Speaker: Traci Adedeji, CPCU, President, Positive Paradigm Group
Why are chapters so vital to the Society's success?
Traci Adedeji, CPCU: Why are chapters so vital to the Society's success? Well, our members are really the life's blood of the society. They are the why for everything that we do and the reality is that as a member based organization, it's really about the relationships that we build in order to ascertain the needs of our members and to meet those needs. That said our chapters are in the best position to engage with our members more intimately at a local level, to identify those individual wise for engagement with the Society and to be more immediately responsive to those needs.
What advice would you give chapter leaders working to grow membership?
Traci Adedeji, CPCU: What advice would I give chapter leaders working to grow membership? There's actually three pieces of advice I'd like to offer. The first is to find every opportunity that you can to have one on one engagement with your members. This could look like taking your membership list and dividing it evenly amongst your board and then making a commitment within some period of time to reach out to that individual member so that each member gets a personal and personalized outreach. What these conversations do is they allow you to form an authentic connection with that member and in forming that connection and having that conversation, you're able to determine their why for engagement with your chapter, what need they may have that you can fill and what they expect to get out of your membership. It's an opportunity to figure out how you as a leader can be of greater service to your members. The second piece of advice actually is an extension of, of the first or repurposing of the first. Just as these one on one conversations, afford an opportunity to determine how you can be of service to your members. It's an opportunity to determine how that member might be of service to the chapter. For example, we are always looking for great programming ideas and there is no better pool of resources than your members. In these conversations, you can identify what their subject matter expertise is, what they're passionate about. And all of these things lead to opportunities for you to perhaps have a webinar. Have them present at a chapter meeting, have them write an article for Insights. All kinds of things that increase the visibility of your chapter, but also increase the visibility of that member. And in doing so you foster goodwill with their employer because most companies are gonna like it if their employees are doing things in our industry that raise the profile of their organization. The third piece of advice that I would give is to connect with chapter leaders in other chapters. There are some best practices out there, INteract has been a wonderful forum for people to share ideas and sometimes that brainstorming is what leads to that spark of genius, right? The thing about it is that somebody could have an idea that you don't think would work for you, but there could be a kernel of something in there that you could repurpose and put your own local spin on it to do something that you might not have thought of but for that interaction. Ultimately, the advice that I give, you know, the overarching idea is to think creatively, use the resources that you have and to work as collaboratively with each other as you can. The staff and the leadership of the Society are here to help. Just reach out if there's anything we can do to support your efforts. And thank you so much for your volunteer leadership.
