Keeping up with the theme of "Lessons Learned" I want to write
about measuring progress in an organization, a fledgling one at
that. Previously, we mistook progress to mean the number of
events staged. This is certainly a good metric to understand the
activeness of the organization but it is not an indicator of growth
or success.
A better measure of growth is membership or subscriber size. Even more
importantly, it is the growth in active membership. In
a dues-paying system, members who pay their annual dues can be
considered active members. Foregoing the due-paying model, we are
left with few choices of tracking membership. The number of unique
e-mail addresses in the mailing list can be substitued for a due-paying
roster. Unfortunately it includes passive and active members alike.
Perhaps a refinement to the mailing list model can also help us distinguish
between active and passive members. Otherwise a more innovative technique
will need to be conceived to track active membership.
Furthermore, a definition is in order of an active member. A person who
attends 50% of the events can be considered active. Members around the
25 and 75 percentile mark can be considered somewhat active and very active,
respectively. At a later point, we may want to expand the definition to include
other contributions to the organization besides event attendance as a measure
of activeness.
Since CAMPDC can be considered as starting from scratch, the primary
goal of the board members should be to make it grow. We should set
a bar for Q1 of 2007 that should be met or exceeded in terms of the
number of members and then work diligently towards achieving it.
What should that magic number be?
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4 comments:
CAMP is a networking platform. Ideally, members will look at CAMP as a means to achieve an end. It should allow members to come up with ideas and leverage CAMPs resources to achieve their goal.
An active member should be a facilitator. Someone who assists in CAMP activites, CAMP initiatives or assists in the growth of CAMPs member or partners.
I couldn't agree more. That is what I was getting at in the second to last paragraph when I referred to "other contributions".
I suppose the next question is, how many passive members and active members do we currently have?
I don't know if attendance alone is a sufficient indicator of activism. When I was in college, we had decent attendance at the MSA meetings, but people hardly participated in a meaningful manner. When I think of 'active members' I think of people engaging in activities beyond mere attendance. Perhaps active members should be defined in terms of volunteerims with or without attendance. You can have very active members of an Islamic organization who don't come to a single meeting. Just my personal thoughts.
If CAMP is an entrepreneurship networking organization then its metrics should be based on entrepreneurship goals: number of companies started by members because of CAMP, number of leads generated by members because of CAMP, amount of dollars raised for members' companies by other members of CAMP, etc.
Events are also a good measure but they need to be split out: educational events, networking events, etc. Once we have a good split we can figure that educational events are successful because it took place; networking events are successful due to contacts made and leads exchanged; etc.
Lets not feel good because we met -- feel good because something happened.
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