The MFAA has partnered with three other leading associations to represent the industry as Treasury review key aspects of the SMSF sector.

For its submission on SMSF lending, the MFAA has sought support from the Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA), the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) and from the Commercial Asset Finance Brokers Association (CAFBA).

The MFAA says a joint response that engages with these industry bodies should significantly raise the impact of the submission.

"Where possible, it is important to provide the Government with a comprehensive submission from the broader industry, rather than multiple small submissions that the government then needs to decipher," said Siobhan Hayden CEO of the MFAA.

"The shared voice is critical to demonstrating industry unity and support for key initiatives currently under review."

The MFAA will also make a submission to the government on three key FSI recommendations which impact upon members:

• a prohibition on direct borrowing by SMSFs for limited recourse borrowing arrangements (LRBAs);
  
• protecting small business borrowers; and
  
• enhanced competition in the lending sector.
  

“This is an important initiative to ensure that the industry has input to this joint submission so we are opening it up to input from the broader industry community. MFAA has supported all brokers in this issue and so give us your feedback even if you are not part of the association,” Hayden said.

Click here for the joint industry submission and here for the MFAA submission and email info@mfaa.com.au with your comments.

When one association offered lapsed members a “pay what you want” reinstatement deal, it won back some members and learned a lot about why they left.

Unless you’re Rob from High Fidelity, this probably sounds like a terrible idea: Invite a bunch of your exes to call you up and explain both why they left you and what they think you’re “worth” today.

You might call this an exercise in self-loathing. Or, if you’re strong willed, an exercise in self-improvement. Or, if you’re Charles M. Cohon, CPMR, CEO and president of the Manufacturers’ Agents National Association (MANA), you might call it an experimental member-reinstatement effort.

In my post last month about “pay what you want” business models, I briefly mentioned a commenter in ASAE’s Collaborate discussion forum [login required] who said he’d used PWYW as a limited offer to bring back lapsed members. That was Cohon. MANA emailed about 350 ex-members in 2014 with an offer to come back, for a full 12-month membership, at whatever price they thought was appropriate.

It certainly caught people’s attention, Cohon says. The emails got an open rate of roughly 35 percent—rather good for a message going out to people who hadn’t heard from MANA in more than a year. In the end, MANA got 15 to 20 members back, Cohon says, at prices ranging from $50 to $199. (MANA’s dues rate at the time was $259.) Winning back those members was nice, of course, but the truth is that the offer was mostly an exit survey in disguise.

“Certainly it was good to get them back, but perhaps the greatest value from it was the opportunity to have one-on-one conversations with people who had lapsed,” Cohon says.

To take advantage of the offer, lapsed members had to call Cohon directly and name their price. Their was no online form to fill out. This was crucial, because the ensuing conversations gave Cohon insights he likely wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Some said the benefits weren’t valuable enough to their companies. Others said they’d had a bad customer-service experience. And in many cases it became clear to Cohon just how difficult it can be for messaging about benefits and value propositions to penetrate. Cohon says it was a “lesson in humility,” but it didn’t reveal any major miscalculations about the right dues amount for the bulk of MANA’s market.

He wanted to know: “Do they not know what the value proposition is, or do they know what the value proposition is but they don’t think it’s worth the dues?” he says. “And, if they do know what the value proposition is and don’t think it’s worth the dues, is there some other dues number that would be so compelling that [if adopted broadly] the increased members would offset the decreased revenue per member? The message that we got was no. The numbers were scattered.”

Because the offer was limited to a small audience, Cohon says he wasn’t worried about the marginal costs of serving the reinstated members, even if they joined for a minimal amount, and logging a few “special sales” in MANA’s association management system wasn’t much trouble either. The offer was only good for the coming year, so if any of the reinstated members renew again this year, it will be at MANA’s current dues rate, $299. “The goal for this was not to set up a permanent lower-cost membership for a selected few members,” he says.

Spending time pursuing a pool of people who have already come and gone might seem counterintuitive—”We already know they’ve tried us and don’t like us!”—but association marketers will tell you that former members are nonetheless more likely to respond to offers than “never members,” simply due their shared history with your association. In fact, chances are you have more former members in your database than current members, and likely only a small portion of them left for genuinely negative reasons. Some may be open to rejoining, and others may still see your association as a resource for products and services, just as a customer rather than as a full member.

In MANA’s case, the PWYW offer was an attention-grabbing mechanism to bring back those former members already predisposed to consider rejoining. Cohon says he preferred the results of the PWYW offer to those of past efforts to reach lapsed members with outbound calls.

“I’m not sure outbound telephone calls to people always necessarily tease out the truth,” he says. “In this case, we’re taking the opposite tack. We’re making an offer that people can contact us to accept, and I feel like we’re probably getting communications from people who want to be in communication with us as opposed to people we just catch who answered their calls.”

