Membership Strategies and Legal Compliance: Best Practices for Nonprofits

Members are much like shareholders of a for-profit corporation with various rights and obligations. This webinar will explain how to achieve most of the benefits of having members (i.e., revenue stream, engages stakeholders, input on major decisions, etc.), without having to manage the annual meetings, voting, record-keeping, production of records, and similar requirements.

Please join attorney Zachary Kester as he addresses how to manage “members” of nonprofit corporations. He will explain member recruitment and engagement strategies as well as multi-tiered membership structures and show you how to assess your own structures in order to determine where your member policies and practices are now as compared with where you want them to be.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

Just a sampling of what this webinar will cover:

1. Understanding “Members”
• Nonprofit history of “members”
• Members as legal term versus simply “someone in our group”
• Voting, Non-voting
• “Member” vs. Board Member or Committee Member
2. Benefits and drawbacks of members
• Benefits: revenue stream, engages stakeholders, input on major decisions, etc.
• Drawbacks: legal obligations, meetings, access to records, etc.
3. Advanced Strategies
• Membership structures; voting blocks
• Voting by Proxy
• Eliminating voting “members,” but keeping benefits
4. Membership Policies and Procedures
• Member recruitment
• Member engagement
• Checklist to assess internal member policies and procedures
• Defining where you want to go

YOUR CONFERENCE LEADER

Your conference leader for “Membership Strategies and Legal Compliance: Best Practices for Nonprofits” is Zachary S. Kester. Mr. Kester is the Executive Director and Managing Attorney with Charitable Allies. He speaks and publishes regularly regarding the unique needs of charities. Topics include identifying effective outcome measures, governance, board liability, human resources for small nonprofits and property tax exemption issues, among many others. He serves on the Boards of Directors of Indiana Philanthropy Alliance, Indiana's professional association of grantmakers, and Ascent 121, a leading anti-human trafficking organization based in Indianapolis. Mr. Kester was also one of twenty statewide recipients of the 2018 Leadership in Law Award from the Indiana Lawyer, and the only in the field of tax-exempt organizations. Mr. Kester has an LL.M. (Masters of Law) concentrating on the special needs of tax-exempt organizations and has practiced law primarily for charities, focusing on organizational and compliance services. He has also earned a CFRM (Certificate in Fundraising Management) from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. In addition, Mr. Kester has also been named a Practitioner-in-Residence at the IU Maurer School of Law in Bloomington.