How to Organize Your Association & Events in SmartSuite [ + FREE Template ]

If you're the person who's holding together some kind of group of humans, such as an association, some kind of local chapter of a group, a club, a volunteer organization, anything like that, you know the headache that comes with managing a bunch of people and a bunch of things those people need to do. When I've worked with people who run associations in the past, they typically organize all of this information through a bunch of totally disconnected tools. They'll have the spreadsheet of some kind for tracking members. They'll track touch points and interactions with their people via email. They'll have another spreadsheet for tracking renewals. And then they use some kind of ticketing system like Eventbrite or so on for tracking different events. And as a result, all of the information about their member experience ends up in a bunch of different places. And so if the association manager or the chapter chair wants to find out, hey, who are our most engaged members? Who are our club participants, who maybe are at risk for not staying with us another year? Those questions become very difficult to answer when we have to look across 14 different tabs in our browser just to figure out what do our members actually do inside our community? If that sounds familiar, it's probably time that you meet the sponsor of today's video, which is SmartSuite. SmartSuite is a flexible no code platform that allows you to organize information. And by information, I mean just about any kind of information you can imagine. Think of it almost like a spreadsheet on steroids. You can organize your members, you can organize your events, you can organize your invoices and billing all inside one spot because it's all very drag and drop and flexible. Today, specifically, I want to share how you can use SmartSuite's free template that will allow you to organize all of your association or club or chapter activities in one place in just a few clicks. So with that, be sure to use the link below and I'll see you inside SmartSuite. Wait, that doesn't make a lot of sense because I actually don't have to move. So I'm just going to stay here and open the tab. Okay, here we are inside of SmartSuite. And when you create your account, you should see something like this. What we want to do to access that free template for association management or chapter organization is head down to this little plus icon, choose start from template and by typing in the top, we want to search until we find the EO chapter management template. Now, it does not matter if you're not an EO chapter I promise we can use this template and modify it to just about any of the use cases that you might have. Once you find this template, click Use Template to add this into your SmartSuite account. And you should see something that looks like this when it arrives in your account. This template is a very easy one to use. So I'm just going to briefly walk through what each of our sections are and how they work together, and then you can have some time to start practicing this and implementing this inside your account. The first area we want to pay attention to is our first app. That's what these guys are. These things that look like tabs, these are kind of like spreadsheets or databases. They store a type of information that we can easily reference. And the three that we have baked into this template from the get go are members, forums, and events. To make sure that you're ready to start using this for yourself, we're going to start our journey in that very first app called Members, where we can actually view our member information. I'm going to go ahead and open up this. Record this row here to find out more information about one of the members. Just to show you an example, let's open up Jesse Bain's account here. Here we can see we have a member, we have the member name, a bunch of contact information about this member, the role that this person has, and what forums they're a part of. Now, this forum terminology, this is something that's actually pulled from that EO chapter example that this was originally built for. But assuming you're not working in the EO space, really what we're just thinking about here is Cohort. What's the group that this person is in? Are they Group A, Group B? Are they the Denver group? Are they the DC group? If you have groupings of some kind of your membership or your community, that's what you'd want to identify here. For now, I'm going to go into my field settings, modify field settings, and change the name of this field to Cohort. And I'm actually going to go over to my other app and change the name there as well, because forums is not a term that I would be using in a normal community environment. So I'm going to switch these over to Cohort back to Members, though. Let's look at what else Jesse has in store for us here. We have some tabs available, some intersections tucked inside Jesse's profile here. What these sections are are areas where we can dive deeper into particular focus areas for us as a chapter manager or an organizer. The very first section is the member assessment. Here's where we can tell the story essentially of how Jesse became part of our community. The first field relationship owner is kind of who is point person, maybe who referred this person or who their chapter leader is in this process. To the right we have target join date. If they're not already a member, we might have a date here for when we hope that they will join. Below that we have a spot for notes and then we have action items. And these action items would be a great spot for us to add to do's of any kind associated with getting Jesse into our community or keeping this person engaged once they're in it. This could include things like having a welcome call saying sending a gift in the mail reminding them to prepare for their renewal, saying