After hearing about what’s been going on lately and reading
the
strategic plan posted in April’s minutes, I felt compelled to write this to
help an organization that transformed me for decades. I organized this by a
couple sections so you can skip to whichever you feel most useful. I realize
not everyone has time to, or cares to, read an essay of this length.
About me
I’ll start with who I am, as I realize quite a bit of time
has passed since I was deeply entrenched in the club. I got my first Australian
Shepherd in 1992 when I was 12 years old. This marks my 25th year of
involvement with the breed. I was not a cool kid, and I had a lot of problems
finding friends and a purpose and my mentor, Cathy Davis of Melody Aussies,
helped give that to me. What my parents thought was a phase turned out not to
be.
At this point, I’ve competed in every ASCA venue except for
scent work (though I’ve trained for it). I’ve been to six national specialties.
I’ve titled in every venue except scent and rally (though I’ve qualified in
rally, I just didn’t love it). I was 4th in National Finals junior
handling. I’ve literally done everything in the breed. And this is due to
mentors that put up with me, who saw something in me, and to all of those who
still do.
While I was in high school, I was asked to chair the
founding Junior committee. I might have been the youngest chair in the breed of
anything, and I certainly was one of the youngest for the other committees I’ve
sat on: DNA & Genetics, Education,
History, Strategic, and the one I’m most proud of: Breed Standard Review.
During a particular time of turmoil, while I was still in
school getting my masters’, I ran and was honored to win, a highly contested
seat on the ASCA board, becoming the youngest to have that seat as well. And
while youngest isn’t a special distinction, I want to point this out because I
ran and won that seat because while I was young and passionate, I also had a
capacity to do the research, the work, and look to get things done. People told
me I should run on some campaign, but I didn’t. I ran as myself. And the
membership seated me, where I worked through some difficult things with the
other directors for a term until I wanted out and on my own again.
Once I got out, I tried to help steer the club when asked to
be a part of the strategic committee, but the work really didn’t go anywhere or
do anything. I felt like unless I wanted to be on the board, or join a
committee and just do all the work, nothing could be done. A lot of who I am is
because of ASCA, and being in a position to not be able to do much was too
much, paired with the constant negativity from politics, infighting, and
general culture problems, I decided to stop my membership and not be involved
in ASCA as a member.
I didn’t leave the breed – I sit as Secretary of the
Australian Shepherd Health and Genetics Institute, where I’m working to help
get the nonprofit less dependent on CA Sharp and continue the good work it’s
been doing toward education and research.
I also was asked to take over the Working Aussie Source, because I’ve
found a passion in promoting this aspect of our breed and I’m good at Internet
things.
Okay, enough about me and Aussies. Here’s the thing, though –
my career, not totally accidentally, mirror’s the club in an incredibly unique
way: I am both an executive director of a 501c7 (founded on the basis of ASCA) AND
an event producer. I’ve devoted my life to both seeing what didn’t work with
ASCA and changing it, and seeing what did and incorporating it.
Those who know me, know that I am never satisfied with good
enough, and I’ll educate myself constantly on whatever I need to do to get
better at something. At this point, I’m a very good ED who understands the ins
and outs of managing membership expectation, steering something toward a
mission, working with and hiring others to share that mission, and growing a
club. I also know just how difficult it is to make a nonprofit work the bigger
it gets. I’m even on the faculty of our local nonprofit resource group. I’m also a very good event producer. I know
about funding and marketing, sponsorship, working with land managers, course
design, all of that. We do events worldwide and are frequently hired as expert
witnesses because of our expertise.
Again, I say all that because my history in the dog world
makes people think I’m still 12. I’m not. I’ve done a lot in that time that I’m
proud of and continuing to do so.
And despite wanting to stay out of ASCA, I get talked to a
lot about it. From things going poorly at Nationals, to seeing people get upset
at current rule changes or political climates, or whatever. And I shrug and
say, “Well that’s not my battle anymore.” I did my time.
I have nothing to gain from writing this, or from you guys
taking this advice. I am not in a position to do any of the things I’m about to
outlay. Maybe in the future, I could take on some of the things I’m talking
about for remuneration, but it’s not now and I’d rather see ASCA grow with or
without me. ASCA changed the rules a while
back to make sure it would take a decade more of membership for me to sit on
the board when I decided to let it lapse a bit after 20 years of membership, so
really, I couldn’t do anything about any
of this if I wanted to.
