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Diagnostics |
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Before jumping into anything, it's important for you to take a moment to determine the financial and operational health of your chapter. Of course, "healthiness" can be a subjective word. In medicine, there are all kinds of tests that you could perform to measure someone's health, such as taking someone's temperature, measuring their blood pressure, measuring their pulse rate, checking their cholesterol levels, checking their reflexes, measuring their insulin levels, or performing an EKG. |
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The same is true for a chapter. You and the rest of your members must agree on two things in order to create and operate a successful organization: |
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- Shared Goals - we'll talk about his more in the "Planning" section, but having a shared understanding of the goals which your chapter is working to achieve will allow everybody to know when you're doing well.
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- "Red Flag Mechanisms" - one of the best ways to determine how well you're doing is to ask your members how everyone will know if you all miss the mark. It's good to insert "red flag mechanisms," or alerts in your program that will alarm everyone when your results are not up-to-par. So, spend some time determining what those are (examples: whenever we have less than $X in our account, whenever we have more than $X in receivables, whenever we have more than X members who are past due, when it's nearing the end of the pledge period and we have not yet taught them about chapter finance, when we're nearing the mid-way point of the Quaestor's term and there are no successors who are being trained, etc).
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Okay, so now that you have shared goals and red flag mechanisms, you'll know what to look for as you perform diagnostics on your chapter's financial health. Take a look at the current situation and evaluate the previous year's program. Now, ask yourself: |
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- In which areas can we improve this year's program as compared to last year's program?
- How could we have made our vision, goals, process and metrics more transparent for all stakeholders?
- What could we have done to instill a better culture of accountability?
- Were there any times when we waited too long to take action?
- Were there any times when we took action too soon before having all of the relevant data?
- Were there any times when we should have asked for help?
- Which resources are at our disposal this year to help us improve?
- Do I feel like our former Quaestor prepared me well for this role?
- What can I do to prepare our next Quaestor to ensure the success of our chapter?
- Anything else we're missing?
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