Why Continuing Education and Multidisciplinary Networking Make for Bad Chapter Meetings: Part 2

Yet in this environment, “professional education” is not just unnecessary to facilitate networking, it’s actually a waste of precious networking time. Not to mention the nigh impossibility of finding an educational topic (or a sponsor!) that would be genuinely relevant enough to all members across all disciplines to make it worthwhile, anyway. 

Notably, some affiliated professionals do manage to make connections in the multi-disciplinary financial services associations, by getting even more involved than just attending chapter meetings. For instance, volunteer committees actually do afford meaningful social interaction that can promote networking. However, this is not a replicable growth model for most chapters, especially given that in the end even volunteer committees meetings are not really structured networking time, many committees and boards still have minimum requirements for a certain number of “core” members, and only so many affiliated professionals can really get involved before it gets too competitive (given the lack of structure around balancing the number of affiliated professionals in overlapping disciplines).

Of course, this isn’t to say that continuing education content is always bad at an association meeting. When the focus of the association is on a core membership with a common focus and common needs—who all find relevance in the same content —then CE content can be an excellent common purpose around which the organization’s community is built.

But the key distinction is that building community is different than networking; community involves similar people who share a similar bond and can relate to each other on common issues, while networking involves different people who have a distinct, non-overlapping business focus that can create cross-referral or partnered business opportunities.

As long as associations continue to run community-oriented CE meetings while trying to draw a multidisciplinary networking membership base and meeting attendance, I fear there will be continued high attrition rates from affiliated professionals like my attorney friend, who are often faced with chapter meetings that include irrelevant content, irrelevant sponsors, little structure to actually facilitate true networking, and often little time to actually network at all.

Either focus on core members, or truly focus on networking. If there’s a fear that making meetings more truly networking focused—without the CE—might cause meeting attendance to drop, then perhaps the reality is that core members aren’t really that interested in networking after all.

So what do you think? Do you join professional associations for networking (for cross referral opportunities) or for community (meeting professional colleagues and peers)? Do you actually find chapter meetings anchored by financial planning CE credit to really be effective networking time as a financial planner? Are you an affiliated professional that finds CE meetings to be a good use of time when you’re not the target of the CE? Have you ever been involved in other networking organizations? Do you see a difference between networking organizations and professional membership associations?