But I’m hoping that some of you will appreciate that I took
the time to lay this out in hopes that ASCA can continue to take this breed
somewhere special and become a place I want my year old twin daughters to play
in, grow up in, and be influenced by, rather than what it has become to my
husband and friends: an eye rolling, high drama distraction. I’m uniquely qualified to say any of this
because I know what it looks like behind the scenes, at the events, and from an
uninvested perspective.
The issue at hand:
ASCA currently appears to be going through some changes that
are making a lot of the membership unhappy, and while I don’t want to get into
it, I will highlight the general issues I see:
- ·
Lack of consistent vision
- ·
Lack of understanding its current membership
base
- ·
Lack of leadership expertise
As someone who has been involved with the breed for 25
years, and is passionate of the history before that, I can acknowledge that
there’s always turbulent times. But ASCA was once to me and to others, THE club
for Aussies. If you were passionate about Aussies, you joined it. It was the
Aussie’s champion – it was where you found the legit mentors and the original
dogs doing things. When we went through the AKC breed takeover, people felt
very strongly that ASCA was the club that would retain the breed’s integrity.
But more and more, it feels like ASCA is chasing AKC. And I
understand why. As the breed has gotten more popular (my red tri pup in 1992
was mistaken for a St Bernard among other things, but never an Aussie, but now
I live within spitting distance of four other Aussies and everyone knows the
colors correctly even) – ASCA has not.
In 2007, the Australian Shepherd was not ranked in the
top
30 dogs registered with AKC. It hit in 2008 in 29
th place. Today
it is in
16th
place. If the Aussie is crawling up the ranks in AKC, why is ASCA not
seeing its pie grow larger as AKC grows it? Why are its membership and
registration numbers, and even its programs on a downward trend?
Is this because USASA is an amazing breed club? I’ve never
been involved in it. I did some AKC shows back in the day but my current dogs
are ASCA only. It’s the shows that put in the work and do that end of things,
so I’m not sure what’s promoting the Australian Shepherd in the club itself. It’s
the breeders and the dogs themselves, most likely.
So . . . if AKC registration is growing, why are breeders favoring them over
ASCA? Why isn’t dual registration happening, or why aren’t pet homes
registering their dogs?
This brings me to my first bullet point:
Lack of consistent vision
I’ve sat on my share of ineffective boards and committees
outside of ASCA, and I’ve advised even more – this is not just an issue to
ASCA, but it is a huge problem for the club because of how big it’s grown and how
its leadership is selected. Since there
is no executive director that manages the day-to-day and long term vision, that
comes down to the directors. But the directors themselves are selected not by
determining holes and filling needs but by popular vote. A good organization
will identify strengths and weaknesses in its board and round it out depending
on the club’s objectives. This can’t happen with the kind of turnaround and
culture ASCA currently has. The club is so big now, the best you can hope for
is that your particular interests are represented by someone at board level or
by some loud, annoying voices at the committee or membership level. The only way to ensure consistency is by
keeping the same board members in the same spot and reelecting them and keeping
them engaged and asking for reelection.
Lack of understanding
of the current membership base
Following on this track – much of the board is comprised of
long term Aussie lovers and ASCA members, and this is intentional: a minimum of
eight years’ membership in the club is required. That kind of heavy investment
means that people that have stuck it out that long have really gained something
and you look at membership numbers, they’re essentially stagnant. Either ASCA
has zero new blood coming in, or people are cycling out as fast as they are
coming in. This would be fine if you were a youth program or serving a
short-term goal, but the idea here is to get these Aussie fans and keep them for
life, right? So why isn’t the club, its advertising revenue, its membership,
and its programs naturally growing by something like 10% year over year, when
we’ve seen a much larger exponential growth in registrations by AKC for Aussies?
After I did my time on the board, I continued to do
something I felt was important to the health of ASCA: conduct exit surveys for
those not renewing. It did a couple things – it reminded people that they hadn’t
renewed and encouraged them to, it gathered information about why they were
leaving, and it made them feel missed. When I lapsed my membership, I never got
the survey, so I assume that ASCA stopped doing it when I did.
I haven’t done those surveys for gosh, at least five years,
but at the time, I got a lot of data out of it and I sent it to the board, but
I’ve never seen any of that information put to use. ASCA will not succeed if it
does not start to quantify, inquire of, and measure its base instead of making
assumptions.
