We recently participated in a webinar called Client Evaluations: What to ask and what to do with the findings, hosted by ASAE (American Society of Association Executives). As a small business, we are continuously evolving, learning and growing. Being a member of ASAE helps us do so! Below are a few of the questions we thought were most interesting including our take on them.
What value does your AMC take from conducting Client Evaluations-is it worth the effort?
Feedback from Clients is invaluable to our small business. We realize that people are busy (especially those who hold full time careers as well as volunteer their time to an Association), so we are especially grateful when we receive an evaluation response.
It is our goal that the feedback directly relates to the level of service we provide. Our Clients are essentially telling us how to successfully support them, we’d be foolish not to listen! The key is to take the suggestions and create actionable items for our team.
What metrics do you use to gauge your company’s performance?
Our Director of Operations gets to know each Client as they on-board with our team. Their role is to check in with the new Client regularly during the first year. They address any changing expectations, opportunities for improvement, identify areas where more training would be helpful and gauge the overall satisfaction during the first stage of our partnership.
We offer and strongly encourage Clients to participate in an annual review with the Director of Operations and the CEO of Impact. This is a great time to review the Organization’s goals for the upcoming year and again address any challenges or weak-points in the partnership. We also like to share our goals and areas of training we’ve invested in.
We also use online surveys to gauge performance. These are carefully written, multiple choice surveys that can always be submitted confidentially.
What key performance indicators show your impact?
We agree with how the panel responded to this question. We measure the success of our Clients in several ways: showing growth in memberships, annual finances, conference attendance, longevity of members, increased involvement, increased communication with members, increased engagement online/social media, increased open rates of e-newsletters, etc. If our partner associations are experiencing success, then so are we.