Liana Watson, CAE
Liana Watson, D.M., PMP, CAE, is chief governance and external affairs officer at the American Society of Radiologic Technologists in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your association's chapters and components and their impact on your mission? Get started with this list of key performance indicators for component relations professionals.
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:
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:
How can CRPs gather and use KPI information?
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.