Organizations need to find effective ways to put leadership resources in place and improve their memberships. Chapters are essential for membership and revenue growth for associations or other member-based organizations.
Therefore, you need a chapter management strategy when setting an agenda, identifying goals, realigning resources, and reinforcing the message in your organization.
In this article, we will give you the different strategies that can help you reach new audiences, grow communities, and increase retention in a local chapter.
1. Goal and Team Alignment Strategy
Multi-chapters work together when creating a plan to attain the goals necessary to achieve success. However, managing it can pose some challenges. Each chapter is assigned to a regional segment for this to be possible.
Preparing a social media strategy for multi-chapters can help create a consistent brand. While opportunities exist for multi-chapters, some challenges should be addressed, especially for web and data management.
2. Perform Effective Member Data Management Strategy
Parent organizations need reliable and efficient software designed to streamline how they connect with their chapters. In addition, utilizing one can speed up data gathering and dissemination of information, creating a sense of transparency and building trust in the chapter.
Membership management software offers all-in-one access to a chapter’s data. In addition, it creates a unified system for both administrative and membership needs. For example, your members don’t need to sign up and renew their memberships on paper anymore. It helps you automate the process entirely by taking it online.
3. Manage Flow of Funds Strategy
Managing funds in chapters can be complicated and time-consuming. As an organization grows, it requires more financial statements and more invoices, among others.
A finance management solution is a great tool to automate and speed up the accounting cycle, which can help you focus on what matters most, like making a chapter grow.
In addition, accounting software promotes collaboration in the chapter. It enables local members to access real-time accounting and financial data by logging into the platform.
The best part of a cloud-based finance solution is the way it secures accounting data. It safely stores information under layers of high-end encryption algorithms. It guarantees that all data is synced to avoid mistakes and ensure that the most up-to-date information is available all the time.
4. Promote Effective Communication Strategy
Communication in multi-chapter organizations helps chapter leaders and members perform their duties and responsibilities. As a foundation for planning, it’s expected that all important information should be communicated to managers in meetings who, in turn, must implement them effectively.
With community management software, chapters can connect with each other more than ever. It has a private social media platform designed for members to communicate and interact with each other, increasing retention and engagement in return.
5. Leverage Technology Strategy
Chapters need software applications to automate processes that can consume plenty of time when performed manually and cost a lot of money. Below are just some of the key features you can get from Glue Up’s all-in-one CRM engagement solution for chapters.
Improving Administration
An association management software simplifies administrative tasks of multi-chapters. You only need to enter the member's name, company name, and contact number. After this, you can effortlessly search, filter, and update other required information.
All financial data can be managed automatically, whether for memberships, events, marketing, or many more. Using software for associations saves you from spending hours in front of the computer when managing and assessing association records. Multi chapter dues management or payment of other expenses shouldn't stress you anymore.
Building Chapter Directories
Directories are tools that contain basic information about individual chapters. These individual records describe the information that covers different entities. Common types of directories are listed below. They are reliable for finding and listing several organizations by specific criteria, such as city, zip code, topic, or type.
Furthermore, publishing a public chapter directory on your website is a great way to display the latest news, events, and members. Include important information you want to display and link it to details such as leader or member details, chapter websites, and more. There can also be options to choose if it's for a public or members-only view on the privacy setting.
Creating and Managing Custom Roles
Custom roles are a set of privileges that can be assigned to a chapter. It’s where you can manage and control what can be performed and what services can be used. Several roles are preconfigured: chapter admins, publisher, and user.
When you set up multiple profile views and layouts for different audiences, you have complete control over its accessibility, including its viewers and editors after navigating to profiles. If there are new members, you can configure custom roles to assign them only the privileges necessary to perform their duties.
Using Branded Website Templates
A local chapter website can help establish an online presence. It’s an effective tool to communicate an organization’s message while building credibility.
Moreover, it’s where prospects who are curious to know about an organization’s history and goals can learn more and attain the level of trust they seek.
Keep in mind that building a well-designed website with good user experience can be a daunting task. Therefore, we recommend that you look for the best website solution to easily create a website and run it in no time.
If you have little or no technical skills at all, a drag-and-drop website builder lets you use a mobile-responsive website template without requiring HTML coding and other technical steps.
In addition, design talent is not required. You can simply choose a professionally-designed template and start from there. Website builders often come with a library of free templates you can use depending on your style and needs.
Sending Built-In Email Campaigns
Chapters can utilize email marketing to customize campaigns and create targeted content.
If you want to add some personalization, writing the member’s name in the email can be an excellent move to improve click-through rates.
On the other hand, individualized content can work for you after audience segmentation when targeting the right customers. For instance, perhaps you want to distribute an email marketing campaign to old members and a different one to new members.
An email marketing solution lets you personalize communication as you grow a chapter. It’s useful when you want to attract new members and increase memberships through branded email campaigns, newsletters, and event invitations you can send with just a few clicks.
Having an All-In-One Mobile App for Members
Enable members to engage from anywhere with My Glue–an all-in-one mobile app for local chapters that you get with every Glue Up solution. With membership management, chapter members can renew memberships, access the membership directory, receive newsletters and other notifications in the palm of their hand.
Glue Up’s Chapter Management Solution
Leveraging technology in an organization improves the efficiency and effectiveness of its initiatives. Using an all-in-one platform for community engagement can reduce workload and eliminate human errors, which improves consistency.
With Glue Up’s Chapter Management solution, multi-tiered organizations like associations, nonprofits, chambers, corporations, and other business groups can check the health of all of their chapters and affiliates with just two clicks. You can quickly transfer information across organizational lines, streamline local chapter management processes and analyze operational performance.
