How do you prepare the organization you manage for the day you step out of your leadership position? The 4 Do’s and Don’ts of successful succession planning.

1. Play The Matchmaker

As a volunteer leader in your local chapter, you are already familiar with some if not most of the members. Try to utilize membership and attendance reports you have in your StarChapter software and dig into the data about each member’s participation rates. There is so much data you can pull out.  

First, take advantage of the data at your disposal within the StarChapter software: find out which members attended most events, if they recently updated their profile or, if they purchased chapter merchandise, are active on the website forum, and more.

Second, dig deeper to find out what they are saying or if they will be willing to hold a leadership role, knowing that you will know only if you ask: create a survey with the Survey Manager, ask for ideas or suggestions on how to improve the organization and boost participation, or post a “Call for Volunteers” to organize the next chapter event. If they helped organize meetings or events they might be interested to lead as well. 

Finally, now that you have the information about who are your members and how they have been engaging the organization, it’s time to create committees. Committees are an excellent way to get more members involved by carrying out decisions for the organization. They are usually created to organize an event or execute a strategy. This is why matching your members’ skills with the right committee might attract them to join and volunteer. 

2. Share, Share, and Share Some More

One of the things we learned from working with over 1,000 organizations that have gone through a leadership change, is that the old board fails to share relevant information with the new leadership.

Don’t overlook the small details and share the information they would need! All too often, we reach out to the new leadership after a board has transitioned and they have no idea what StarChapter is or that their organization even has a chapter management software. In other cases the new leadership isn’t even aware of the existing list of vendors that the organization has been working with such as where to print flyers or invitations, who is their caterer, accountant or insurance company, etc.

3. Let StarChapter Help You

Clearly explain what the role entails and what are the responsibilities and tasks involved in volunteering on the board. Because your organization is already using StarChapter, show them that using the software will make their role fun and easy. Use the StarChapter Checklist for successful Board Transitions, a handful of the things include:

• Introduce new board members to StarChapter - video
• Advise them to attend StarChapter’s Board Training webinars led by our Support Team
• Forward them this article to explain how technical support works at StarChapter.
• Update board member list on your StarChapter website

4. Spread The Word

Your members will probably be interested to know who took leadership of the organization. As the process unfolds, communicate to them about the transition to gain support and participation.

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Our chapters kept busy in the first half year of 2015. They showed dramatic improvement in all performance indicators, from meeting attendance to membership rates. Check out the numbers!

Indeed, the first half of 2015 has been busy for all our customers: member and non-member count increased, more meetings were held, more guests attended, and more revenues were collected.

Just when the year started, during the month of January, our chapters reached over $4.2 million in revenues, making it the highest performing month of the year. Our chapters also outperformed in the month of March: over 1,300 meetings and events were held during the last month of the first quarter.

We pulled out some numbers to compare first half-year performance with the first half of last year.