Lack of leadership
expertise:
This brings me to the final point – which is not that the
people on the board aren’t smart or don’t care, but that they simply lack the
finer points of the expertise needed to successfully grow and heal the rifts
within ASCA that I believe are caused by it running “business as usual.”
When I was on the board, we tried to do some board education
that came in the form of some little handouts we all got – but we had to read them and all buy into them and that
just didn’t happen. Changing culture, training leaders, etc, is not a part-time
job. I’m spending a half hour every week with each of my employees doing checks
on what they think and helping them grow into better managers, reading at least
5 hours a week myself, etc. If you’re on the ASCA board, you’re reading emails,
talking to your friends and other members, playing with your dogs, working on
your career or raising your kids, or whatever . . . are you really that into
growing your leadership skills? And what if nobody on the board is, as well?
So while you might have cool people who are smart and understand the breed and
are loyal to the club – you’re not getting people who are marketers, middle-sized
business people, etc that would really catapult this club to where it could be.
Those people have their careers and aren’t typically as invested as you’d need
to be to both be a member for that 8 year period along with be a big name that
people recognize and vote for.
So what do we do
about it?
Did you actually make it this far? Thank you. I appreciate your time and you
giving me a chance here. I’m not the type to complain and point things out
without also providing a fix here and there, and in the past it was solved by
ME providing the fix. I can’t and won’t do it right now. But I will help
outline some actionable things that ASCA can do today, as long as how the club
operates hasn’t changed that much from when it did:
Address the leadership issue first, and it needs
to be a multi-pronged attack.
a.
Accept less time as a member in the club for
board members. Encourage new blood with skills to apply for the jobs that need
those skills.
b.
Don’t like that? Hire an executive director (do
this even if you like the above). Yesterday. And yes, I more than anyone else
know how that went down poorly (I used to coach the first one for hours after
work weekly until she was let go). Put together an attractive incentive
package. Hold out until you find the right employee that’s hungry to learn
about ASCA (or already knows) and hungry to make the changes and believes in
the mission. Hold out until that person has demonstrated experience at the helm
of a passionate membership organization. Don’t think you have the money? I’ve
said this before, and I’ll say it again – if you hire an effective director,
you will make that money back. You are BLEEDING membership and registration
dollars that a focused individual could get back through implementing simple
operational changes.
c.
Get complete board buy in to do
leadership
training. Rather than complain about it being a time suck, the board
members should see it as a development perk. My tenure on the board has made me
great with numbers and projections, great with legalese, and just overall
confident in everything else I did because I learned it there first thanks to
our wonderful professional team. The board seat is an asset to the right
people.
d.
Send a message to the tireless volunteers and
passionate supporters in the clubs and committees that things are changing.
Liaisons
need to check in and have real relationships with the committee chairs that
put that leadership training to work and trickles down to committee
members. Let that leadership training
become available to affiliate clubs. Let EVERYONE get just a little better at
everything from efficiency to communication, to outreach. Send messages that
you want to hear from people. Send thank yous to those who you hear from.
Send
updates to them, too. This is an open letter specifically because I know as
it currently stands, I’ll be blessed to even get a thank you that lets me know
it got to the board. I’ve taken hours out of my day to process this and write
it. I’ve spent decades giving my skills to this breed. A thank you and an
update is the least that could be done. And yes, I know it’s work and the
people at the top are thankless volunteers: HIRE AN ED or at the very least,
expand the Executive Secretary’s job to do this, too. She’s cool. She’ll do
great at it.
As a club, it’s time to look at what ASCA is,
what it was, what it has become from there, and what you want it to be. This needs
to be measurable. Run the following surveys:
a.
Track every stream of income as far back as you
can go – and do it by programs. Look at the graph. Where it spikes and drops,
look at the policies you’ve enacted and also go back and look at ASCA-L and look
where the drama occurred. Make objective notes.
i.
Evaluate income stream against the expenses at
the club level so you can see which cost the most to administrate and which don’t.
(How much does it cost the office per month or year to admin a program? Time
track everything from data entry to customer service calls to printing and
mailing certificates)
b.
Start up those exit surveys again. If they’re
lost in the ether, I’m happy to dig up the questions. They provided pointed
reasons for leaving as well as suggestions for improvement.
c.
Conduct a survey of the membership about their
feelings. Run it for six months. Market it heavily. Email people. Call them.
Invest in your membership and see what they think about things. Specifically:
i.
Why are you a member of ASCA?
ii.
What do you see is the primary purpose of ASCA?
iii.
What would you like to see for ASCA’s future?
iv.
