Your association’s board of directors need to stay in the loop, but they don’t have time to keep up with your organization’s every move. Board reports summarize your association’s efforts, giving your board of directors necessary information without being too time-consuming. When writing these reports, your association management software (AMS) can provide valuable information to make the reporting even easier and more insightful.
Why are professional association board reports important?
Board reports serve several purposes for your association. The documents inform the board about vital association work, keeping them informed on strategic growth in relation to your mission and goals. Board reports also summarize committee reports about governing finances or other vital organizational activities. Depending on the committee’s findings, the report may request funds for a list of proposed activities.
A board report also works to outline potential risks for board members, sometimes creating a full risk assessment for review or opting to put a committee in charge and letting the board vote on proposed actions. Additionally, board reports may include ideas for actions or proposals for its members. These parts of the reports can encourage discussion on certain topics during the board meetings.
What does the professional association board of directors do with report information?
Reports serve as a vital informational tool to guide board members as they make decisions when voting on potential funding or activities. A board report can also advise members by proposing action plans for reducing various types of risk or initiating growth.
By guiding the board of directors in their discussions, providing data to inform decisions, and suggesting actions to take, board reports serve as a crucial communication tool between the association and its board.
What goes into association board reporting?
Board reports can contain a wealth of information. Common topics covered in these reports include the following:
- Committee work
- Financial performance
- Staff or member management
- Accomplishments
- In-progress activities
- Upcoming events
- Advice or recommendations to board of directors
Board reports give the most information needed in a succinct format, thereby serving as an association board summary of events and operations since the previous board of directors meeting.
Much of the information used in a board report comes from committees and association management software. Committees summarize their actions and proposals. However, for delivering numerical evidence to the board, the information from association management software is essential.
What insights from your association management software can you include in your report?
Association management software is an invaluable tool for running your organization. The data the software collects and reports ensures that writing a board report is more efficient. You will also have accurate data to back up any proposals or requests made to the board of directors.
Not all software options for managing associations are the same. Nimble AMS uses the Salesforce platform for a secure, familiar architecture that keeps up to date automatically. With this software, you have the power to create and view reports on all aspects of your association’s operations.
To facilitate the use of the program out of the box, several reports come automatically loaded to the dashboard. Your association staff can configure these reports as needed based on your requirements for information and reporting.
The following are some of the files for reports that you will see when you first use the Nimble AMS reporting feature:
- Accounting: Incoming and outgoing payments
- Accounts: People who set up accounts with your association, such as members or businesses, and their payment and personal information
- Committees: Committees and their members
- Data validation: Reports covering all accounts, committees, members, donations, publications, and more
- Donations: Funds donated to your association
- Events: Data on events including dates, locations, logistics, and registrations
- Engagements: All association engagements
- Memberships: Information on all members of the association
- Merchandise: Data on merchandise inventories, sales and products
- Payments: Payments to your association for dues or other reasons
- Subscriptions: Information on those who have subscriptions to your association’s publications and data on various publications from your group
- Users: Data on Nimble AMS users who have access to the reports and other information in the system
Information about accounts, members, and subscriptions tells the board of directors more about those who engage with your association and how much they get out of it. For instance, having many more members than subscribers to publications shows a need for boosting marketing or changing the content of your newsletters, magazines and other subscription-based pieces. Members who have accounts may be more engaged in purchasing continuing education courses or event tickets than those without accounts. The board may look at an imbalance as a sign to change member engagement practices.
With reports based on upcoming events, such as within the next year or next 30 days, trends in expiring memberships and subscriptions can reveal groups of people who may have signed up for publications or became members around the same time. Finding a connection among those groups may hint at a possible way to raise subscription or membership rates in the future. Similarly, with the use of predictive analysis from Nimble AMS, you can see which members have a lower chance of renewing their memberships. Commonalities among these can inform your member communications.
Committees can use this information to inform their proposed plans of action for the board of directors. When committees use the report information, they reduce the amount of work for the board. In this way, reports can provide valuable insights to the board of directors after committees process the information to create their board reports.
