UpStream! Series

UpStream! Series

The Portage Group Presents: Up Stream Blog Series On Channeling Member Needs Wouldn’t it be great to know what your members are thinking?  What they’re really thinking?   Your members are the owners of your association.  In order to develop a strategy driven by their...

read more
Understanding What Nonprofits Do

Understanding What Nonprofits Do

By Jack Shand, Executive Partner. The Portage Group In an earlier article on The Characteristics of Executive Leadership, I outlined what employees in the nonprofit sector do. But what do nonprofit organizations do? First, two observations: Observation one is that...

read more
Breaking Through the Status Quo: Challenging Your Organizational Limits

Breaking Through the Status Quo: Challenging Your Organizational Limits

By Alan Ward We don’t know our limits until we push past them.

Is this true?  It sounds like it could be true.  If you asked me, though, if I knew my limits my automatic thinking answer would be “Yeah, pretty well.”  I more or less know what I can and cannot do.  Ergo, I probably know my limits.

My deeper thinking process, however, would question that conclusion.  All I really know is what I have done, what I have done well or not so well, and what I stay away from doing.  I know my experience, but not my limits.

read more
Show Your Members They Drive the Agenda With a One-Page Strategic Plan

Show Your Members They Drive the Agenda With a One-Page Strategic Plan

There are a number of tools you can use to succinctly and effectively communicate to your members that they drive the association agenda. The one-page strategic plan is a great way to present your strategic plan in a succinct way to your members – the key is to make it clear that their input is being used to drive the agenda. Below is one example of a one-page member-driven strategic plan. Here is an example.

read more
First This, Then That: Why Your Association’s Team May Not Be Working to Its Full Potential

First This, Then That: Why Your Association’s Team May Not Be Working to Its Full Potential

As leaders and contributors, we want to make things happen.  We need to make things happen.  On our watch revenues should be ramping, membership should be growing, and our organization’s influence should be expanding.  We develop strategy, equip the ship, and set sail.  And things go well… until perhaps they don’t.  Then, it seems, we have more questions than answers

read more
New Beginnings: When to Quit Your Job

New Beginnings: When to Quit Your Job

Applicants for a job will recognize that common interview question: “Why did you leave your last employer?”

In my consulting work I have discovered a number of valid reasons why one should consider moving on from a job. Years ago I did research on why good employees get fired and heard from executives on reasons why they should have left a job sooner. I’ve continued to talk with individuals who have exited a role because it was no longer the right job for them.

Here is a suggested list of factors that may point to the need to get on with that next chapter in your professional career.

read more
Connecting the Dots: Communicating Association Strategy to Your Members

Connecting the Dots: Communicating Association Strategy to Your Members

Most associations seek member feedback. Many take this feedback into account in their planning activities….but if this information doesn’t get back to members, all that hard work will have been for nothing. This in mind, there are a number of effective ways to communicate your association’s strategy as an ongoing means to keep members in the loop about what is happening and how their needs and priorities drive the agenda…

read more

Do You Need A Survey to Tell You What Your Members Think?

Like many folks, you probably do a lot when it comes to gathering stakeholder feedback: You see and make a point of talking to members at association events. Perhaps you make it a habit to pick up the phone or drop in on members periodically to talk to them one-on-one. Maybe you even survey or poll them internally on their satisfaction with events, programs or new issues coming down the pipe.

These are all very important tools to keep your association connected to members on an ongoing basis…but what about when it comes to your planning activities?  Typically, member feedback is used as a peripheral driver of the process, if it’s used at all.

read more

Making Strategy Happen

The value in planning is not in creating strategy but in implementing it. The purpose of planning includes seeing the positive, tangible results accruing to the organization by instituting and achieving strategic change.

Yet too many organizations see their planning process fail. The strategic plan sits ignored on a bookshelf; the volunteers and staff involved lament the wasted money and lost time in a failed process, understandably reluctant to repeat the same experience again.

read more

Categories

Archives

Get Free Expert Advice!

Subscribe to articles from thought-leaders with diverse experience to help you succeed in your organizational journey.