The Term Ends. The Work Doesn't.

The day a new committee takes office is one of the best in an association's calendar. There are garlands and photographs, thanks for the outgoing team and plans from the incoming one.

On that same day, somewhere, a member opens the app to renew. A newcomer scans a QR code and fills in the membership form. Someone registers for next month's seminar. None of them is thinking about the election. For them, the association is simply there, as it was last week.

A committee serves for a term. Members belong every day.

Two calendars

Every association runs on two calendars at once.

The committee's calendar has a beginning and an end: a term of a year or two, an election, a handover. That is by design. New office-bearers and new ideas are how an association renews itself.

The member's calendar has no such marks. A member who joined in March renews in March. Events come round when they come round. Newcomers arrive whenever a friend tells them about you.

A new team naturally takes a little while to settle into its work, and that is as it should be. Going digital means the members' calendar does not have to wait while it does.

Your bye-laws already describe how it works

An association decided long ago how it runs: who may join, how an application is considered, how long a membership lasts, how members are numbered. Those decisions belong to the general body, and they are written in the bye-laws.

In a shared system, each of them is set up once — and then applied in the same way, every day, for every member:

• How people join. Open to anyone, by an application the committee reviews first, or by invitation only — whichever your rules say.
• How long a membership runs. Each kind of membership with its own period: a number of months or years, or for life.
• How members are numbered. In the association's own format, one after another, so the sequence carries on from one committee to the next.
• What follows a joining. On approval, the invoice, the welcome, the digital card and the certificate go out on their own (see The Zero-Touch Welcome).
• When a renewal falls due. Each membership comes up on its own date, and the member is prompted in their app (see Renewals on Autopilot).

The rules stay the association's own. When the general body changes one, the setting is changed once, and from that day it applies to everyone.

What carries on by itself

So in the week a new committee takes office, the things members rely on are already in place.

Nothing here replaces the committee. The routine carries on; the decisions and the ideas wait for the people chosen to make them. Applications that need a decision are kept together in one queue, ready for whoever now looks after membership.

The same holds when an office-bearer has to step back in the middle of a term, for work or for family. The role passes to someone else, and the routine continues.

What a new committee brings

A new committee is chosen for its direction: new programmes, new priorities, new partnerships. That is exactly what should change from one term to the next.

When the routine carries on by itself, a new team's first weeks go into those ideas rather than into setting things up. And it does not begin with a blank page:

• Last year's event can be copied as a starting point, then reshaped for this year.
• Forms and certificate designs made earlier are ready to use again.
• The figures are already there — membership, events and collections, as they stood on the day the team took office (see From Gut Feel to Growth Curve).

Each committee adds something of its own, and leaves a little more for the next.

What each person gets

The member

The same association, whoever is in office. Joining, renewing and registering work today as they did last month.

The newcomer

A door that is always open. Their application is received and looked after, whichever week they happen to apply.

The incoming office-bearer

A working association from the first day — and time to spend on the plans they were chosen for. (What they inherit in records and history is the subject of The Handover Problem.)

The outgoing office-bearer

The satisfaction of handing over something that is running, and of watching it carry on.

Chapters and branches

Each chapter has its own office-bearers and its own changes of team. The same continuity holds for every one of them, inside the association's one system (see Big Enough to Matter, Small Enough to Belong).

The association

An office that is easier to say yes to. When taking up a role means carrying on something that already works, more members feel able to step forward — and the association keeps its rhythm, term after term.

Putting it to work

• Set up joining as your bye-laws describe it — open, by application or by invitation.
• Check each kind of membership and the period it runs for.
• Put the joining form online, as a link and as a QR code.
• Invite members into the app, where renewals, events and announcements reach them.
• Give each office-bearer their own sign-in, with the role their office needs.
• Make it the association's way of working. Note it at a committee or general body meeting, so that the system passes to every future committee along with everything else.

Let every committee bring something new. Let everything members rely on carry on.