Happy Birthday, whatever that is. We can create these tasks such as send welcome gift, give a due date and an assignee and add these items into Jesse's profile here. This is per person. Although we could also set default values using the feature in SmartSuite right up here to make sure that we have the same checklist available for all new members. For example, every time you have a new chapter enrollment, Maybe you have 10 steps you do as part of onboarding. You could have those always show up here. This action items area using a Checklist field in SmartSuite is a great example of how SmartSuite kind of marries together data like this stuff up here and tasks such as this. So I will now get alerted as June 15th approaches and eventually arrives that hey hey hey Layla. Don't forget about sending that welcome gift because there is a built in task management system in Inside a smartsuite. More on that up in this video here. I won't geek out in this one, but for now let's move on beyond membership assessment into some of the other areas. The second area we have here is company information. So in this case we have an association that is built around business owners by default. That's kind of what the template skews towards. If that is also relevant for you, you're going to want to use these fields to describe the business that your person is kind of bringing into your orbit as well. However, if your chapter association is not about business, we're going to want to change these fields. For example, let's just say rather than organizing a business association, you're trying to organize a group of motorcycle meetup people, people who meet up and ride their motorcycles together. In that case, you might want to swap out some of these fields we can just easily delete the money field. We don't need that. We can even delete the description field. We may not need that. Delete the website field and certainly delete the company name and replace these fields by adding new fields with fields that are relevant to what our niches, which could be something like changing this text field to say rather than company name type of motorcycle. We could also have another field for the type of writer this person is. We could add a field for something like when did they start writing? How many years of experience do they have? We could add a lot of different fields here and change this overall section because everything is so flexible to say rather than come company information, bike information. Because in this imaginary world we're a motorcycle meetup, in which case we would Change this out. SmartSuite allows us to change every single thing pretty much you see on the screen. Every field, every setting, every collapsible section. And this allows us to really customize this to the type of association you're organizing. A motorcycle meetup will have different fields than a church volunteer group, but you can still use this same template just by renaming a few pieces. Below this bike information area or whatever kind of information you want to track here we have a membership history section. This is one more section we can use to collapse or expand based on our preferences. Membership history is one I want to kind of spend a little time on because this is where the real magic is with SmartSuite. In this section we have two clusters of information. One of them is a linked record field. All that means is we are connecting information in one spot in SmartSuite and connecting it to another. In this case events. You might have remembered from previously that there is this kind of events app that we'll be talking about more detail in a moment. This is basically an area where we can track all of the get togethers that we are planning for our meetup, group, chapter, whatever. But over here in the members area, we actually have these two things connected together. So down here we can see what events has Jesse attended and you know, how did those go and so on. We can have these here. The way we can report on this in SmartSuite is quite varied. We could create charts and tables using a dashboard view that shows us how many people attended which event in which quarter in which week. We can break all of that down or to go back into our main area here we can add things like spotlights to spotlight anyone who maybe hasn't attended an event. In this case event attendance is empty. Right here we're going to make them red if they don't have any event attendance. And we're only going to consider that as important if someone has joined before yesterday. We can use these kinds of spotlights to help us in real time see the data and make better decisions about which members to follow up with, maybe which members have issues with dues. Any kind of information we're trying to report on, we can build these kinds of dynamic spotlights for or dashboards. Like I mentioned earlier, I don't have time in this video to go through all all the deep dives of dashboards, but in this video up here, we go through an example of how to use a dashboard in a nonprofit environment. And while we're not talking about nonprofits today, there's a lot of overlap. And that reporting features we cover in that video would probably be pretty helpful. One final piece before we move on beyond spotlights is I do want to show you how this changes if your information changes. For example, if we go to Lisa right here, maybe we update something to say, oh, Lisa did actually attend that event. We link that record together right there, save our work. All of a sudden, Lisa is no longer selected and no longer showing up as red in our chart here. We could add more and more spotlights if we wanted to, such as if they've attended many events, if they've been a member for five years. Any record or field that we have tracked inside of SmartSuite, we can have these kinds of spotlights or reporting on. We can also group by that information if we