Role Guidance for Chapter Leaders

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?

Billhighway provides the solution.

Unlike the old days, technology now exists that can guide users through unfamiliar processes. Billhighway 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.

Improves Reporting Versus Stone Age Spreadsheets

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the chapter may have gained two new members and elected a new treasurer, making the main office’s membership database outdated within a week.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.

Web Design and Association Branding

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.

Billhighway’s plug-and-play templates make creating and hosting your chapter websites easy. Because of this, chapters have the ability to create websites within Billhighway. 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. Billhighway 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. 

Financial Management

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. 

Billhighway has 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 Billhighway, the greenest of volunteers can tackle budgets, collections, projections, and more.

Headquarters also benefits from Billhighway’s 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 Billhighway 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 Billhighway, they can be easily prepared and sent to HQ with no need for QuickBooks.

Banking

Each chapter must perform its banking duties, a huge time consumer for many organizations. Billhighway 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. 

Billhighway 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 Billhighway chapter banking system.

Our in-person payment software known as Billhighway 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:

• Membership Fees
• Donations
• Mobile Deposits
• Credit Cards
• Checks

Staffing Changes

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.

Billhighway saves associations time by providing a simplified process for onboarding new chapter staff. For instance, when a chapter president departs, Billhighway makes 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 Billhighway system, chapters can keep the same account open when a new person takes over a vital position, such as president, treasurer, or director. Without Billhighway, associations often must change users or accounts across multiple platforms and institutions, such as banks, PayPal, and QuickBooks.

Chapter Visibility

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. Billhighway 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.

Billhighway 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.

Event Promotion

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, Billhighway provides all the tools necessary for event promotion and management, eliminating the need for a separate event management program, such as Eventbrite. Billhighway’s event management  integration allows chapters to manage the following event-related activities: 

• Create mobile-friendly forms
• Generate attendance reports in real time
• Communicate event changes
• Track payments and refunds
• Collect member and non-member data
• Send email invitations
• Write promotional materials
• Create custom badges and certificates
• Build and manage waitlists 
• Send post-event surveys

With Billhighway, chapter event planning and promotion tools are at your fingertips.

Advanced Metrics Reports

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. Billhighway’s system 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. 

Billhighway 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 Prevention

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 Billhighway’s fraud prevention tools. Our system offers in-depth visibility into your account’s funds which helps to locate money that has been misallocated.

Saves Time

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.

Breaks Down Data Silos

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. 

Promotes Mission Focus

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.