Sustainable growth and efficiency of professional organization

I am member of many professional organizations. Though these associations have large membership and are quite active in organizing events like seminars, conferences, workshops and get together, they are observed to be financially very weak with infrastructural facilities and stable administrative staff. These organizations elect their managing boards and the people so elected work in honorary capacity and the organization activities are planned and executed under their leadership with the help of permanent administrative staff.

Though these organizations have noble aims and objectives, there is little effort to make the organization financially stable for future growth. The only way adopted by these organizations for collecting funds is through donations and advertisement/stall bookings at the time of annual conventions or exhibitions. The organizations also have life membership plans rather than annual subscriptions.The idea behind life membership is to form a corpus fund and run the organization though the interest from such fund.

However, as the cost of products and services rise very fast as compared to constant interest, the organizations cannot provide the services to members from such corpus fund. Naturally the members soon become inactive towards the organization. Those who are office bearers try to increase life membership fee or get new members for strengthening the organization financially. However, this also fails to improve the situation, as the number of active members remains very small.

As these organizations are established with some motive of social service, it is expected that the members would contribute actively for fulfilling the objectives of the organization. Absence of constant association of organization with its members, makes the status of organization as  event maker rather than regular functioning. As a result, the organizations remain dormant for most of the time defeating the very purpose of  forming such organizations.

Fortunately, the digital media has developed many gadgets and tools which can help in keeping live and active interaction  between organization and its members and organization can provide many more value adding services to its members through web portal. These include products/services, discussion forum, knowledge database, e-learning solutions, platform for collaborative activities, webinars etc. The organization can communicate with its members and get their feedback and suggestions for new programs and projects on continuous basis. This helps in growth and effectiveness of organization  for career development of members and implementation of projects of social welfare.

Study of some international  professional organizations revealed that their major income is through digital media in the form of knowledge transfer, education, sale of goods and services and advertisements. These organizations have a strong corporate infra-structure, sound business model for sustainable growth and are ready to expand their activities in India. They have annual membership, which gives them constant source of finance for running their activities.

Unless Indian organizations transform their way of working by making major changes in their administrative setup, membership rules and adopt digital media as the main platform for conducting their activities with self financing ability, they may be superseded by international agencies.

Dnyandeep Foundation has decided to restructure its setup and functioning on these lines with collaborative investment and undertaking self financing projects for sustainable growth and  achieving desired impact on society.

Dr. S. V. Ranade, Chairman, Dnyandeep Foundation, Sangli