In my Chair Coaching Program on how to leverage social media, one of the lessons we step through is how to see the connections your members have to peer CEOS on the non-profit boards, public commissions, and other community based organizations in your geographic market.
This one module from our coaching program should produce more warm-to-hot referrals for your CEO group than you could possibly follow-up with in a single year. Keep in mind, this is but one of a number of different strategies we cover in the coaching program.
Here’s how the steps of this module in our coaching program works:
1. Ask all your CEO members what boards and commissions they participate in at a leadership level. Make a list. We’ll call this your “Known Board of Director List”
2. Ask all your TAs and other “influencers” what boards and commissions they participate in at a leadership level. Add these organizations to your “Known Board of Directors List”.
3. Connect to all these folks on LinkedIn. You cannot see their rolodex and connections unless you are a first level connection.
4. Conduct a search on LinkedIn for who is a Board member of that same organization as your Member, TA, or influencer. Ask for a personal introduction to each one.
5. Go on-line and get the list of Board Members for the organizations you’ve identified on your “Known Board of Directors List”. All public organizations maintain this list. Search for each person in Google and through LinkedIn to verify they are at a CEO/President level and worthy of pursuing. Ask your Member, TA, or influencer to provide a personal introduction.
6. Even if your members are not on a particular non-profit Board, they will still be connected to numerous CEOs and Presidents sitting on non-profit Boards in your local community. Only about 20% of your members will be active as Board Members. Some of these active individuals will also be on numerous Boards in your local community. Get a list from the local “Book of Lists” or some other reference work in your public library of the top 20-50-100 non-profits. Make this your “Unknown Board of Director List”. Repeat step 5. As you build your network on LinkedIn, you’ll be amazed at how many of your “close” relationships of Members, TAs, and influencers know the CEOs and Presidents on your “Unknown Board of Director" list.
7. Once you build a relationship with the CEOs from Step 6, you can then repeat Steps 1-5 with your new connections. You would be hard pressed to get through this entire “rinse and repeat” cycle over the next 5-6 years.
Spend 15-20 minutes a day on these 7 steps and you’ll most likely NEVER have to struggle again to find potential members for your CEO group (and that’s just one small element of the entire toolkit in leveraging social media to find members)If you’ve not yet asked to be part of this personalized coaching program on finding new members by leveraging social media, shoot me a note to start right now. At the very least, schedule a 30 minute call with me and I’ll show you first hand how to apply the techniques mentioned in this blog article.
Barry Deutsch
