Certification and Associations
Associations and Professional organizations can add a lot of value to their members with the inclusion of a certification or professional designation. But this can take a lot of resources to set up and manage a certification program. Professionals need to meet a variety of certification criteria which can include testing, training and ongoing continuing education training and recertification.
While this is a great service to the members there are a lot of steps in the process and with a system for automating steps in the process and a database for managing the information it can be done well even with limited resources. Without a system in place this takes a lot of resources and results in a higher cost to deliver and maintain the service. This can put pressure on membership dues and certification costs.
As an example, one Association we work with was using a spreadsheet to manage their member's certification and Continuing Education (CE) credits. They had 650 members and as then went from one year to the next it was becoming more difficult to manage. There was no connection between the spreadsheets and their billing which was also a manual process. Converting to TrainingToDo allowed them to record each member's training activities and see instantly which members were in compliance and which ones need a reminder email to be sent. It also streamlined their billing allowing invoices to be automatically generated and emailed as a .PDF which was a huge cost savings for the association and frees up people's time to do other higher value added services for the members.