Tired of Begging Your Chapter to Invite?

Cys Bronner, BNI Executive Director is here to say “Stop Yelling, Start Growing”. By focusing on what’s working and using the tools at hand, your membership will naturally increase in happiness and members, creating more referrals for everyone.

Transcript:
Stop Yelling, Start Growing

Hi, I’m Cys Bronner, Executive Director of BNI4Success in the Greater Los Angeles area and earlier this week I was remembering something BNI Executive Director Patti Salvucci once said “Chapters under 20 drive me crazy, because they don’t know how great they are. If they knew how great there are, they would be telling everyone!” 
 
I think understanding how great we are is more important than anything we do towards inviting potential members into the group. Instead of yelling, “Ya gotta invite, ya gotta invite!” we need to both become and acknowledge that the chapter is great.  

So how do we get great?
 
 That’s the question isn’t it? It’s easy to answer when you understand the tools at hand. But understanding the tools – which are a variety of reports – isn’t the activity; it’s the measurement of your activities. 

OMG, Cys – you are confusing us! 
Our real goal is to build a healthy chapter – one that is strong from the ground up, with every member working together towards each other’s success. Once you have that, you have the culture of knowing how great you are and wanting to share that. 

“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”  Vince Lombardi

When you talk about the individuals creating a group effort, you really need an overview to see how and where that is happening
 
 Reports I like to work with: 

·      Chapter Traffic Lights

·      Power of One Report

·      (and of course) PALMS

·      Sponsor Report

My favorite overview to start with is our chapter traffic lights. It’s just one of our tools that highlights the group’s benchmarks giving you a snap shot of what is working.  

Too many chapters think that it is a report to show where they rank among other chapters and don’t really pay attention to how they got to where they are placed in the report. 
 
 Every chapter has the ability to sit in the green at 100 points (actually you can get there at 80 points) so what does it take? 
 
 Let’s look at the categories – they are very similar to our members Power of One report – we have:

·      Chapter Size 

·      Chapter Growth

·      Retention 

·      Referrals

·      Visitors 

·      Conversion 

·      Absenteeism 

What’s Working? 
What I look for first is the areas where the chapter is excelling; in other words what’s working. 
 
This isn’t just about letting a chapter know where they are succeeding, but it’s also a step towards chapter growth. Once you know what’s working and then move towards the next thing that is doing well or on an upwards climb, other areas seem to naturally shift into place. 

Think about it, if you’re hitting all your benchmarks, you are definitely firing on all cylinders and you’ll have a larger, stronger chapter for it. 
 
 Where it can be deceptive is your retention, and this can trip some chapters up. 

On occasion I see chapters that are so worried about their chapter size, that they pass on empowering the Membership Committee to be good gardeners – nurturing and pruning as they go along – cre

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