A quick internet search will provide varying answers to this question and the Avlo Solutions FAQ section gives this synopsis:
An Association Management Company (AMC) is a professional service firm that provides management and administration services to non-profit professional and trade associations. AMCs help these organizations develop and achieve their goals through increasing efficiency, enabling scalability, and allowing volunteers and full-time staff to spend more of their time focused on their responsibilities and, ultimately, meaningful mission-driven work.
At this point you say to yourself, “Ok, so an AMC is a company our association brings in so we can free up volunteer manpower on the day-to-day administration and maybe they can help us with some of our problems—got it”. So why spend more time on this question? Let’s take a quick look into the construct of the synopsis above and pull the threads to generate a better picture of what an AMC really is.
As an association, you want to focus all of your time on the mission: achieving goals, knocking off KPIs, and advancing toward your vision. Realistically most, if not all, of your staff is made up of volunteers—volunteers that work all day, run a household, are taking continuing education, go on vacations, as well as a myriad of other distractions from dedicating time to the association. The rest of the reality is that emails still need to be read, membership needs attention, and someone needs to keep the association’s lights on.
So, what if you could have dedicated volunteers that have a bucket of valuable time that you could focus purely on priority association work? To make this scenario a reality, you need a workshop of association elves taking care of email, phone calls, developing marketing and communications, planning events, managing membership, sharing association knowledge and expertise, developing strategies, and so on.
Wait for it…
That’s what an AMC does. At Avlo Solutions, we want your association to achieve its goals. We want your volunteers to stay engaged on the strategic issues while we take care of the operational ones. We want to help you walk through your strategy and realize your vision. And if your budget affords it, we’ll do more than just the day-to-day, we can work on your strategic initiatives too!
