Is Your Chapter System From Another Century?

If you are a membership association, you are familiar with chapters even if you don’t have them as part of your organization. Chapters can be great ways to offer regular engagement for your members locally or regionally, and it keeps the association “top of mind” in between national conferences.

However, there are some challenges when it comes to chapters regarding everything from succession planning to financial management to liability concerns.

As a long-time Component Relations Professional (CRP) earlier in my career, I saw most of the common structures for local engagement including chapters, affiliates, and networking groups. One of the headaches that comes with any type of formal component structure is the bureaucratic and sometimes draconian systems that are built to “keep the chapters in line.”

There was a time in the 19th and early 20th centuries when chapters were necessary; multiple “mini Me*-s” across the country (and sometimes the world) were created because communication and travel took much longer. Conventions and conferences took years to plan and sometimes lasted for months in the 19th century. Travel took much longer too, especially if you had to travel across the country or to another part of the world to participate.

Thus, the “mini Me” system of chapters that looked and operated very much like the national organization was born, and this was considered the norm and the best way to do things. This required boards of directors, committees, bank accounts, and multiple reporting requirements to maintain “good standing” with the national organization.

And what, pray tell, are the banes of any CRP’s existence?

Helping chapters recruit board members; keeping track of bank accounts; and getting the chapters to file all the necessary reports to maintain good standing. And let’s not forget the energy we use encouraging chapters to use the money that is piling up in their bank accounts. These assets might as well be frozen for all the good they are doing your members.

Let’s fast forward to 22 years into the 21st century. Our phones are “smart,” meaning they work like computers and have multiple apps that support, inspire, connect, and entertain us. We can text, email or talk to anyone, anywhere, with little or no wait time. We stream programs when it fits our schedule.

Imagine the opportunities that are out there for connection, networking, and building the association brand from a local perspective. Oh right. You don’t have time. Because you are trying to get your chapters to comply with all the rules and guidelines you set up.

Despite my love of chapters, I have concluded that we don’t need the “mini-me” chapter model any longer. It is something that should go the way of corsets and Dictaphones. They are things we just don’t need any longer.

Instead, we should eliminate this outdated system and replace it with one that works in our current environment. We can free up staff time, volunteer energy, and put association funds to use across the organization for everyone. A valuable outcome from changing our thinking on chapters is that volunteering might become fun again and provide more valuable and engaging experiences.

Consider a Governance review of your current chapter system and ask yourself: are we doing this because it works, or because it’s the way we’ve always done it?

*: “Mini Me” is a character in the Austin Powers movie series; he is a smaller version of Dr. Evil created through cloning.