Of course, that meant being ready to back up the PWYW offer when people actually took it. It has to be more than just a gimmick. When one former member called and said he’d pay $50, Cohon didn’t blink. “He may have just been testing me to see if I would stand by my word—’Oh, call him up and say 50 bucks and see what happens’— but I made a commitment and certainly I was going to stick with it,” he says.

MANA won’t know until May whether it won back any of these reinstated members for good (or for at least another year), but it already has plans to redeploy PWYW in other ways. It will soon roll out a membership for retired members, Cohon says, and the initial outreach campaign will offer lapsed members a chance to come back at the retired-member rate if they have in fact retired. If not, a follow-up campaign will offer a chance to return at a price of their own choosing.

The retired-member category is born of the same desire as the original PWYW offer: to re-engage members who have left MANA. Cohon says he thinks such an effort is promising, because organizations typically put so little energy into restoring those relationships. When he spoke with lapsed members who received the PWYW offer, “there was a certain appreciation that we’d reached out to them at all,” he says.

This article first appeared on Associations Now and is written by Joe Rominiecki

One of the least discussed components of success is failure and the crucial role it plays in turning loss into achievement.

Flearning – failing + learning – may not exactly be the new black, but it’s definitely in fashion. So what’s the value in organisations sharing the details of when things go wrong, and how do you fail smart, not dumb?

When Ben Rennie’s multimillion dollar clothing business failed in 2004, he didn’t speak about it with anyone for two and a half years, not even close family and friends. “I no longer had something cool and interesting that people wanted. I thought, if I don’t have that, what do I have?” says Rennie.

Fast forward to 2012 and Rennie is organising and taking the stage at Australia’s first “FailCon” in Sydney. To an audience of 300, he shares how he woke up one morning to an email telling him his company had lost its distribution rights, sending his business from an A$5 million to an A$1.2 million per annum venture overnight. FailCons, where conference speakers share their business stuff-ups and what they learned from them, are enjoying international popularity. “Since we went global in 2012, we’ve produced more than 25 events in more than 15 cities around the world,” says Cass Phillips, FailCon’s San Francisco-based founder.

So why all the fuss about failure?

“When the global financial crisis hit it forced people to be more entrepreneurial, to create jobs for themselves,” says Rennie, now managing director and co-founder of 6.2, a digital strategy and design firm. “That involves much more risk than being an employee, so you need to embrace the idea it might not work.” In addition, while innovation is celebrated, any creative process involves risk-taking and failure. And “failure” is still an uncomfortable proposition in many workplaces. But rebranding failure with a positive spin can help.

The term “flearning” (failing + learning) aims at just such a rebranding. The term was coined after the 2012 FailCon, in a brainstorming session led by Mick Liubinskas, co-founder of business incubator Pollenizer. Now it’s a Twitter hash tag and web domain name, and even a syllabus title in some entrepreneur training courses, and you’ll find Liubinskas’s “proud #flearns” publicly listed on his LinkedIn profile.

While a positive reframe is important, it will take more than clever catchphrases before the average senior manager – with objectives to deliver on – feels comfortable allowing his people to fail. “People know that you have to let people fail to increase innovation, but there’s a knowing-doing gap,” says Doug Sundheim, a New York-based executive coach and author of Taking Smart Risks (McGraw-Hill).

Alex Malley, chief executive of CPA Australia, doesn’t shy away from giving people permission to fail. In the process of trying to achieve great things some things may go wrong, says Malley, who actively recruits people who can be open about their mistakes. “If someone claims to be mistake free, I’d rather they work for someone else,” he writes in his recently released book The Naked CEO (Wiley).

Alex Malley will be the opening keynote address at AuSAE Conference and Exhibition. Early bird pricing for this two day event ends on March 31. To see the full program please click here.

This article first appeared on INTHEBLACK.

Australia's leading chief executive officers still don't understand the power and influence of social media according to the latest available numbers for two key social platforms, LinkedIn and Twitter. The failure of Australia's top CEOs to engage with social media raises questions about their understanding of one of the most powerful business-related paradigm shifts in the 21st century.

The fact that Australian business leaders are bypassing social media is clear from the results of a survey of the CEOs of the top 20 publicly listed companies and their relationships with LinkedIn and Twitter, conducted by The Australian Financial Review's Chanticleer. The two leading executives in terms of social-platform connections are Telstra CEO David Thodey and ANZ Banking Group CEO Mike Smith. Thodey was one of the first executives in Australia to appoint a chief social media officer. Mike Smith embraced social media after a trip to Silicon Valley in 2010.

Thodey is a LinkedIn influencer with 33,323 followers, while Smith is a LinkedIn influencer with 100,438 followers. Thodey is on Twitter and has about 4150 followers. Smith is on Twitter but his account is protected. Thodey has taken social media seriously for several years. He is a big user of the internal social media network called Yammer. Telstra has the largest Yammer community in the Asia-Pacific region and the 14th-largest globally, according to Yammer.

