Although its only February, chapters are already gearing up for the months ahead. Some chapters are planning milestone anniversaries and spring meetings, others are training their incoming officers and preparing for the new volunteer year. While preparing for the months and year ahead, it’s always a good idea to regularly review your chapter’s strategic goals, evaluate initiatives and best practices to ensure we meet our goals as well as our members’ needs. However, before adjusting our plans and practices, we encourage you to take some time to understand our members’ needs with feedback provided from the ANFP Membership Survey, which was distributed to members in November of 2025. This information helps us understand what we may be doing well and what we need to improve, and how we need to do so, which will affect our planning for the year ahead.
Chapter Meetings – We surveyed members and asked if they had attended chapter meetings in the last 5 years. For those that did not attend (66%), here are the top 3 reasons for not attending:
- Scheduling conflict
- Location
- Cost
Consider This: Chapters may want to explore alternate options to address these concerns and accommodate more members including hosting a virtual or hybrid meeting (or series of webinars), rotating your location throughout the state, surveying members on their preferred dates/time of year/date pattern.
Reasons to Attend – Of the members that responded to the survey who are attending meetings (33%) here are top 3 benefits:
- Affordable, quality education
- Networking opportunities
- Opportunity to earn CEs
Consider This: Each of these benefits are great motivators to entice attendees and for chapters to use when promoting meetings. Be sure to highlight these benefits as well as others in your marketing materials.
Chapter Offerings – Overall members were mostly satisfied with chapter offerings, including educational meetings, networking and volunteer opportunities, communications, and member recognition.
Consider This: Chapters can use this information as a springboard to dig deeper into how we can improve satisfaction in these areas or explore new chapter offerings members may be interested in. Chapters may wish to conduct a mini-survey that focuses on offerings and ways to improve overall satisfaction or ‘test the waters’ on potential, new offerings.
Thank you to all chapter leaders that completed the member satisfaction survey and provided feedback on how National can also improve. Chapter leaders will receive a follow-up, mini-survey in the coming weeks, along with the summarized results specific to chapter involvement as highlighted above.