Getting strategic
I’ve been gradually working on understanding and refining the strategies the ATBA-UK uses in it’s various functions and am at a stage now where I can begin to document them properly. The aim is to produce written strategy documents for Business, Events, Marketing, Membership, and Standards. These documents will all work together to form the overall strategy that the ATBA-UK follows in its work and provide some business sustainability for when the current committee members move on and are replaced by other volunteers. Having what we’ve done, how we did it, and why, written down to pass on means any future committee should be able to continue without all the difficulties we faced when we took over.
Although I been adding to each of the strategies for a while, it’s only recently that I’ve been working on the Membership Strategy that I’ve found a format that seems to work. Each document is split into two sections; Strategy and Workflow. The strategy contains an Introduction to the strategy, the Aim and Objectives for the function, its Goals, Critical Success Factors, Implementation, Measures and Future Developments. The Workflow contains all the information a person would need to take over a function like Membership and run it. It breaks down how the systems are set up, what the person managing the function needs to do, and what schedule they should work to.
These documents will change as part of an ongoing process of reviewing and updating our procedures, but by the end of the process we should be able to produce ‘A Guide To Running The ATBA-UK’ which will become a very useful resource for guiding the current and future committee.