3 Ways to Improve Chapter Consistency

Chapters were created to meet members where they are, providing a forum for local networking and collaboration. While remaining under the umbrella of national, autonomy was given to local leaders to help contribute to member engagement.

However, for better or for worse, rarely are the chapters fully autonomous. There is a significant amount of national staff time, effort, and control needed to manage so many chapters across a wide geography. Looking at domestic US associations, putting a chapter in just half of the states is a huge undertaking – that’s 25 chapters you need to maintain! And this is frequently placed on one staff member who may also consider this only part of their role.

Your association should be assessing the chapter environment every two to three years (as often as you have or expect to have turnover in chapter leadership). This assessment can help you to diagnose any pain points you and/or your members are experiencing.

What we find in our research is that the consistency (or lack thereof) in the chapter experience is by far the number one reason why chapters are thriving or failing. The degree to which you can develop standards or structure in the following areas can make or break your chapter experience:

  1. Recruiting and retaining strong, active leaders;
  2. Setting and communicating the day, time, and location of regularly scheduled meetings; and
  3. Developing and promoting high quality meeting content.

The first aspect of inconsistency we see is that some associations are struggling to maintain strong, active leadership at the local level. Whether through natural attrition, or when great leaders are “poached” by the national association, most chapters do not have a written succession plan. The remainder of the chapter’s leadership is then forced to scramble to identify and onboard a replacement, with little guidance from the previous leader.

The second area that can hurt the chapter experience is inconsistency in the day, time, and location of regularly scheduled meetings. It is great that your chapter leadership wants to move the meetings around the region – it makes the meetings convenient for different groups of individuals. The same thing can be said about day and time. But if no one knows when your meetings occur, or can even anticipate when they might occur, how are you going to maintain a consistently high level of attendance?

And that brings us to our final area of inconsistency, content in meetings. This could be speakers, field trips, re-purposed national content (webinars), social events, even an annual meeting. Chapter leaders frequently rack their brains trying to develop new meeting agendas and content for their constituents, when much of this could be “standardized” at the national level and shared across chapters.

Consistency is key to thriving chapters, but to ensure a high level of it, associations are struggling to toe the line between structuring chapters to guarantee that consistency vs. allowing for the autonomy that each region calls for.

If the lack of consistency in your chapter model is detracting from member engagement at the national level, you might consider rolling them up into regional chapters, or consider virtual chapters. It will likely be an uncomfortable conversation, because local chapters may be “what you’ve always done.”

However, reducing the number of physical chapters that you have can dramatically reduce the amount of staff time and resource required to manage them, while at the same time increasing the probability of long-term consistency and success.