What do they like and dislike about the Aussie
Times? Is it a major driver for membership? Have they placed ads in the past, why
or why not? Did they work? Why or why not?
v.
What got you to join as a member?
vi.
What motivates you to register your dogs with
us?
vii.
Do you compete in our programs? Which ones? How
long have you?
viii.
If you have not competed in our programs, why
not? How can we help you?
ix.
What can we do to make it easy for you to reach
out to other Aussie owners and educate them about ASCA?
d.
Take all this information and make an objective
table. Where does it line up with expectations? Does anything surprise you?
What simple changes could you make to please more people? What is super
complicated and creates a headache for everyone?
3.
Take a good hard look at the breed, where it’s
at, and what step 2 yielded – what is ASCA these days? Is it what you want it
to be? If not, it’s time to make some changes. Something I do want to say is
that taking on more and more centrally is NOT a great idea if we already have
leadership wants. More programs will not solve your income stream issue.
Retention is key. From the surveys and numbers
- what is it that people want? It’s time to make a hard decision about
whether that’s in line with what you think ASCA’s supposed to be. Success comes
from staying focused on your niche and believing in it and doing it WELL with
consistency.
Develop an outreach approach that captures these
things.
Booth a large dog-friendly events. Sponsor affiliate club outreach
efforts so it’s easier for the people on the ground to do the work that ASCA
wants and needs. Beautiful ads in well-read dog magazines, pamphlets sent out
to members for distribution. Updated car stickers. Some drop-shipped
merchandise that people can wear to show people’s pride that’s only available
to members (so circumnavigating the income requirements of a 501c7).
a.
Advertise heavily what your fees go toward. Make
the process transparent. $10,000 to health research. Tours of the office. Tours
of the new software. Faces of the staff in the office. Whatever you spend money
on, find the reason a member should be excited about it and show us all
proudly.
5.
Electronic entries – I still don’t know how you
guys aren’t doing this yet. There’s no good excuse. I’m putting on multiday
adventure races where people go missing for a time with no communication and
could easily die and I can do it and it works great. Have been for fifteen
years. Make the barrier to entry low and catalog and data entry EASY – cost effective,
too. And you capture money from people who don't come who thought they would. I know a couple smaller timing companies that would be thrilled to
shoulder the expense to program it based on the volume ASCA has. And how about autorenewing memberships? Opt out vs opt in!
6.
Nationals/Finals – this is stuff from almost 20
years doing events nationally, internationally, locally, and ranging from 200
participants to 10,000
a.
Hire a team to do this. Do not put it on any
volunteers, do not put it on office staff, do not put it on the theoretical
executive director. Someone doing this year after year will get so good at
this, that the quality will be unsurpassed. I wrote up a whole outline about
how I thought that would work when Jean Roberts requested it of me, hopefully
that’s going to be helpful one day.
b.
Make this the best it can be. Market it heavily
as the place to be if you love these dogs, even if you don’t show or trial
them. Get as many Aussie lovers in one place as you can. It’s not just the
trials, it’s the stuff, it’s the seminars . . . educate, outreach, etc.
c.
You did a great thing by deciding to cycle
through the same few spots and here’s why – sourcing will be easier but . . .
more importantly . . .
d.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF TOURISM MONEY. You have events
in the fall season. Have these Nationals locations in tourist-friendly areas,
tell them you’re bringing 2000 people (all the more to do step b) for a week
and show them the heads in beds. Tourism money for events during "shoulder seasons" (like fall) is lucrative. You could
probably get $50,000 to bring ASCA nationals to my home turf if you said you’d
come back again and again. Fill hotels and restaurants and tourist towns will
support you –
show them
the economic impact. You won’t be complaining about Finals not being self
sustaining or about not being able to afford an event coordinator. You won’t
even have to work on pursuing sponsorship dollars.
So there it is, my manifesto for ASCA greatness, as short as
I can make it. I hope someone out there finds it useful. This breed has brought
me a lot of joy, a lot of pain, and a lot of frustration. ASCA can do this, but
things have to change and people need to take advantage of resources out there.
Put in the work and it will come back. I promise.
Thanks for your time,
Kristin Tara Horowitz (McNamara), Tara Aussies (lifetime registered ASCA
kennel), home of ASCA MVA qualifying C-Me Fury and the Mire of Tara STDdc, CD,
GS-O, JS-E, RS-E DNA-VP and Tara’s Lil
Rippa STDcsd
