I am currently working with my first client at Tying It Together Consulting, and the project centers on something they believe they do very well for their members. However, several public and private organizations are actually delivering those same services more effectively.

While that scenario may sound eerily familiar to some of you, it immediately took me back to the first association where I served as chief executive—the Association Executives of North Carolina (AENC).

When I joined AENC, membership was at an all-time low. And even among those who were members, the primary audience—association professionals—weren’t very engaged or attending meetings. The vision of AENC was “to be the premier resource for the association professional in North Carolina.” Simple, right? Well… easier said than done.

One of the primary ways you serve as a resource to association professionals is through education. I’ve always been a big believer in letting data paint the picture. So, we conducted a comprehensive survey of our members and asked some very basic questions: What are we doing well? What can we improve? And what problems are keeping you up at night that AENC could help solve?

For years, I’ve played golf, and one of the most exciting moments in my golf journey was when I went to the driving range and every bad shot I hit sliced to the right. Now, you might be thinking—why is that a good thing? Because I was consistently bad. And consistency means there’s likely a simple fix. Sure enough, one conversation with a swing coach got me back on track.

The same was true for AENC. The answer was right in front of us. If we were supposed to be “the premier resource for the association professional in North Carolina,” and our survey revealed that education was where we were weakest, then we had our marching orders.

My first task was to recruit a strong Professional Development Committee chair. One thing I quickly learned was that we were planning programming only a month or two in advance of each meeting. That wasn’t going to work. We needed a plan. We needed a calendar.

I knew many association CEOs personally—and they were BUSY. If something wasn’t on their calendar months in advance, it wasn’t happening. And if it didn’t provide real value, it definitely wasn’t happening.

So, I asked a dear friend, Jim Booth, CAE, if he would be willing to step up and chair the committee. He agreed, and the committee got to work.

The first thing we did was use the CAE domains as our guiding framework. Moving forward, no educational program would pass the “sniff test” unless we could tie it directly to one of the CAE domains. This brought rigor and credibility to our offerings. We also made sure to maintain variety—we didn’t want all advocacy or all governance. The CAE exam itself is weighted across domains, so we worked to reflect that balance.

And y’all—within just a few years, everything changed. Education attendance increased, membership began to grow, and by the time I left AENC in 2014, we had to change our vision statement… because we had become the premier resource for association professionals in North Carolina.

Nobody was doing it better than us.