As the AH Accreditation Champion, I’m often writing and enhancing policies to confirm compliance with the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) Standard of Good Practices for the Association Management Company Industry, developed by AMC Institute. In addition to being the AH Accreditation Champion, I have also assumed an unofficial Accreditation Champion role among my AMC Friends. I was recently invited to share my passion for AMC Accreditation with Jonathan Strauss’ team at Strauss Event & Association Management in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Jonathan and his team were committed to understanding the nuances of the AMCI Accreditation Program. His team was eager and attentive during our day-long accreditation session. I’m proud to share that the combination of Jonathan’s commitment to just getting it done and the accreditation deep-dive session allowed Strauss Event & Association Management to become the first and currently only Accredited AMC in Canada!
I was so pleased to recently receive a note from Jonathan sharing the good news and a blog article that his team had written, summarizing the efficiency and benefits of the model file structure that I previously developed and implemented at AH.
Standard File Structure
At an AMC, there are always new clients and new team members. It was critical to develop and implement a file system that would achieve the following objectives:
- Creation of standard file structure
- Move client files to client folders living in a central location (out of staff named folders)
- Efficiency in training new staff members
- Ability to archive old data – live the Accreditation Document Retention policy
- Standardize a file naming protocol
- Reduce duplicate files/confusion about where the most current file lives
- Efficiency in migrating client in or out of an AMC
