An open letter to the Board of Directors and members of the Australian Shepherd Club of America

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 25^th 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 4^th 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 16^th 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