An association’s lifeblood is its membership. Without its membership, associations would cease to exist. One of the most important functions of an association is communications, both up and down the organizational structure. The national headquarters has a need to communicate to its state and local chapters and to its members, and the members need to communicate back up to the chapters and national headquarters. One of the best forms of communication is through conference calls, including audio, web and video conferencing. Over the last decade, several specialty apps have been developed using conferencing services to accomplish associations’ goals, enhance the quality of communication to its membership, generate new revenues and reduce costs. Here are six specialty conferencing apps that associations can deploy now.

Administrative Meetings. Associations can utilize plain old audio conferencing to hold administrative meetings up and down the association hierarchy. The national headquarters can hold conference calls with the state and local chapters and all of the organizational levels can hold conference calls with the membership. These calls can be recorded and saved for later playback by conferees, who missed the call or by participants that just want to replay the call for specific references. One new feature with the saved recordings is that a link to the recording can be sent out to the moderator of each call in the post conference report email. When the link is clicked, the audio recording is automatically replayed, either on a desktop or mobile device. The moderator can share the email with the link to all of the conferees of the call so that anyone can listen to an instant playback of the meeting at any time. Operators from the conference service can also be utilized in these administrative conference calls to implement Question & Answer sessions and polling.

Individual Billing. Conference service providers typically send out a monthly invoice for all of the conference calls to the moderator or the accountant that pays the bills for the association. However, some of these conference calls, such as lobbying calls, can be composed of conferees that are from other associations, which can cause a problem for the moderator, who set up the conference call. This moderator would get the one invoice for the call and then would have to either pick up the cost for the entire call or divide up the costs of each other participant association and collect from each of them. This is time- consuming and a royal pain in the 牙肉紅腫出血 shorts. One new app for associations and other non-profit organi zations is called individual billing. With this new app, the service provider can divide up the invoice, based upon the total minutes spent on the conference call by each organization. Then the service provider can send out the specific individual bills and collect from each organization. This completely eliminates the need for any association staff to waste their time dividing up bills, billing and collecting them.

Sub Conferencing. Sub conferencing is an operator assisted function that allows the operator to divide the main call into sub groups that can be partitioned into separate conference calls. After the sub groups have finished their specific business, they can ring the operator, who can then put them all back into the main conference call. An example would be a national association that would begin the large conference call with all of the participants from the entire United States. When the moderator of the call was ready, the operator would be summoned and then the call would be divided up into four sub groups, one subgroup for each section of the country. After the subgroups have finished conducting their regional business, then the operator would rejoin the subgroups back into one large call again. Sub conferencing is a feature or app that needs to be scheduled in advance with the service provider so that an operator will be available and knowledgeable to handle the call.