Our Chapter Performance solution is designed to integrate with your Association Management Software (AMS) to combine many chapter management activities into one platform. Before Chapter Performance, chapter administrators relied on far too many disconnected software programs that created unwanted data silos. Switching back and forth between these systems wasted time and made data integration unorganized and disjointed.
An AMS streamlines many processes. However, its capabilities are limited when it comes to chapter management, requiring associations to use many additional applications, such as these usual suspects:
By employing these applications in addition to an AMS, associations often suffer from operational inefficiencies.
Wouldn’t it be helpful if all chapter functions were handled through one application?
Chapter Performance is a technology platform that works in tandem with AMS vendors. When integrated, this solution adds the chapter functionality that most association management software (AMS) lack, allowing chapters to benefit from a single platform that performs all the functions they need. At the same time, headquarters staff benefit from an association-wide system that provides visibility to all chapter data.
No more need for chapter officers to pay for or master PayPal, QuickBooks, Eventbrite, WordPress, and Microsoft Excel.
Chapter Performance includes all of these capabilities. By integrating your association management system (AMS) with our platform, you’ll be able to fully realize the potential of your association. With Chapter Performance, chapters gain tools for all administrative and brand development functions:
By integrating our Chapter Performance solution with their AMS, associations save countless hours of manual labor, benefit from automated data transfer and integration, provide technology tools to their chapter leaders, and capture a bird’s-eye view of the entire organization, which provides headquarters with actionable insights.
AMS software assists professional associations, nonprofit organizations, and member-based organizations in managing their vast member database. These platforms provide essential tools for recruitment, retention, and administrative functions.
Professional and trade associations commonly use association management software to build, track, and maintain critical information within their membership organization. AMS systems can typically be leveraged to communicate with members, track donation amounts, organize events, and much more.
Multi-chapter associations have a unique organizational structure requiring a flexible AMS tool that provides a centralized database with aggregate reporting, all while accounting for a personalized experience at the headquarters, chapter, and member level.
One of the central benefits of an AMS is that it allows you to manage current members of your association, while also making the process of adding new members as easy as possible.
An AMS acts as a database of current members, giving you a detailed list of names and additional information about each member.
This comes in handy when tracking or searching for specific members. You’re able to open your AMS and use the in-app filters to find exactly who you’re looking for.
An AMS also allows for data visualization that gives you insight into more information about your own association. From discovering what sort of members make up your platform to total logins or how many new members you’re recruiting each month, your AMS will help give you data-driven insight into your organization.
Additionally, when you recruit new members to your association, you’ll be able to customize your registration portal. This allows you to specify what sort of information and demographics they’ll need to enter when creating an account. Their information will feed into the AMS filters, letting you see how your organization is taking shape.
As association management software is a cloud-based system, you can use it to access your member’s information and manage their activities.
Seamlessly updating your community about upcoming events is one of the main benefits of integrating an AMS into your organization. An AMS makes automating communication easy, allowing you to create personalized emails and newsletters that you can send out to all of your members.
Instead of receiving generic emails, you can use an AMS to make sure that all the communications a member receives are personalized to their interests.
This form of communication allows everyone to stay in the loop with all the events going on within your association. You can promote events on a large scale, ensuring that all your members receive an update reminding them of the upcoming content, date, and time of an event.
You’re also able to send out sign-up forms, quickly getting an estimate of how many people will be attending each event.
AMS systems simplify intra-association communication, allowing you to manage event reminders and educational session participation forms quickly and efficiently.
Association Management Software can also lead to a more social, community-driven atmosphere within your organization. Instead of isolating with 1-1 association to individual communication, you can create social channels where everyone can be seen and heard.
These social channels, in which users can freely share their opinions, photos, and ideas, help your members foster a sense of community. This friendly environment helps users feel connected to your cause and meet other association members that are also interested in your organization.
An AMS allows peers to cultivate a connection, reach out to others in their channels, and strike up a conversation.
