Show Notes

Mastering the Essentials of Running an Association: 5 Key Points

In this episode of the Service Game Podcast, host Julie Krieger delves into the foundational elements required to run a successful not-for-profit association. Julie shares her expertise from 14 years of experience, outlining five key themes crucial for establishing and maintaining an effective and value-adding association. These include understanding your mission, developing a strategic plan, setting up efficient systems and processes, identifying required resources, and regularly tracking and reviewing your progress. Listeners are offered practical advice, downloadable resources, and insights on building a sustainable and mission-driven organisation.

00:00 Introduction to the Service Game Podcast

00:56 The Fundamentals of Running an Association

01:40 Key Theme 1: Know Why You Exist

03:53 Key Theme 2: Have a Plan

05:19 Key Theme 3: Establish Systems and Processes

08:10 Key Theme 4: Understand Your Resources

11:58 Key Theme 5: Track, Review, and Iterate

15:45 Recap and Conclusion

16:39 Outro and Additional Resources

Links:

www.onsomble.com.au

Show transcript

Welcome to the Service Game Podcast brought to you by onsomble. I'm your host, Julie Krieger. For the past 14 years, I've been helping associations to grow and thrive, establishing systems, writing policies and procedures, implementing membership and sponsorship strategies.

Setting up operations, undertaking complete governance restructures, developing strategies, and advising CEOs, presidents, and boards. I am driven to support the hardworking people who give their time, heart, and soul in the service of their members and in the pursuit of the greater good.  Join me as we delve deep into this innovative, creative, values based and mission driven thing I call the service game.  Let's get going with today's episode.

In this episode, everything you need to know about running an association in one short podcast episode.  Just kidding. Of course, that would be impossible, but I'm here to let you in on a secret. It's actually not hard to run an effective, productive, and value adding association for your members. If you get a few fundamentals, right, so what are these fundamentals of which you speak, Julie?

Well, there are five key themes or areas that I want to cover on today's episode that will help you set the foundations right for the running of your not for profit association. Delving right in. 

Number one.  Know why you exist, and I mean get really, really clear on why you are there and what you're there to do.

I like to start by setting and developing with your board a really clear mission, vision and values document.  Your mission of course, and we'll go into this in another episode in much more detail. We also have a cheat sheet on the website that you can download. The mission should tell the world what it is exactly that you are going to achieve.

We are here to....  That's our mission. 

Your vision is what you want to see happen if you were to achieve your mission.  So your vision might start with "a world in which", or "a society in which", something happens or something looks a certain way because of the effort that we've put in.

And your values, of course, are those defining statements that tell the world what you stand for, what you believe in, and how you want to operate....the set of rules, I guess, by which you will operate as an organisation. They're your values, your core principles. 

The next thing that you want to have in that, we're still on 1 - know why you exist. You want to develop a really clear elevator pitch, which sounds a little bit corporate, but actually it's really important for every business to be able to, in a couple of sentences or,  as the name suggests, in the space of getting into an elevator and getting out on the fifth floor, be able to tell the person standing next to you in that elevator exactly, succinctly, quickly, and really clearly who you are  what you do.  And of course, you need to really, really clearly understand who you serve, get to know your audience and your members, and what it is that they need from you, their pain points, what drives them, how you can add value to their daily lives and to their own working lives in the field that you represent.

So that's point one, know why you exist. 

Point two follows logically from that. Have a plan.  Develop a strategic plan. It's got to cover a period of time between three and five years and no more.  Anything over that, in my view, starts to become just a little too distant, a little too pie in the sky.  So much happens in the space of a year, let alone five years or more. That make it virtually impossible to set a plan. You might set your mission or your vision based on 10 years. You know, in 10 years time, our vision is a world in which X happens or doesn't happen.  But that's not your strategic plan. Your strategic plan, three to five years and no more.  Everything in that strategic plan needs to map back to your vision, your mission, and your values.

So from the strategic plan, then you need to develop  your annual operating plans and budgets.  You can see how this is a trickle down effect from the high level stuff, Then into a longer term plan of how you're going to achieve your mission and vision.  And then into an operating plan, which  covers a period of 12 months at a time. And a budget that accompanies that. And if you've got those foundational documents together, you are a long way towards making running your association a pretty easy process. 

So point three, after you've  developed all your plans, is to establish clear and concise systems and processes.

And these are the kind of guidelines by which you will operate, and all of your team operates, and your board will operate.  Most associations these days operate fully online,  without an office, certainly in the small to medium space, a lot of associations don't have an office and don't want to have an office and frankly don't need to have an office.

So most of your subscriptions and the systems and platforms that you will use to run your association are going to be cloud based.   You need to develop a simple, clear ecosystem of platforms that you're going to use every day in the running of your association. They need to be accessible to the people who need to see them to be able to do their jobs.

They need to be cost effective,  and They need to be set up well from the very beginning to make it just easy to use, intuitive for people to use, easy to onboard new people, whether they be at board level or staff.  And  the most cost effective and streamlined set of systems that you can find.

There's a lot of systems out there and there's a lot of opportunity to spend a lot of money pretty quickly every month on recurring subscriptions. It's definitely something to keep an eye on, and we will definitely do an episode on systems and platforms at a later stage in our podcast.  So stay tuned for that.

But if you get this in place well,  you will set yourself up for really efficient operations, but not only efficient, also consistent, no matter who is delivering the service. If you've got a change in staff or a change in leadership.  the same processes are in place and replicable  into the future, which gives you members a much more consistent experience. And consistency is key as we all know.

So you'll also need a suite of working documents to keep moving with.  And you'll start, of course, with your constitution.  You'll go down then through, again, in this trickle down effect, through your board charter, your policies, your procedures, and finally your operating manual or operations manual.

