Diabetes Australia Case Study

CASE STUDIES

Job

National Launch of Diabetes Australia Government Action Plan

Date

April- June 2004

Objective

To gain the awareness and support for the Diabetes Australia Government Action Plan by federal politicians, media and other stakeholder groups.

Outcomes

Major function at Parliament House with document launched by Minister for Health and Ageing and Shadow Minister for Health, 130 guests including over 90 federal politicians and wide media coverage in national TV, print and radio.

Materials

Design and write fact sheets

Edit plan and oversee design and printing

Arrange for attendance of Minister and Shadow Minister

Media management including release and alert

Speech writing

Event management

Extras

Client Solutions won the ACT Golden Target Award for Event Management from the ACT Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) for this event.

(Below) The Hon. Tony Abbott, Minister for Health and Ms Julia Gillard, Shadow Minister for Health holding the Government Action Plan.

(Below) The Hon. Tony Abbott, Minister for Health answering media questions

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Very few organisations could claim that they have never had members asking:

What do I get for my subscription?
How does it help me?
Those at H.Q. are out of touch with the members.
We go in too hard on issues.
We don't go in hard enough!

In my own 36 years of industry/professional association work, I have heard them all - and in each organisation I worked in! This has caused me to think about what are the key measures of an organisation's health - and how often are they checked, analysed and calibrated?

What are the symptoms of an ailing association? Some danger signs clearly are:

falling membership;
ageing membership;
loss of influence;
lack of competition for elected positions;
rapid changeover of senior staff
loss of corporate memory
a sense of treading water rather than moving forward;
no direction, no vision; and
the emergence of competitors.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Like a disease, there is not much benefit from simply treating the symptoms if at the same time you don't determine the root cause and implement major change. It is always easier to fill in the potholes rather than resurface the road, but the road will get progressively weaker through this process. (Now that's a three metaphor paragraph!)

In answer to this, Client Solutions has developed a range of services which will allow groups to know more about themselves and to improve the way they operate. It's called Association Analytics and will cover a range of analyses, diagnostics and recalibration in areas such as:

Internal Analysis/Review
Membership Analysis/Review
Outputs Analysis/Review
Environmental Analysis/Review