Overview
CDI’s senior management staff has an aggregate of more than 100 years of experience in senior association positions as either volunteer or staff leaders. In addition to serving in senior staff management positions, we have served non-profit organizations as directors, chief elected officers, dean of post-graduate education programs, and institute fellows, as well as authored textbooks and taught courses for professional organizations.
Services Detail
Global Operations
CDI has employees on the ground in the United States in Norcross, Georgia. It has developed, managed and delivered programs and conferences in Argentina, Australia, China, Denmark, France, India, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, N. Ireland, Spain and Saudi Arabia, to name a few. The company maintains fluid communication worldwide via its Web sites, telephone, fax and routine and occasional in-person meetings. CDI is experienced at starting up new operations in new global regions.
Member communications: internal and external
CDI has published
Site Selection magazine since 1954. In 1961, it became the official publication of CDI's client IDRC. Site Selection speaks to both internal and external audiences. It is provided free of charge to IDRC's members and to over 40,000 others who head companies and/or are involved in providing workplace and facilities to companies. CDI publishes a newsletter called The Communicator for IDRC and all of IDRC's, WDF's and NAPO's promotional materials, as well. In addition, the company is very experienced at publishing research-based publications for associations.
Member services: back office and member help desk
CDI provides seamless real-time service to its clients' members worldwide. A member may call during business hours to discuss questions or problems with a company representative. Questions left after business hours on the company's voice mail system are addressed the next business day. CDI staff responds expeditiously to e-mailed requests for assistance. Many chapter and conference registration services can be delivered 100% via Web facilities. But members who choose to talk to a person can always do so.
Web site development, content and management
CDI established its first Web site in behalf of a client in 1995. The company maintains on-staff the capability to create new sites, maintain them, and update them on a daily basis. Today, the company manages four Web sites and employs a full-time webmaster.
Publications: content, advertising revenue and distribution
Since the 1950s, CDI staff has researched, written, sold advertising for, and distributed Site Selection magazine to its subscribers, which number almost 45,000 today.
Information technology: systems and database management
CDI maintains state-of-the-art IT infrastructure sufficient to service multiple associations, their Web sites and its publications business, with capacity to spare. The full-time IT staff consists of a director, maintenance & support technician and a database analyst/manager.
Accounting support, financial planning
Responsible and conservative financial management is a hallmark of CDI's culture. These characteristics are carried over to its association clients. For example, CDI's client IDRC maintained an operating reserve that averaged 38 percent of annual expenses from 1990-99.
Membership development: marketing and sales
The company has a very strong membership marketing and sales capability that was created to cope with its client IDRC's 15-20 percent annual membership turnover. These members, mostly corporate middle managers and service provider, change jobs a lot. Even so, CDI was able to grow the membership from roughly 700 in 1990 to over 3,600 by 2002.
Research on industry trends and prospects
In the early 1990s, CDI recognized that the corporate real estate (CRE) function, source of members for its client IDRC, was in danger of being fully outsourced or reduced to tactical/transactions status by many companies. In response, CDI initiated a top-flight, long term research program called Corporate Real Estate 2000, which eventually caused F1000 companies to view the function as strategically valuable. Over 1993-99, the program raised from corporate sources and spent $2.8 mil. and published almost 2,000 pages of educational books and bulletins for the CRE profession.
Membership Market Research
Knowing and satisfying customers needs are core tenets of CDI's association-management philosophy. Membership market research is one of the company's core competencies. This plays out on several levels. First, we establish a partnership with the association's staff that entails daily discussions on the operational details of our work. Second, we stay in close touch with the client association's leadership, chiefly through routine conference calls, one-on-one conversations and face-to-face meetings. Third, we poll the membership every 18-24 on their needs and the quality of our services. In addition, we use Web-based surveys to poll members on their satisfaction with each event we put on. The results of these polls are analyzed and reported to the staff members responsible for programming the next such event. Over a period of months, we use membership market research to create a kind of moving picture of evolving membership needs, the quality of our responsiveness to these needs, and their general satisfaction with our work.
Global or local events: planning, promotion, registration, logistics
CDI takes great pride in its meeting planning and execution capabilities. This function is lead by a staff member who has earned the Certified Meeting Planner designation. This staff group has over 50 years of combined experience in the area. Routinely, we organize conventions, and smaller meetings, all the way from contracting with the meeting facility to documenting the room-nights the function delivered to a hotel. We have on hand years of event evaluation results to document the quality of our work in this area.
Chapter Development and Support
CDI has the experienced staff, computer systems and Web capabilities to manage chapter operations "from A to Z." Our client IDRC has over 40 chapter in the U.S. and abroad for which we maintained member lists on the Web, sent event announcements, registered event attendees, collected fees, and managed chapter leadership functions at annual conferences.
Sponsorship development, coordination and fulfillment
Sponsorships are playing a crucial and growing role in the funding model of many associations. CDI is staffed to add value to your association by identifying opportunities to sell sponsorships for events, services and products to expand the revenue base beyond dues and to serve the special relationship building and advertising needs of some members.
Trade shows or expositions: planning, promotion logistics
CDI maintains a core competency in management of trade shows and expositions and plan and execute every aspect of these revenue-generating operations. CDI can handle planning, marketing selling, leads management, vendor satisfaction surveys, and on-site management.
Public affairs: issues advocacy
Associations today must use the press as another avenue for communicating, both to members and to other constituencies. These include government and potential members. CDI can demonstrate years of success at generating articles and other press mentions is such publications as
The Wall Street Journal,
Fortune magazine,
Business Week, the
New York Times, as well as a host of city and local news and business periodicals.
