BEST ASSOCIATION TEAM

Association of Corporate Treasurers – Senior Leadership Team

The ACT’s Senior Leadership Team has delivered fantastic outcomes through great collegiality and teamwork. The ACT’s mission is to embed the highest standards of professionalism and integrity in the treasury world, and act as its leading advocate. A not-for-profit with Royal Charter, we set the global benchmark for treasury excellence and lead the profession through our internationally recognised qualifications, defining standards and championing CPD. We have 6-7,000 members, but a much larger stakeholder group of c75,000. I joined the ACT in February 2017, and today the SLT is a great mix – ‘longtimers’ and new. We have improved the gender balance (now 3 men vs 1) and each member has the success of the team in their objectives and contributes fully to all strategic discussions.

Team achievements have been outstanding in all areas: membership renewal rates and enhanced member engagement; new website launch; improved and leading-edge assessment systems; positive influence on regulators/banks, representing the ‘real economy’; our impactful, growing event agenda. The team has worked tirelessly and is now implementing a new CRM and other initiatives alongside the day job. The team’s ‘USP’ is their support for each other and the wider team who say ACT people are the best!

Builders Merchants Federation

The BMF vision is “To enable our Members to Build Excellence in Building Materials Supply”. The Teamwork by Regional Managers – to develop much closer relationships with members and understand their requirements – and by Head Office personnel to respond and develop programmes to meet those needs, have brought us closer to that vision. We have demonstrably greater engagement: Between January 2018 and June 2019, the BMF Regional Centres of Excellence hosted a total 96 events attracting 1,338 delegates. We have business KPIs that are presented at each BMF Board meeting and focus on membership numbers, key event attendances, training and membership services income. We have introduced a valuable new Regional subset to our unique BMBI sales data, exclusively available to members. We are promoting the industry with legislators through a programme of constituency MP visits to members’ operations. This year BMF membership increased by a further 7%, from 650 to 684, illustrating our recruitment and retention strategies are working. The Teamwork demonstrated in all of these achievements is worthy of this Award.

Law Society of Scotland – Anti-money laundering team

Comprised of just three full time employees, the Law Society of Scotland’s AML team have responded to the changing regulatory landscape and delivered against a challenging set of objectives. They carried out the Society’s first AML Certification process demonstrating openness and integrity along the way, resulting in the profession’s cooperation and a 100% completion rate. They adhere to a risk-based strategy and approach to supervision, which best serves members’ needs and most efficiently protects the public interest and they collaborate with a wide range of organisations and stakeholders sharing best practice and achieving maximum supervisory impact across the piece. They go above and beyond their sphere of expertise to engage with their customers, the legal profession, writing blogs, articles, web content and delivering presentations at AML roadshows across Scotland. They contribute to their colleagues’ healthy working lives and the Law Society’s corporate social responsibility programme and the team spirit they have developed in less than three years has enabled them to overcome challenges and resulted in their adding value greater than the sum of their parts.

National Association of Funeral Directors

The NAFD is recognised as the voice of the UK funeral profession, representing 4,100 funeral homes and it has one overarching objective: to help funeral directors care for bereaved families. The NAFD team might be small, but it punches well above its weight. For example:

-responding to numerous government consultations, campaigning for change and securing meetings with ministers in the Department of Health, DWP and officials from HM Treasury.
-representing the profession at a wide variety of events and provides information/support to the public.
-organising the biennial National Funeral Exhibition which brings the UK and international funeral profession together.
-overseeing the Diploma in Funeral Directing and Diploma in Funeral Arranging/Administration, which are quality approved by the Open College Network. Almost 1,000 students have studied for an NAFD Diploma since 2012.
-securing regular coverage in all major national print, broadcast and online titles and regularly fielding funeral directors to act as expert witnesses in response to breaking news.
-pioneering the use of independent/authoritative data to understand consumer views about funerals – commissioning YouGov to undertake extensive surveys in 2016 and 2018.
-inspecting more than 2,000 funeral homes each year to ensure they are abiding by the NAFD’s Code of Practice.

Police Federation of England and Wales – Communications Team

Turning a poor performing team into an award winning law-changing flexible bunch has been an ongoing challenge, making change against the face of resistance, with an every changing board of leaders. Work has been undertaken with small budgets and in the face of adversity (cyber-attack to name one) but the outcome is an improved communications service which has introduced a range of new channels to communicate and engage with its members.

Regional Studies Association – The RSA Office Team

The Regional Studies Association is a learned society with a global membership of academics, policy makers and practitioners from around 79 countries in the interdisciplinary fields of geography, sociology, urban planning and development studies. We organise global conferences and networking events, publish research, and provide various micro funding grants. We are a team of eight (six full time and two part time), working out of an office based in Sussex. we work to support the members of our association and individually report back to the board on progress across our different areas of expertise. We are recognised in person and across the digital divide; by our members, our board, our committees, our publishers and our social media followers, as a team of people committed not only to the present and future of our association, but also as the office team who are great friends who together achieve things far greater than we each could do individually.

Royal College of General Practitioners – Membership Team

I’m immensely proud of my team. The last 12 months have seen a huge amount of change at RCGP. An organisational restructure resulted in a new Membership department – a new Head of, Assistant Director and Executive Director of Membership joined the team in quick succession. A new Membership strategy was requested by our Trustee Board, created and approved within 3 months. And we introduced our new Salesforce CRM! Each element of this required the team to quickly adapt, embrace change and in some instances take on new responsibilities. It’s not always been easy, but the team has supported each other, taken ownership of the tasks in hand and looked forward to the new chapter in our evolution with optimism and energy. Our 2019 year-end membership total exceeded 54,000 for the first time and our retention rate remains high at 93%. While these achievements are a result of the hard-work of the entire team at the RCGP, I can confidently attribute much of this success to the professionalism, creativity and positive attitude of the Membership team. I’m lucky to work with such an amazing group of people and thank each and every one for their contribution.

The Governance Institute – ICSA Team

This nomination for the Best Association Team Award 2019 celebrates all at ICSA who collaborate to deliver a fantastic Annual Conference experience for our members, students, delegates, partners, sponsors and supporters.