If someone on your team left tomorrow, would anyone know how to do their job? If the answer involves “she keeps that in her head” or “I’d have to call him,” you have an SOP problem. Here are actionable steps to stay on top of your association SOPs.
What Is an SOP?
A standard operating procedure (SOP) documents step-by-step how to complete a specific task. In associations, this covers how you process a membership renewal, onboard a new vendor, prepare for your annual conference, or respond to a member inquiry.
The Importance of Association SOPs
SOPs are the backbone of a resilient, scalable association. They reduce dependency on any one person, shorten new staff’s learning curve, and ensure member experience consistency every time.
During an AMS assessment, documented association SOPs are one of the first things we look for. They reveal how staff use your current system and where shadow systems, workarounds, inconsistencies, or gaps accumulated over time. Associations with current SOPs move through assessments more efficiently and get sharper, more targeted recommendations as a result. When processes aren’t documented, the assessment takes longer and the picture is less complete.
Association SOPs Always Important, Rarely Urgent
Association SOPs, although important, are never urgent until they inevitably are. It’s easy to push aside documenting processes when there is a conference to plan or a board presentation to prepare.
It’s also an uncomfortable truth to acknowledge how much institutional knowledge lives in staff and how burdensome it feels to have to “download” that information when they are right there. But retirements, turnover, association growth, and new technology have a way of exposing this fragility at the worst possible time.
Actionable Steps
- Identify your highest-risk processes first. Start with tasks that only one or two people know how to do, or that would cause member-facing disruption if done incorrectly.
- Capture new workflows. Did you update a new system or workflow? Staff may be using the new system but with an old playbook or following old steps out of habit rather than necessity.
- Don’t aim for perfect. A rough, living document beats a polished one that never gets written. A simple template with steps, screenshots, and links is enough to start.
- Lean on your technology. Use AI to draft an SOP you can review and refine. For process steps that are easier to show than describe, record a quick Loom video, which auto-generates a transcript you can clean up and use as your written SOP.
- Involve key players. The best SOPs are written by those who do the work and understand the nuance. Don’t assign documentation to someone observing from the outside.
- Make it easy to find. A well-written SOP no one can find isn’t useful. Audit where SOPs live and remind staff where they can find them.
- Build SOP reviews into your association’s natural rhythms. The best time to update SOPs is when you already have a reason to walk through them:
- New staff or intern onboarding. Especially if it’s an annual cycle, have them follow existing SOPs and flag anything outdated or unclear. It trains them and keeps your documentation fresh at the same time.
- After a major initiative or technology change. If your processes shifted, your SOPs should too. This is the moment to capture what actually changed before the new way becomes the assumed way.
- Maintenance mode. A planned pause from new projects is the ideal time for a broader SOP review. The pressure to execute is low, and your team has the bandwidth to do this work thoughtfully.
Get Started
Processes that live only in people’s heads are a liability. They leave your association vulnerable to turnover, inconsistency, and the compounding cost of reinventing the wheel. If you haven’t updated your association SOPs in a while, this is your sign to start and build from there.
Ready to build a maintenance period into your calendar? Contact us to talk through how Achurch Consulting can help your team put the right processes in place.