so choose to just make sure that we always know what's going on, Such as type of motorcycle. We can see that there's. So back inside the Jesse record here, where we have one more field to highlight, we have this membership history subitems area. Subitems is again, a type of field in SmartSuite that lets us organize a type of information. In this case, subitems are really special. They're kind of like a spreadsheet inside the spreadsheet, when there's particular information we want to organize that maybe works a little bit better in more of a table. In this case, our subitems track our payments, the money changing hands inside this particular profile. If I go up here and add a new item, you can see what fields are being tracked. We can track money out, money in, and the type up here at the top, as well as the date and any notes about that payment. And once we have this information all tracked inside a smartsuite, just like with the other stuff we can report on it, we can make dashboards that look all pretty and we can even do basic mathematics and not so basic mathematics using a formula field. If you haven't gathered, fields are our best friend in SmartSuite. So what we're going to do is click right here to add a new field. We're going to go down to formula or just type it in and we're going to do a basic formula to sum up all of the dues owed and all of the dues paid to figure out whether or not there's an active balance with Jesse's account. So we're going to go under advanced just because we need to group a bunch of stuff to do that. We're going to start off by summing up one of the fields, how much they paid, how much they owed. So in this case, we're going to write sum. We're going to look inside the membership history because that's what we're looking to actually do the math based on. We're going to do a period sign to say, hey, look inside that membership history area. I want to report on just one field. In this case, we want to start off with the amount paid. So I'm going to go ahead and click paid. Then I'm going to do a subtraction sign and then calculate the amount that is owed. Again, I'm going to choose membership history here. I'm going to write that period sign to peek inside that subitem relationship. We see we've got these linked fields right here and we are looking for the owed amounts. I'm going to click use Go ahead, click add field. And what we should find is the difference between these columns. Sure enough, here's where we are. We have our formula field with negative 500 as the result, which makes sense because we see that there's $1,000 owed and only $500 paid. To make things a little bit clearer, I'm going to call this formula Current balance. Just to be clear that this is the current balance on the account and update that field. I'm going to drag this up towards the top of the account because I feel like this is something I'd want to see when I go into that membership history. And now I have a current balance field that shows me the overall result so I don't even have to tuck inside all this information. I can see one quick summary. And as soon as we have new information come in or maybe some of this information changes, like maybe we're wrong and they actually paid half of it. At some point, and as soon as we save our work, that formula will also update as well. That completes the Members tab of the SmartSuite template. Definitely check that out on your own account. You can play around with this a bit to make sure those fields work for you, but from there we can head over to the Cohorts area. This is one that not all folks are going to use, but if your chapter, association, whatever, has, let's just say task force or squads or associations based on region, this is a great way for you to organize those Here we can see that there are some forums in this default demo area, and if I go inside this Alpha one, we can see we have a name, a status of that cohort and a connection back to that members list. We saw this on the other side. If I go over to Joe here, you'll see what this field looks like when it's on this side of things. Right here, Cohort, it's linking it together. And if I go back over to Alpha forum, I can see Joe there as well. This is a two way connection and it's summarized up here in this count field, kind of like a formula. It's counting it all up for us. There's not too much more to say about this overview area other than this is definitely one that you're going to want to tailor to the types of organizations you're running. If you are someone with Task Force where you have different initiatives by each task force, you probably will want to add a few more fields, such as a document field where you can keep notes of the meetings you have. You'll probably want to make sure that all of your members have access or someone on your behalf has access to the communication center where you can talk about what this forum is exactly doing and broadcast messages out, perhaps via email, to other users who need to know about the happenings of this group. These kinds of things are expansions that you might want to do depending on how your cohorts of whatever kind run. But this is a good starting point and something that I think just about anyone could get up and running in just a few minutes. Now, beyond Cohort, we have Events and this Events app. This tab in our SmartSuite allows us to organize the actual festivities and meetups and happenings that kind of make the backbone of our community inside this area. Much like in Members, each row represents an event. And while the fields are a little bit different, like the overview has a few different fields than what you might have in the members one, the overall functionality is very similar. Each of these fields reflect either some data or some action that need to happen around bringing that event to life. I love the fact that the due dates and assignees you can add here. Make