• Case Study
Association for Corporate Growth (ACG NYC)
The New York City chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth utilizes Lineup to save time when managing their volunteers and committees.
SITUATION
For many professional associations, volunteers are the foundation to moving an organizations' mission forward. Members of the Association for Corporate Growth’s New York chapter (ACG NYC) chair or serve on their 15 committees and subcommittees and are decision makers on implementing changes, offering solutions, and creating programming for their chapter.
ACG NYC represents private capital providers, Investment Bankers, M&A advisors, corporate executives, accountants, attorneys and other related transactional advisors. The chapter strongly encourages their members to serve on their committees as it's a rewarding experience for their members, and could also lead to greater leadership roles within the organization.
The chapter grew, as did their volunteer participation, but unfortunately the chapter continued to use ineffective tools to manage their volunteers and committees.
CHALLENGE
The volunteer management process included one too many platforms and steps for this small but very active chapter, “we were using SurveyMonkey to reach out to our volunteers, downloading the results, merging the data into a massive spreadsheet, and manually sorting volunteers onto committees based on a numbering system, then leaving the final selection process up to the committee chairs.” By the end of this labor intensive process Amanda and her team would deploy individual emails through Outlook leaving the team waiting to hear back from their volunteers and unaware if the volunteer received, opened or even read the email, once again referring back to their spreadsheets.
In addition to the management of their robust collection of spreadsheets, Amanda found herself managing team members who played a role in the process, “we have liaisons who work closely with our chairs and committees, so naturally they would have access to the spreadsheets, this actually added another layer of challenges internally and caused duplicative work. The process we had in place did not allow us to keep track of external communications between ACG NYC staff and our volunteers, so we never knew who on our staff had contacted a volunteer to confirm their slots, or if something had changed with the status of a volunteer, we just didn’t know.”
ACG NYC continued to struggle with the volunteer management system they had in place, as well as tackling the internal team management of this process. Amanda and the rest of the organization knew that there had to be a better solution for collecting, reporting, keeping track and communicating with their volunteers (and staff). “We had seen and demoed a few volunteer management solutions, but unfortunately, nothing that appealed to us or wowed us at the time.”
SOLUTION
ACG NYC discovered Lineup at an ASAE conference and decided to take advantage of the free trial. Lineup absolutely surpassed ACG’s expectations. The adoption of Lineup has helped the ACG NYC streamline their volunteer appointment process, earn back valuable time, and shift their focus to higher priority projects rather than chasing down answers and getting lost in spreadsheets. By organizing their volunteer process into one platform, Lineup allowed their committee chairs to easily vet their potential committee members without the tedious back and forth with ACG NYC executives.
With Lineup, ACG NYC can now focus on growing their chapter and increasing their volunteer participation. In 2019, approximately 13% of their membership participated on committees including Membership, Programming, Marketing, Forward, Women of Leadership, Family Office as well as a number of other programs. “We’re committed to having our members more involved with the chapter, and with this new streamlined way, we’re hopeful that moving forward we can make the recruitment process easier on our volunteers and less stressful for the ACG staff.”