A Case Study by Therese Long
It takes a village…and association management professionals working with Meeting Expectations have much more than a village.
I had been working with a small nonprofit association for more than 20 years when the organization hired Meeting Expectations (ME) to provide much-needed infrastructure and support. As part of this effort, Meeting Expectations gave me access to professionals in diverse sectors who collaborate and share experiences, ideas and even suppliers.
One simple example of how the collaborative culture at Meeting Expectations is helping my organization advance is our new Board portal. We were updating our Board orientation manual for the start of the fiscal year and had tried binders, a Board member app and a .zip file with all the relevant documents. However, none of these approaches provided an efficient solution.
During a monthly meeting with other association managers, one of the managers mentioned using their Association Management System (AMS) to build out a portal that only Board members could access. We already had the AMS – could it be used for Board collaboration? The approach was appealing because all our Board members would have 24-7 access to the website, it would ensure frequent Board member visits to the website and we could use it not only to house the Board documents, but also to load the monthly meeting materials instead of having to send the Board packets of information.
We built out the portal, our Board loves it and we received kudos for making it easier and more efficient for Board members to perform their governance duties.
We are now reaching out to our association colleagues for solutions to other issues. Meeting Expectations is proving to be a great village and more.