Over time, this form of open communication can lead to an active gathering of like-minded professionals, your AMS channels inspire a community where everyone shares freely.
Though association management software capabilities are essential for organizations, an AMS does not handle many vital chapter functions. Oftentimes an AMS will offer some value to an organization on a national level but neglect the chapters. However, through the integration of Chapter Performance, associations gain the full suite of chapter features in one unified system and headquarters is able to view their entire organization clearly through our industry leading platform.
An AMS enhances efficiency at the headquarters level, but it cannot encompass all chapter functions. As a result, chapters must rely on multiple systems outside of their AMS, such as PayPal, Excel, Eventbrite, and QuickBooks. Component Relations Professionals (CRPs) must spend time flipping between these systems, and data is inevitably lost in translation.
Chapter Performance solves this problem by augmenting your AMS with the additional capabilities that your association and chapters need. In addition, it offers tools that are less expensive and more robust than the standalone options. By integrating this solution with their AMS, associations save time and money while gaining access to chapter tools that increase member engagement and satisfaction.
Billhighway integrates with most AMS systems to allow associations to maximize the performance of their chapters and simultaneously increase visibility across their entire chapter network.
We work with our AMS partners to streamline the flow of membership data between headquarters and chapters, while providing tools to chapters that directly reduce time spent on administrative processes.
Our partners with an extensive network of association management software solutions that our clients leverage to support their association business and administrative activities. If your association uses any of the association management softwares below or if you’re looking for a chapter management solution, let’s talk!
Got Chapters? We are a Chapter Performance Solution designed for the unique complexity of professional associations and trade associations with multiple chapters, components, clubs, sections, divisions, networks, etc.
For more than two decades, we have focused on providing innovative financial and member management solutions to non-profit organizations including professional associations, trade associations, sororities, fraternities, honor societies, labor unions, and more.
Our platform’s chapter management solution creates a healthy balance between headquarters visibility and chapter autonomy. Increase ROI across your entire organization by leveraging tools to help chapters perform better, as well as provide member engagement and component performance data to headquarters.
This data helps to establish actionable insights that will directly contribute to your organization’s growth and continued success. By moving away from spreadsheets and towards robust association software, you can manage your member data and finances more effectively.
The benefits of Chapter Performance provides national associations with capabilities far beyond what an AMS alone offers, including these game-changing features:
Chapter leaders wear many hats. Unlike a corporate office, where each employee and team specializes in a narrow part of a large operation, chapter leaders with administrative responsibilities handle everything from web design to financial management to event planning to community leadership.
Because the skills required are so diverse, few individuals have adequate knowledge of all areas. Most have experience in just one, such as an accounting major who understands finance but knows nothing about designing websites, planning events, or leading community discussions.
How can chapter leaders manage when they have so much on their plates?
Unlike the old days, technology now exists that can guide users through unfamiliar processes. Chapter Performance includes user-friendly tutorials, and user prompts that take new volunteers through each process step-by-step. No more time and resources being wasted on mistakes. Instead, volunteers hit the ground running even if they have zero experience.
The consolidation of multiple systems also streamlines the reporting process. Before Billhighway, chapter officers and association headquarters staff spent valuable time managing spreadsheets that contained related data points but had no interconnectivity. As a result, merging information was a Herculean task, requiring endless menial labor that was often out of sync. Key connections were missed, and opportunities for enhancing ROI, increasing member engagement, and providing superior member services were lost.
No longer will an organization need to ask its local chapters for this month’s member directory. By the time that data reaches headquarters, the chapter may have gained two new members and elected a new treasurer, making the main office’s membership database outdated within a week. By working within the same system, this advanced chapter performance tool allows information to be sent instantaneously, which leads to stronger and more efficient workflows at every level.