And you might have different ones for different aspects of your business. Like, for example, your conference might have its own operations manual.  But your administration and membership processes might have a separate one. So, again, trickle down effect, keeping it all simple. Set and clear from the very beginning, and then everyone who has any touchpoints with your processes  follows the guidelines and everything's consistent.

Number four, understand what resources you need to deliver against your plan.  And when I say resources, there are a number of different things. One is the platforms and systems that we've just touched on in point three. Another, of course, is money. You need a budget. You need to understand what revenue you've got coming in  and what expenditure you've got and are incurring in the delivery of service to your members. And you need then to understand what profit you have and And yes, I said profit.

I know we're talking not for profit associations, but just a little quick word on that. Not for profit does not mean that you can, and indeed should, have surplus money at the end of every operating period. You absolutely should.

And the reason for that is that you need to be reliable. Viable into the future and you need as you grow as an organization to have the surplus funds available to deliver  growing and evolving needs of your membership. You cannot do that if you're breaking even or worse losing money every year. So yes, we want profit in a not for profit.

The simple thing about not for profit as a, a concept is  you cannot. Share that surplus  funding  with your board directors or your staff or any of your members. That's the definition of it. Broadly speaking, you just can't distribute it other than  as a benefit to members. So yes, we need profit.

So you need to understand your money. You need to understand what money you're going to need to deliver against your program of activity in your operating plans.  Of course, you're going to need. a really good association management system or a good database. Let's call it.  It doesn't have to be specifically for associations, although there are definitely benefits to using those.

You're going to need a good simple accounting package and a great system to manage your documents, your files,  your planning and reporting, and perhaps some internal communications as well. And for that, I'm thinking a system like Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Teams,  or the Google suite. So those are the two main ones.

And then of course, the big one under resources is people.  Whether you have purely a volunteer board who are engaged in actually running the organisation, whether you have some team or a paid team member, or whether you're outsourcing, you need to understand what. Human resource is going to be required to deliver the benefits to your members that you have promised them.

And that just needs to be mapped out and determined. There are so many options. And again, we'll cover that in future episodes.  But you know, there are so many ways  to staff an organization  in a way that not only enables you to deliver against your plan and your strategic plan and your goals, but also in a way that is flexible to allow for you to increase your resourcing  as needs demand it,  or as your finances enable it.

But also you might have a project that comes up that is going to run for a discreet period of time. and then it's going to disappear again. So you need some flexibility built in there, especially when you're a smaller scale association, and there are lots of different ways to do that.  So people is another element of the resources that you need to put in place well to enable smooth and streamlined operations into the future.

And the fifth and final element is to track, review, and iterate. Everything you do in your organisation, you should be able to measure in some way.  So you need to start, as you mean to go on, and set things up now, so that as you go forward, you can pull reports, so that you know exactly what reports you want to be pulling, and that will be largely directed by your board.

The board should be the one saying, we want to be able to check. these things at regular intervals. And so your systems then need to be  embedded into your processes in a way that enables you to track the measurables that you've identified as being important.

Then you need to set regular review and reporting points throughout the year. These might be aligned with your board meetings.  If you've got monthly board meetings, that can be too frequent.  And it's often the case that a part time executive officer will spend a really large portion of their time between board meetings, actually reporting for the next board meeting, preparing for and reporting and submitting reports.

And it's just at that point, hugely inefficient. I've been there. I know what that's like, where you've got maybe, if you've got a monthly board meeting and you're only working two days a week as an EO,  you've got eight days, eight working days between meetings. So you really need to think carefully about how you use that time. And do you want to spend a day of it potentially pulling reports, writing reports,  and presenting papers for the board.  And you need to rely on your board  to take a reasonable measured approach to what they want to see. Perhaps you can agree, if you can't agree, to reduce the frequency of those board meetings to say every second month.  then perhaps you can agree that certain things are reported at certain intervals. So you might not report on everything every time,  but you might develop a,  schedule of reporting across the year so that you don't spend, you know, 10 percent of your working hours between meetings, actually  telling the board what you've done and what outcome that's had on the business.

Final thing I'd say on tracking and reviewing and iterating is don't be afraid to make changes.  Sometimes, particularly with systems, We get stuck in this cycle of investing,   and then investing some more to make the system work just the way we want it. And that still may not work right. And so we invest a little bit more.

And before you know it, we're in so deep that we feel, you know, we've sunk all this cost into it.  It would be silly to move yet. It's still kind of not working the way we need it. Don't be afraid to make change.  If it's not working, you're wasting time and in doing so you're then wasting money too.

If you need to make change with regard to the people that you've got working in the team,  be it in the form of your service providers or your board members even,   sooner is always better than later when it comes. To affecting change, whether that's upskilling, retraining, mentoring, or straight up replacing,  sometimes it needs to happen and sooner is always better than later.

So just to quickly recap those five key points that I have made today to help you run your association with ease. Firstly, know why you exist and get really clear.  Second, have a plan.  Third, establish clear, concise systems and processes and then use them.  Fourth, Understand what resources you need to deliver against your plan and set about  putting them aside, ready to use, safeguarding them, measuring them.

And fifth and final one is to track, review and iterate. You've got to look back in order to progress forward. Don't be afraid to make change where change is really needed.

Thanks so much for listening today. Reach out via our socials. If there's anything you'd really like us to cover here on the podcast, otherwise till next time.

Thanks for listening to the Service Game Podcast by onsomble. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe and write us a quick review. It helps us to reach more people and we really appreciate your support. To access our downloadable resources and tailored support options designed for NFPs, head to onsomble.

com. au. Or look us up on social media. You'll find all our links in the show notes for this episode. Chat next time.