Comment / Share the value

By Mark Knight

I was very pleased to read the latest results of our HFMA member survey. They reveal an association that is valued by its membership – but at the same time they leave no room for complacency.  The HFMA team is poring over the results to identify areas in which we can improve and serve you better. 
The headline figures are encouraging and certainly compare favourably with the 2010 poll.  We received 609 responses – that’s substantially down on 2010 but still a significant sample of the membership. Of those who responded 96% of members would recommend HFMA to a colleague and 94% rate this magazine as good or excellent. Not surprisingly, the news and features pages both scored well and were the most popular. It was also pleasing to see that 93% of members rate the weekly news service as good or excellent and nearly 80% feel the subscription is good or excellent value for money.
Looking further afield to the branch network, 84% of members felt that local events were worth recommending to a colleague. I was pleased that the HFMA is very much perceived as the professional development partner of choice for everyone.
This is very much a warts-and-all survey and I have posted the results table on the HFMA website for members to access. There was no surprise to me that the Friday news summary was seen as a very good benefit, as was access to the network. However, I was interested to see that the blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn hadn’t really caught on. Perhaps the 2014 survey will demonstrate more growth in this area as more of our services lend themselves to these new media.
There are a few areas where I think we need to work harder, and we will redouble our efforts in these areas. While we always look at the benefits we offer members, one issue is about communicating our existing benefits to members. Take the member’s library: we put
virtually all our briefings and publications on the secure members-only site and yet most are unaware of it. We will do better to explain our benefits package.
We have started a new campaign to increase membership. We believe we have a good value-for-money offering, which at national level provides this excellent magazine and at a local level the branch network. ‘Share the value’ is a little incentive to give you a little back when you introduce a new member – a £10 Marks & Spencer voucher. And there’s no limit to how many you recruit. The initiative will run for a few months but please don’t delay. Sign up as many as you can because in the run-up to making an application for chartered status it would be great to show we have the vast bulk of healthcare accountants as members.
At an event recently some of the delegates were surprised to find that they weren’t HFMA members. Their organisations were HFMA partners and they had confused this with personal membership. We see personal membership as vital to the association. Yes, we believe the benefits more than match the cost. But it is also a way for finance practitioners to align themselves and show their support for the role and goals of the HFMA.
I’ll leave with one final comment: thank you. Although we can’t run the association solely on subscriptions, every penny is valued and appreciated –and what’s more they are tax deductible.