Creating a website that is functional, navigable, and engaging is key to chapter success. Billhighway provides volunteers with no web design experience with the tools to create a chapter web page. Our easy-to-use tools help you to create a template website that follows your brand guidelines such as font, color scheme, or navigation menus. This simplifies the web design process to easily provide an organized, convenient space to keep members connected and involved.
Associations need distinct chapter websites to establish their local presence, but hosting dozens, hundreds, or thousands of chapter websites takes an enormous investment of time and money for large associations. In addition, each chapter needs a separate domain, requiring them to contact GoDaddy and pay fees.
Our plug-and-play templates make creating and hosting your chapter websites easy. Because of this, chapters have the ability to create websites within Chapter Performance. In addition, user-friendly website development tools allow local chapters to develop their websites without content management systems like WordPress, saving the association time and money while ensuring that their digital brand is consistent across all chapters.
Many associations want chapters to run their own websites but also need each component’s site to display similar branding, such as corporate colors, logos, and mission statements. Chapter Performance offers associations templates to create a uniform look and feel while allowing chapters to input their information and designs within specified areas.
This approach provides a balance between continuity and chapter independence. It also eliminates the need to employ a web designer, saving valuable association resources. Members benefit from a consistent experience from chapter to chapter while also enjoying ready access to their local component’s website.
If accounting were intuitive and straightforward, there wouldn’t be entire university departments devoted to teaching it. Financial management is nuanced, laborious, and unforgiving of the slightest error.
We have designed financial management software that handles the nuanced problems of accounting and performs the hard labor necessary for results that keep chapters on firm financial footing. With Chapter Performance, the greenest of volunteers can tackle budgets, collections, projections, and more.
Headquarters also benefits from our financial management tools.
For instance, how does headquarters know if its chapters are managing their money effectively? What is each chapter’s ROI? Are members receiving good value for their dues?
Financial reports available within Chapter Performance provide the data needed to answer these vital questions. Preparation of these reports once took monumental effort at the chapter level, as did reading and analyzing them at the HQ level. With Chapter Performance, they can be easily prepared and sent to HQ with no need for QuickBooks.
Each chapter must perform its banking duties, a huge time consumer for many organizations. Chapter Performance simplifies accounting and banking by consolidating all banking functions onto one platform. As a result, chapter leaders can directly manage their component’s finances from the program—no need for endless trips to the local bank.
We also provides each component with the tools needed for membership dues collection, eliminating the need for PayPal, Square, and other costly or burdensome applications. Now local branches can collect dues in person or through online payments with ease directly into the chapter banking system.
Our in-person payment software known as Anywhere is a fully-mobile, cashless solution that lets your members and donors pay how they want. Your members are on-the-go, shouldn’t your chapters be too? Anywhere makes it easy to accept the following payment types:
Turnover at the chapter level is an unfortunate reality associations face. This is especially true when local leaders are volunteers, as they frequently run into time constraints. Key staff may suddenly leave the organization, and remaining volunteers are left with little or no time to train replacements.
Chapter Performance saves associations time by providing a simplified process for onboarding new chapter staff. For instance, when a chapter president departs, we make it possible to grant the same permissions to a new chapter leader with a few keystrokes. With our platform there’s no need to visit the bank to remove the old signor and add the new one.
When deploying the system, chapters can keep the same account open when a new person takes over a vital position, such as president, treasurer, or director. Without Chapter Performance, associations often must change users or accounts across multiple platforms and institutions, such as banks, PayPal, and QuickBooks.
In large associations, there is a natural tendency for headquarters to lose touch with chapter performance. When dozens or hundreds of chapters each have their own data silos, headquarters has no method of easily tracking chapter activity. It becomes a black box. Chapter Performance assists with chapter visibility by unifying component data so headquarters can see what occurs within each chapter.
For example, without a cohesive system, component bank account information and member rosters are stored within each chapter. Sharing this data with national requires enormous pains at both the headquarters and chapter levels. Then, national must collate the data to draw meaningful comparisons between locals.
