Whether your chapter structure is subsidiary or independent, these tips and best practices can help you handle (or hopefully avoid) your next chapter crisis.
Listen in here and check out this quick summary.
First, a quick look at the 11 of the most common crises:
| Financial mismanagement | Cybersecurity | Struggling chapter leaders |
| Financial Fraud | Data Privacy | Leadership succession challenges |
| Compliance issues | Website disasters | Outsourcing & hiring |
| Legal risks & liabilities | Natural disaster |
The first group (financial, compliance, legal risks & liabilities) often result from inexperience and/or lack of time/motivation to learn best practices. Equally, issues such as cybersecurity, data privacy and website disasters stem from lack of knowledge or technical expertise, while natural disasters (whether locally, nationally or globally) can have huge ramifications for chapters without adequate planning.
All of these can be hindered by the last column, i.e., struggling chapter leaders, succession challenges, and outsourcing & hiring issues. On the other hand, strong leadership and succession strategies can be key to handling the other eight items while the right outsourcing and hiring practices can support the leadership.
So, what can we do? Here are some common tools to help mitigate these issues:
1. Continually work on your relationship with chapter leaders – Build a trusting relationship, regularly communicate, and provide helpful resources.
2. Support chapters with time-saving technology – Help chapter leaders save time, avoid errors, provide better member and user experience, and stay in alignment with HQ.
3. Provide online training for chapters – Education is the best prevention.
4. Host peer education & networking sessions – Help leaders get to know, support, and learn from each other.
5. Create chapter policies and procedures* – Encourage (or require) chapter adopt policies and procedures you develop.
6. Offer chapter consulting services – Sometimes chapters need more assistance than a polity, video, or checklist can provide.
7. Use a chapter self-assessment – Let’s shift from watchdog to coach as a better approach to gaining compliance.
8. Provide a budget match to chapters – Identify chapter activities you want to encourage and provide a budget match.
9. Distribute how-to resources – Provide a handy reference for chapter leaders in areas of higher risk or association priorities.
10. Identify local/regional professional services – A list of vetted professional service providers ensures that chapters know where to turn when they need help and minimizes the likelihood of conflicts of interest.
11. Address the volunteer drain – This is the root of the problem. Help chapters embrace micro, ad hoc, episodic volunteering; reduce the requirements for BODs/committees; be a volunteer recruiter; reward & spotlight volunteers; alleviate the burden on chapter members; replace checklists with impact measures.
*Having an affiliation agreement is important! This is the agreement between you and your chapters that spells out how you will work together. Be sure to review annually with your chapters,. Don’t let it just fade into a distant memory.
Bottom line: let chapters know they’re not in it alone. Give them more support the need.
Bonus! Billhighway & Mariner are planning for 2023 and want to hear from you! Help us create meaningful activities for the CRP community by completing this simple poll. It’s just two simple questions on what you’d like to see and if you’d be interested in participating in a focus group on the same question!
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What more info? Check out these resources:
- CRP Solution Center – resources on creating dashboards & resource portals and coaching volunteer leaders.
- Reports & Tools – repository of research, stories, tools & templates.
- 11 Strategies for Preventing Chapter Crises – post series by Billhighway.