Holly Patrick sat down with Jeanette
Gass to find out what a day in her new role as associate director for
development and strategic partnerships at Washington, DC-based the Association for International Educators
(NAFSA) looks like.
HP: Congratulations on your new role!
JG: Thank you. It’s a role I’ve wanted
for a long time, but I didn’t realise that until I saw the job description.
HP: How does this new role differ from
your previous roles?
JG: My previous role at the American
Association for Public Opinion Research was mostly membership focused and there
was a lot of database management. My new role is more partnership focused where
I’ll be looking at development, fundraising and sponsorship opportunities.
HP: Who are NAFSA’s members?
JG: NAFSA’s membership are people that
work in study abroad offices or international student scholar services and other
study abroad consortiums, including English language testing services and those
kinds of organisations that help people improve their language competency.
HP: What got you interested in association
work in the first place?
JG: You probably hear this from other association
professionals; we all say the same thing. Nobody really graduates from college
and thinks, ‘yeah, I'm going to enter the association industry,’ and I didn't
either. I came to Washington DC to get my degree in global communications. I
thought I was going to be a Foreign Service Officer. Obviously, I'm not doing
that but I'm glad I'm not doing that.
After being
in higher education, I had the opportunity to get a degree for free. I got it in
non-profit association management, not really knowing what that was. Then I got
an association job and I loved it. It was like ‘Hey, this is where I want to be
- this is awesome.’ Bringing people together, creating community and making the
world a better place. I realised that is exactly what I went to school for. I
just didn't know it.
I'd been
part of professional organisations at college, such as honour fraternities and
other professional associations. I didn't realise that you could have a career
in it. But once I figured that out, it was really helpful for me. This is my
third or fourth association job, so I'm here for the long run.
HP: Do you think it’s important for
association professionals to be invested in what they’re doing?
JG: I think it's important to not only
be interested in the mission of your organisation, but also to be interested in
the functional area you're in.
There are a
lot of jobs in association management, there's meeting management, membership,
financing and development. If you're not interested in the functional area that
you're in, I think that can also make a job difficult even if you love the
mission of the organisation.
HP: Your new role focuses a lot on
revenue models. What association revenue trends are you seeing as we move further
out of the pandemic?
JG: A lot of associations that relied
on their conference as a major profit centre, suddenly didn’t have that and
were left asking themselves what to do. Those associations had to find
new ways of generating money.
I’ve seen associations
offer sponsorship on professional learning libraries and other online
activities. There are benefits of digital advertising and digital activities and
they’re great for year-round engagement, because we shouldn’t just engage with members
once a year. But associations must have the services to give them to sponsor. If
you don't have programmes to sponsor year-round, you're losing an opportunity,
or you're coming up with something very quickly that may or may not actually
function the way you want it to because somebody wants to fund it.
HP: What do you want to achieve in your
new role at NAFSA?
JG: NAFSA has a Global Partnership
Programme, these are people that are committed to engagement all year long. It’s
important to know those people and to provide them with the best customer
service possible. They're the major players in the field in general, so it's
really important to watch trends happening in their organisations and to
understand what the association can do to help them advance further.
The other
part of my job is development. So making sure that we're taking great care of
our individual donors as well as the big-company donors. Both the $100 and
$50,000 donors matter because both of those people will help sustain your
organisation but they matter on different levels and they need different
benefits and different fulfilment services.
HP: Lastly then, who are you when you
take off your association hat at the end of the day?
JG: A lot of the time that I spend
outside of work is spent volunteering in the association sector. I'm really
involved with the American Society of Association Executives. We have a young
professionals committee and I'm a second year on that committee. We're very
involved in helping young professionals understand more about association
management careers and also helping the wider association community understand
all the stuff we're doing.
A desire to travel led Holly Patrick to the business meetings and events world and she’s never looked back. Holly takes a particular interest in event sustainability and creating a diverse and inclusive industry. When she’s not working, she can be found rolling skating along Brighton seafront listening to an eclectic playlist, featuring the likes of Patti Smith, Sean Paul, and Arooj Aftab.