We automatically collects and stores chapter data so that it is visible to the main office. Reports and metrics allow headquarters to understand what is occurring at the local level to see which chapters are performing well and which ones need improvement.
For many chapters, events are the lifeblood of their promotion, member service, and fundraising efforts. To make events successful, they must spread the word, entice people to attend, and create a positive experience. Chapters must also manage administrative tasks, such as collecting entry fees.
Through an integration, we provide all the tools necessary for event promotion and management, eliminating the need for a separate event management program, such as Eventbrite. Our event management integration allows chapters to manage the following event-related activities:
With us, chapter event planning and promotion tools are at your fingertips.
Visibility at the component level provides associations with the insights they need to improve overall chapter performance. It also assists in making financial decisions, such as where to allocate resources to achieve the highest ROI. Chapter Performance automatically collects the data needed to generate reports that show chapter performance in detail.
These reports provide metrics that measure vital factors like member engagement. For example, associations can drill down on event attendance, membership activity, and dues payments to determine engagement at the chapter level. Metrics also help determine why engagement is high or low.
A chapter with few events, for instance, may have low membership renewal levels, indicating the need for action to stimulate interest and increase repeat enrollments. On the other hand, robust event attendance and an impressive renewal rate show a component’s high performance.
Our reports parse where chapters are spending money and show the results of these investments. For instance, associations can run reports on how much a component spends on fundraising events and the yield in donations. They can also see how much a chapter spends on member benefits and track the effect on membership renewals over different periods.
Fraud presents an unwelcome reality to associations: Where there is money, certain people behave dishonestly. However, detecting graft is difficult when managing a large group of components unless you have our fraud prevention tools. Our system offers in-depth visibility into your account’s funds which helps to locate money that has been misallocated.
Volunteer leaders often run association chapters. Though these volunteers may be highly devoted to their chapter’s success, most have limited time to offer, which makes working efficiently all the more important.
Their ability to perform their duties depends on a system that minimizes time-consuming labor. Association management software helps to alleviate some of that stress, especially around membership management.
Without an AMS in use, information is often miscommunicated or lost altogether in translation between disparate systems, resulting in re-work for time-pressed volunteers and staff. Members also save time through automated options. For example, an AMS provides self-service options within the members’ section of the website, allowing them to complete tasks like updating their profiles or viewing their membership levels. The ability to complete these actions anytime from anywhere makes membership more convenient.
Data silos are a direct enemy of efficiency.
As walled-off entities, data silos must each be updated separately and may even contain conflicting information. For example, one may have a member’s current mailing address while the other has out-of-date contact information.
Keeping the data in each silo consistent and correct requires extensive effort. For example, without an AMS, chapter leaders must update something as simple as a change of address across many programs, such as those containing mailing lists, event invitations, volunteer databases, etc.
Often, one person lacks the universal access needed to make updates in all systems, so accuracy depends on time-consuming communication between multiple parties, a common chokepoint.
With an AMS, updates apply to all parts of the network, and members can amend much of the data themselves.
Every association has a mission, and its chapters must focus on that mission to thrive. Professional and trade associations need members for local advocacy and locally driven public policy, problem-solving, and community engagement. There are many issues and geographic-specific topics that are best offered through local groups. Components help foster real-time, in-person relationships based on more than a shared occupation, industry or cause. Chapters greatly extend the national association’s bandwidth for programming, member service, and volunteer development. They can act faster and more directly for members, develop fresh content, and pilot programs that promote the national organization’s mission.
Are you interested in learning more about how the Chapter Performance platform can integrate with your AMS? Sign up for a free demo to see how we can deliver association performance solutions to better serve your members and increase chapter ROI.
Increase Your ROI With Our Chapter Performance Solution
Our Chapter Performance solution increases ROI across your entire association by providing technology tools to help chapters perform better, and provide data to headquarters. See how we can help you!
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