CHAPTER SESSION: Three Questions to Ask About Your Competition

In order to remain sustainable, your nonprofit chapter has to continually recruit new members and ensure they accept the invitation to join. However, your potential members are also being asked to join other professional and social organizations, which means you will have to compete for the time and membership dollars of these candidates. Do you know who your chapter's competitors are? Are you asking the right questions about your competition to ensure members choose YOU?

This session will help your chapter determine who is competing your chapter for your members’ time and money, and help you ask the right questions about them, such as:

• What are they doing well? 
• Do they have any gaps that your chapter could fill?
• Are there any items that you can work together on?

Once you have identified those components about your competition, your chapter should to be able to deliver the programs and services to fill the needs your members have that your competition cannot deliver. Do you know how to do that adequately as a volunteer? Resources will be shared to ensure that you know how to survey your members, and develop an action plan to fulfill their needs once they have been identified. Your action plan will also ask you to identify which leaders are responsible for which area, so the chapter volunteers are functioning optimally.

Attendees will also have an opportunity to share their own best practices about identifying the competition and delivering member services and programs based on those areas.

Brown, Paul B. "6 Things to Know About What Your Competitors Are Doing Right." Retrieved on 1 March 2016 at http://www.inc.com/paul-brown/learning-from-what-the-competition-is-doing-right.html

Berry, Tim. "Understand Your Competition." Retrieved on 1 March 2016 at http://articles.bplans.com/understand-your-competition/

This session will also reference the Chapter Sustainability Pyramid and the Society Pride and Awareness Recruitment Kit, developed by STTI staff.