagement, leadership, and communications, should be at the top of the list because, to the member, these are the most important in terms of recruitment and retention.
• Make the reporting tool objective, self-reporting, and relevant to the work of the component or volunteers.
• Use the information gathered to educate, not punish. Provide information about benchmarking against other components, talk about the dashboard as a way to get a snapshot of where the component or volunteer is today and to measure progress toward goals.
• Provide avenues for components and volunteers to talk about the KPIs and brainstorm strategies for improvement.

The most important aspect of using KPIs is to remain flexible. There is no one-size-fits-all program, and components each run a little differently. Figure out how to get the information you need in a way that is easiest and useful to component and volunteers. The better the information you receive from components and volunteers, the more you will understand about the difference you are making to your association through components and volunteers.

For more information on gathering and measuring KPIs, Mariner Management & Marketing LLC has compiled a list of Tech Tools for Chapters.