In his message of September 23 Stacy Techsner stated, Our ultimate goal with this process is to ensure that chapters of the National Speakers Association are designed to best serve NSA members in their local community markets. As representatives of the Carolinas Chapter of NSA we could not agree more. We are committed to adhering to the standards of chapter conduct and to serving our members across two states.
We view the rechartering process with concern. We understand several proposals have been put forth to revalidate what an NSA chapter should look like and how it should act going forward. Yet, we have not received official communication from national as to what is in these proposals.
We continue to adhere to the current guidelines and continue to enjoy success as a chapter. So, we confess to some confusion as to all this talk about weak chapters. The attempt to develop a new one size fits all charter may be misguided. As Stacy stated, the goal is to best serve members in their local communities and we feel we know our locale better than anyone can possibly know from Arizona. Moves to centralize administration sound easy but they will wreak havoc on a number of chapters while adding a cost and staffing burden at the national level that must be addressed. In the face of tight budgets we wonder if increasing overhead is the best course of action for the national association.
To be clear
- We do not support a centralizing of administration and dues
- We support a blackout on programming that conflicts with a national event.
- We support efforts to protect the quality of the brand
- We support that holders of chapter board positions are members of NSA
- We support a wider dialogue on this issue.
- We wonder why targeted intervention for non-conforming chapters has not been taken
Our representatives at the chapter summit will be able to elaborate on these issues.
We look forward to positive resolution of this important issue.
NSA Carolinas Board
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Thank you for your thoughtful comment.
Speaking only for myself, and not the Board of the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of which I am a member, I share many of the concerns and viewpoints expressed by the Board of the Carolinas Chapter.
It’s not clear what problem this process is intended to solve. There has been some talk on the open mic recordings about “rogue” chapters and some indication that “this system” worked well for twenty five years or so. The recordings don’t indicate what a “rogue” chapter is, or what happened a few years ago.
In addition, the White Paper begins with a premise that our goal should be to extend the NSA Brand throughout the country. The Greater Los Angeles Chapter has been doing that for approaching 30 years. The local members of the Chapter are the face of the NSA in Southern California; we are known to members of the media and meeting planners. Apart from the NSA logo, there is very little NSA presence apart from what the local Chapter provides. I assume this is true in the Carolinas and at many other Chapters as well.
In light of this situation, I share the concern expressed above about the desirability or wisdom of trying to centralize administrative functions.
In addition, I am concerned about the absence of data that has been circulated regarding the various topics that might be addressed at the Summit. For example, how can have a meaningful discussion about whether we should require NSA members to join local chapters without knowing how many people fall into this category, or how the demographics of people who join local chapters differs from those who don’t?
The unspoken premise of much of the discussion relating to the Summit seems to be that the local chapters are suffering compared to National. But is this true? I remember that at some point in the last few years National’s stated goal was to attract 5010 members by 2010. What is our current membership? As others on this blog have indicated, it would be helpful if information regarding membership, finances, and related topics were circulated in advance of the Summit.
As a member of NSA since 1986 I have seen a lot come and go. We in Wis. share the concerns of the Carolinas and others about the efforts to revamp the Chapters. In fact as a Leadership trainer who talks about good leaders and servant leaders NSA is going in just the opposite direction to take control of too many aspects of the Chapters. We have had enough from the Politicians forcing us into Health Care, government take overs and Stimulus bills, and we do not need this kind of approach from NSA. If we truly want to improve NSA and grow membership ,we think it needs to be a bottom up effort and not top down. we run our own Speaker U to get candidates prepared fot the speaking business. This has worked very well.
Some specific concerns.
Ths summit is not taking the time to do a thorough vetting of the issues.
We object to centralizind dues collections as this is a chapter function and we do not want to send dues to NSA and get some back, Way too much administartive bureaucracy.
We object to standard chapter dues. What a dollar buys in Wis is different than New York and California and we can only see a much higher dues structure.
Program restrictions before and ofter NSA events will work only if the NSA calendar is pu\blished early. We had our dates set for the year before this upcoming event was known to us and we have a conflict. We already had speakers, hotels etc and are not changing because we had contracts.
Training always requires high cost to attend. New and even speaker with my experience are just not in a position to attend all these things. We use our Chapter meetings to accomplish this. We do not feel only NSA speakers have the knowledge we need and bring in local experts in graphics, social media and more. This is a win win for all of us and helps with relationships in the community.
We think that over regulating could lead chapters to quit or realign as Professional speaker organizaitons without NSA affiliation. I know of several speakers who are good and who have a lot to offer a chapter who just do not agree with what the NSA provides. For example we now have ability through e speakers to have video links but again it cost the members over and above their dues.
If NSA wants all the chapters “on board” then forcing chapters to do it one way is not the answer, On the contrary the apporach should be ” what can we provide the members of value to make them want to be more involved and part of the NSA” Increasing the NSA administrative role and dictating how chapters must comply will not accomplish that objective. Increasing Chapter members is the answer.
I apologize for the typos as I hit the sumit buttion by accident before I did a spell check