Survey Your Association’s Leadership and Members
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It is vital that your association’s board regularly reviews its achievements and seeks new ways to increase productivity, efficiency, and output. This is done best through frequent, habitual evaluation.
Evaluations facilitate examination and discussion by the board and each committee of their effectiveness as groups, and of each director as an individual in meeting their responsibilities.
Its good practice to solicit board feedback about the performance of individual members at the end of their terms (instead of automatically renewing their service) to help ensure high engagement and commitment. Allowing board members the opportunity to complete a self-assessment questionnaire at least once a year helps create and maintain a high-performing board.
Solicit Feedback from Members
Your association depends on member retention and satisfaction. The only way to know how your members genuinely feel and if they are satisfied with your association’s services is to simply ask them in a survey.
When used properly, a survey can provide your leadership with constructive feedback on member perceptions, interests, and indicate support or opposition for certain initiatives. The results of a member survey deliver data that can be used to inform your board’s policies and decisions and be used as evidence to combat opinion-based discussions that don’t serve the membership.
One of the best times to conduct is survey is after members have voted in your annual election. These can be used to obtain rapid, actionable results that allowing your organization to gain key knowledge about opinions and issues that matter to your members.
Post-election surveys can also be valuable to learn why your members didn’t vote. Once you have the data, you can better analyze your voting trends, prepare for future elections and implement tactics to get members to vote.
When used on a regularly scheduled basis, member surveys can provide a benchmark by which you can measure your progress in satisfying your members’ needs.
For more information on evaluating the success of your board or how to conduct a post-election survey, contact us. We’re here to help!
Since joining SBS in 2011, Tony has led company communications, branding, and product launches, maintaining SBS as the go-to for governance solutions. He regularly hosts educational webinars and speaks at national trade association events across the United States. Tony’s expertise has earned him media recognition, with features in outlets like Rural Electric Magazine, The Association Adviser podcast, Associations Now, and NBC’s King 5 Mornings in Seattle.