Secrets to the Association's Turn-around

I'm on a bit of a high this week after a great turn-out last Thursday for both a volunteer meeting (now we have over 25 and what an amazing group of positive people!) at the Association and the official presentation of our activities for 2011-2012. A year ago we were happy if we got 10 or 15 (on a really good day) people to attend our little events. Last week we had over 70 people (Denise says it was more like 100) come just to hear what we have planned for the season. There were folks spilling out into the next room (and filling it up!). Wow. What a difference from last year. The exciting part was how many people came who didn't know us.

Now it's time to reflect on what is making all this good stuff possible. Last year, our first priority was to get out of debt. At the same time, we had to think about GROWTH which we hoped would be the key to getting us out of debt faster. To do this we had to put a little team together even before it was really necessary.

When things were going lousy, we formed a special group of volunteers (people who were with us already and others we talked into volunteering with us because they were friends and had special skills that we needed) and gave each person a responsability/ies (accounting, communications, IT, legal, PR, fund raising, volunteers). Now that these people have a year of experience doing their thing, it has made it easier to organize new volunteers into groups with a mentor.

We started communicating differently with our volunteers and our members in general. For one thing, we eliminated our website as an unnecessary expense and started blogging. At that point we got a fair amount of criticism for this, but our Association blog has gotten over 17,000 hits in the last year. Lots more traffic than our boring, static site did. Having 3 administrators on it means that it is constantly being updated, and that keeps people coming back to it and reminds them we are still around. I had a great moment of satisfaction yesterday when someone came in to renew their membership and didn't want the printed info on our film series because he checks the blog "religiously."

We also send out a very simple, no frills newsletter every month with our upcoming events. The difference this year is that we made this the responsibility of our IT guru volunteer rather than having it done by just anyone and having 98% of them returned as spam. We try to get it out no later than the first week of the month and always BEFORE the first event on the calendar.

For all of our paid activities (English and Italian courses) we now offer a no obligation presentation in our library in order to explain what we offer, costs, introduce our teachers and methods, and answer questions. Since it is a free presentation (and therefore not in competition with language schools who pay for advertising), the newspaper prints the news the morning of the presentation (a surprising number of people come at a moment's notice).

The big winner for our Association's turn-around: TRANSPARENCY. We pay all of our teachers the same hourly wage (I'm sure we are the only ones in Trieste to do this) and we charge the same amount per hour for all of our courses. If you ask any of us anything about prices, we will tell you the same thing. Our teachers are the only ones who get paid at our Association, and only for the hours they teach. Our teachers are also volunteers, making us a completely volunteer-run non-profit association.  There is something very cool about the atmosphere that creates.

As the director, I am also a volunteer because I decided not to take the small, part-time stipend that came with the position. Since I need to bring home the bacon from other sources, I have to be efficient, that's for sure, but it's better for morale when no one gets paid.

One more secret to the Association's turn-around? We made the Association a place we would want to hang out. We got a good coffee maker (donated by illycaffè here in Trieste), put a changing table in the bathroom, used our US gov grant money last year to make a comfy children's library to cuten things up a bit and filled the place up with friends who attract more friends. The place is bustling with activity now-- people coming in for books and dvds and just to hang out.

There is still a lot of work to do, of course but things are finally looking up for us. If we can double our membership from last year, we will pay off our debts in January and really be on our way to a future of good things. We need to sell 600 memberships by the end of October. This will pay for our film series and not much else, but it will be enough to get us to our goal. Then we will plan for more growth.