sure that none of these details are missed, and you can even standardize your process for event hosting by baking those into this field. Below this we have the Member Attendees section where we're going to have those connections between the members we have and who is RSVP'd. By connecting these all together, we ensure that we don't have to check 15 different places. It all ties together and that way when we go to say, Christie's profile, we can see that Christie RSVP'd and attended this particular event. Notice that this event area also includes a voting field in case you want to have your team members internally or your overall community vote vote on these events. But that's honestly not my favorite feature of this events area. My favorite is one click away and it's actually not something that we have baked in by default into this default template. My favorite feature inside of the SmartSuite events area is actually what happens when you transform. You convert this view into a calendar view. Let me show you what that looks like. Here we have the Change view type button. This is basically our option to change the visual appearance of the data. It doesn't change the information, it just looks a little different. For example, we could make things into a pretty card. We could make things into a Kanban board of some kind. We could make things into a map view. For some reason, if you want to just see where your events are on a map, some of these are going to be more relevant than others. But the one I really like when it comes to events is of course the calendar view. In this calendar view you can see a calendar of what events you have going on and on which days. In case you're someone who likes to see things on the calendar alongside other festivities as well, you can open your sidebar to see a reference of all of your events, or you can just browse the calendar dates until you see the next event appear. Here you have the option to have day, week, year and list view to be able to see all of your events that are scheduled and especially if you're someone who's more visual. I think this calendar view is a really great thing to have starred meaning favorited and easy to find inside your SmartSuite account. So that way anytime you're getting ready for the week ahead, the month ahead, you have one central spot to know what should be promoting on social media what should we mention at our upcoming chapter meeting? This gives you one source of truth and do keep in mind that our spotlight that we learned about in the previous app over here does also work in case we want to highlight certain events that might be upcoming, such as when an event date is today, we want to make it green for some reason. We can go ahead and do that and we will see that magically our event changed color here on the screen already. I think back to the task force and the volunteer groups that I've been on and I can't help but think if we had an organization system like this, our events and fundraisers and meetups probably would have been a whole lot less stressful. But if you are someone who's looking at this and thinking, hmm, I want to push things even further, I could have a whole event planning area. I like the way you think. There is actually some ways that you can take this events area and supersize it by merging together some other templates that SmartSuite has available. There are just so many here, all for free and included in your account. And the one that I think might be nice for those super organized folks is actually our event planning template we have here. When you combine this with the chapter management for people who are super organized, you can merge all these together and you get even more organization if you are someone who needs a little bit more detail than just what this default template has available. Not to mention this and all of the templates you saw on the screen just now and inside your SmartSuite account are free and available for you to use. So mixing and matching to make them as complex or as simple as you need is definitely encouraged and something I would do and do do in my own versions of SmartSuite as well. So in conclusion, if you are someone running a chapter association, conference, meetup club, some kind of group of volunteers or something in between, check out the SmartSuite template for chapter organization. It may say EO in it, but that doesn't mean you can't apply it. Once you use the affiliate link below to sign up for your SmartSuite account, you can install this template just like I did here. In a few seconds, come in here, customize those fields just as I did on the screen, and then wipe out this demo data to clear out all of the default and demonstration clutter and then rename it to be whatever your chapter is and you are going to be good to go. Once you've completed these basic steps, you are ready to unlock a calmer way of organizing your organization, and you may even find some ways that I haven't even mentioned in this video that push things even further. If you have your own tips or thoughts around this puzzle, feel free to leave a comment below. Let me know what your thoughts are. If you're someone who's watched this and are curious to learn more about SmartSuite specifically, check out the description below. We have a bunch of resources for how to help you, including training that I provide here where we go over how to use SmartSuite in one day with a basic user training. Good thing to check out to save yourself some time. Otherwise though, while you start playing around with this template and get your SmartSuite set up, you're probably going to want to have a great way to use this template on your phone because you know events usually involve you having to be on your phone and not at a computer. So be ready for that with this video about how to use the SmartSuite mobile app. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.