Starting a member association can provide numerous benefits to the members you serve, including a collective voice for advocacy, shared resources, uplifting excellence and enhanced networking opportunities. But starting a member association can also be a lot of work. Usually an association starts when a group of people identify a need and get together voluntarily to make it happen. These individuals share a passion and commitment to a functional, honest, well respected and sustainable industry but are also working with limited time and budgets, and often limited experience in what it takes to set up and maintain a successful and sustainable membership association. This module of the FIDIC Member Association Toolkit provides a step-by-step guide to how you can go about setting up a member association so that your new association has the most successful start possible. |
This toolkit and the modules below are designed to form part of a living resource for Member Associations both new and old, there will be further modules in the future covering various areas of business activity and helping associations address the continually evolving challenges they face.
Get involved: To submit content that would be useful to form a new module or to provide case studies please email [email protected]
Module 1: Establishing your member association
This module of the FIDIC Member Association Toolkit provides a step-by-step guide to how you can go about setting up a member association so that your new association has the most successful start possible.
The module focusses on:
- Setting your association’s objectives and purpose
- Determining your value proposition
- Establishing your governance framework
- Determining your membership and membership criteria
- Setting your constitution or bylaws
- Creating a strategic plan
- Determining your operational requirements and organisational structure and staffing as a start up MA
Once you’ve done the hard work to establish your association you need to think about how you can most effectively operationalise it. This module covers some key areas that are relevant to the successful oeprations of most of FIDIC’s member associations, whether that is in relation to their business operations (like their fee models) or their service to members (like advocacy).
The module covers:
- Establishing a member fee basis
- Recruiting members
- Financial planning and budgeting
- Leveraging and managing volunteers/committees
- Effective advocacy
- Setting up and running an in-person event / seminar
- Setting up and running an online event / webinar / seminar
- Member engagement and communicating with members
- Legal risk of claims and mitigations
Module 3: Enhancing your member association
Once you’ve got your association up and running and have all the basic operational and service areas organised, you’ll want to start thinking about how you can best future proof your association for a sustainable and impactful future.
This module covers a range of topic areas helping you to build a high performing team, strong member and stakeholder community, and build your business resilience through revenue diversification and technology.
The module covers:
- Growing a strong team – employee engagement
- Succession planning
- Member recruitment and retention
- Developing a sponsorship / partnership strategy
- Revenue diversification (including developing a training offering)
- Leveraging AI
- Dealing with complaints about members
