Hello,
I'm the President of the Illinois chapter. We have been noticing that the attendance rate for our chapter meetings has been dropping. It's been so low for some meetings that I've had to cancel the meeting.
We make effort to have quality speakers talk about business law, HR related issues, tech ideas, and other topics. We even try to schedule something fun after the meeting for the members to do at least once a year.
The location of the meetings vary as we hold the meetings at the members' offices. We try to have some in the suburbs and some in downtown Chicago to give members opportunities to attend depending on where they are located. We have meetings 4 - 5 times a year and try to schedule them so they don't interfere with busy seasons. They usually last 5 - 6 hours and have 2 or 3 speakers and round table discussions based on member questions they bring to the meeting.
Some of the firms in our group have gotten acquired by another CPA firm and have dropped out of the association because the new firm doesn't support CPA FMA. (Four firms were acquired by the same CPA firm.) Of course many of those members were some of the regular meeting attendees.
It's so bad, I couldn't get enough people to volunteer to be on the board for the next year. I was going to step down and let someone else have a chance to be the President, but stayed on due to lack of interest. We won't have a VP for the next year. What's worse is I had to cancel our July meeting, which is when we vote in the new board. This will be delayed until the next meeting.
I've thought about having a webinar for our main guest speaker to accommodate members who can't travel or take a day out of their schedule to attend meetings. However, I'm not sure how to do this. I need to speak with my IT guy.
I intend to send a survey out to members to find out what they would like at meetings to get them to attend and more involved.
Can you offer any suggestions to help increase our meeting attendance?
Thanks!
Mary
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