A free course offered in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area.
As a board member of the Greater Washington Society of CPAs, I will be presenting a free half-day course titled Financial Management for Association Executives on Wednesday, May 2 from 9:00 am- 12:00 pm. The course will be held at GWSCPA’s offices, located at 1111 19th Street NW, Suite 1200, Washington, DC 200036; registration and networking will begin at 8:30 with breakfast provided.
The course is intended to provide an introduction to association finance for those who are new to that subject, or to provide an opportunity to refresh their skills for those who wish to do so. If you or someone else on your staff wishes to register, I suggest you do so promptly, because space is filling up. To register, please e-mail Ashley Worthington, Operations Manager, at awothington@gwscpa.org.
So what does this have to do with non-dues revenue, you might ask? The answer is quite simple. When GWSCPA thought of putting on the course it was going to be done at the society’s expense, with me simply volunteering my time. Being hard focused on the bottom line, I pushed them to secure sponsorships totaling at least a $1000, allowing this public service offering to create a profit as a byproduct. With a modicum of effort they were able to secure two $500 sponsors, and what would have been a loss, based on providing breakfast and teaching materials, will now be a gain of about $500.
In this case, it is not so much the amount as the concept. Why not try to make a profit on everything you do?
Let me give you another example with more significant dollars involved. A trade association here in DC had an advocacy fight on their hands; unfortunately they were not sufficiently funded to deal with it appropriately. The committee they had formed to deal with the advocacy challenge decided on their own that while they were dealing with this issue they would pay for ALL of their own travel and out-of-pocket expenditures. All I can say is that it is not business as usual and I was seriously impressed. The necessary work was done with no impact on the bottom line whatsoever.
They were serious and they were creative. That’s a good approach for all of us.
An interesting new story: “The Future of Planning for the Future.” Associations Now: April/May 2012
My article in the April/May “Associations Now” is only tangentially related to non-dues income. Its main focus is on the latest methods of successful strategic planning, and the significance of internal politics on planning.
Happily, there are a number of areas that will be of interest to executives who are responsible for, or focus on, developing additional revenue streams. Many of these topics relate to the marketplace that the association is serving. In these days of rapid change it is entirely possible that the market you were serving has changed due to an increase in competition, or a change in the fundamentals of the niche involved.
One of the topics discussed in the article is an approach to targeting your new products and services, not based on what your members think they want, but on the needs of your members’ customers. This approach, called “a customer’s customer analysis,” is one of the more interesting approaches that came up in the roundtable on which the article is based.
These are just a few of the topics that you may find of interest. I encourage you to read the article for these issues as well as for others.
Read More >>> Go under Articles and Text, most recent articles and click on: The Future of Planning for the Future
