There are tons of free online resources available to help your association. It pays to build a bank of templates that make mundane tasks a little less time consuming, which can be especially useful for smaller associations with little manpower and less resources.
In addition to the thousands available online, it is helpful to create and tailor your own templates. They take very little time to create yet save an enormous amount of work in the long run – there is no point repeating a task over and over again if there is an easier and more efficient way of working. Templates can be made for just about any Microsoft Office program, but we find they are most useful for Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. If a difficult query comes up, or there is something particularly time consuming that you envisage yourself redoing, then it’s worth creating a template.
This is extremely useful when sending out bulk emails. Maybe one of your members needs a reminder to pay their invoice, or you are sending out joining instructions to training course delegates. These tasks are prime examples of when templates come in handy.
Here’s a look at the templates we use the most for our clients:
Training Courses:
Save a set of master slides when creating training course presentations. This will make it much easier to amend the course in the future, as well as set the groundwork for any new training courses your association wishes to develop.
Invoices:
Whether you manually create and email out invoices using Microsoft Office, or use a more advanced accounting software, templates really help save time when sending out invoices – especially when membership renewal time rolls around!
Letters:
Headed paper for letters is a must have on your list of templates. When undergoing administrative tasks letters are something you are going to send a lot of, so creating a template for headed paper is certainly something you are going to want to do. In addition to making your association stand out and look more professional, companies may require your association’s details on headed paper in order to pay invoices.
New Member Materials:
It’s common for associations to send “welcome packs” to their new members. This could either be done through the post or digitally, but either way it will significantly save you time if you create a few blanket templates to help you with this. It may be that you need templates for postage labels, badge inserts, or a welcome letter. When you get a new member sign up it’s as easy as changing the name on your materials.
AGM & Conference Materials:
As member conferences are usually annually, when planning it’s easy to forget about all the quick little tasks and focus on the bigger aspects. This isn’t best practice, as you will soon realise that the quick tasks build up and can end up taking a large chunk of your time when you’re close to your deadline. Setting up templates for things like delegate lists, Q&A cards and programmes in advance will save you quite the headache when that time of year comes around.
Make use of our free Annual Leave Tracker Template here!