Eleven of the top 20 CEOs are not on LinkedIn and 13 of them are not on Twitter. However, several of the top 20 CEOs are doing better when using another measure of LinkedIn engagement, and that is the number of connections. The following CEOs have more than 500 connections on LinkedIn: BHP Billiton's Andre Mackenzie, Westpac Banking Corp's Brian Hartzer and Grant O'Brien at Woolworths. Insurance Australia Group CEO Mike Wilkins has one connection on LinkedIn, while Brambles CEO Tom Gorman has 26.

Some CEOs outside the top 20 are active on LinkedIn and Twitter, including Alan Joyce from Qantas Airways and Richard Goyder from Wesfarmers. But they are the exception to the rule. James Griffin, a director of KPMG and a specialist in social media, says the most common excuse from CEOs for not being on Twitter or becoming an influencer on LinkedIn is they see it as being narcissistic. "They don't want to put themselves forward as they fear it will look as though it is all about their own vanity," he says. "In some respects this shows that social media is not part of the way they tackle their day. But they are missing the opportunity to not only follow leading thought leaders and experts in different fields around the world but also engage with a variety of stakeholders."

Amanda Gome, who is head of digital and social media at ANZ, says Smith has made it clear he wants ANZ to be the leading social bank in the region. Social is an important tool for engaging with customers. "This is not about having 100 likes on Facebook," she says. "It is about the business value, the value to our customers from doing this." ANZ has recently stepped up its use of social media to promote women within the organisation and give them a platform for sharing their expertise with customers and potential customers.

Twitter and LinkedIn are increasingly being seen as part of a "New Power" in business and government, which was recently defined in an article in Harvard Business Review by Australian Jeremy Heimans, the co-founder of social media group Purpose and one of the founders of GetUp!, and Henry Timms, executive director of 92nd Street Y, a community centre in New York. Their article, published in December 2014 described the attributes of new power and old power. "Old powerworks like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures," wrote Heimans and Timms.

"New poweroperates differently,like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it's most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it." The attributes of new power include social media because it includes collaboration, crowd wisdom and sharing.

Article written by Tony Boyd and sourced directly from:

http://www.afr.com/p/business/chanticleer/ceos_fail_to_embrace_linkedin_twitter_CnLqtqRIsbguxUC6vAqm2M

If, as the saying goes, hell is other people, then there is probably a circle of that hell reserved for work groups. When a team gets hijacked by an alpha member’s quest for world domination, and people stop contributing ideas for fear of being shut down, the work climate can quickly become toxic.

It might be time to call in the actors. Business schools like Harvard and MIT Sloan, and companies like Google and Nokia, routinely bring in improvisational theatre practitioners, to give students and employees a jolt of mindfulness.
Improv is a powerful way for team members to re-examine and change how they relate to each other, say Russell Fletcher and Sarah Kinsella, the actor duo behind the Melbourne corporate training outfit The Decent People. You don’t need to be an actor to get the most out of improv; it’s for anyone who has to communicate with others.

In their work with organisations such as ANZ and Victoria Police, they have seen how improv helps people start to see past rank and role to relate to each other more authentically.

‘Many people wear a mask at work,’ Fletcher says. ‘Many are aware of it, but they stay in that groove because it’s worked for them: it’s kept them in the organisation or in a particular type of role.’ Kinsella adds that pressure-cooker environments take their toll on communication. ‘That’s when you get people sending emails instead of talking to each other – no hello and no goodbye. These subtleties build up over time.’

The duo often use an exercise called ‘yes, but/ yes, and’, a role play in which participants organise a work function, and every exchange begins with ‘yes, but’. Fletcher and Kinsella demonstrate vividly just how defensive and even hostile an exchange can become, because of those two words. ‘Let’s organise the Christmas party’; ‘Yes, but I have a meeting in five minutes’; ‘Yes, but I am the 2IC’.

When workshop participants replace ‘yes, but’ with ‘yes, and’, the difference is startling. The negotiation blossoms into a free flow of ideas and collaborations.

‘Of course, organisations do have to say, “yes, but”,’ Kinsella explains. However, ‘You can say the same thing by saying “yes, and” — “Yes, and we’ve done that before, how do you see this being done differently?”; “Yes, and can I see the budget for that?”. That allows people to contribute and feel valued for their contributions. “Yes, but” closes people down. And after a while apathy sets in: I’m not even going to bother.’

More important than the actual words, powerful as they are, is the mindset the pair are trying to instil. Fletcher says many of the principles of improv are now espoused by many firms: team behaviours, being brave, being creative, backing your own ideas and those of other people. Creativity and innovation depend on being able to play, take risks and bounce back from failure. Improv does not work if you are shooting the other person down to make yourself look good.

‘A lot of organisations are trying to round out their people to be more creative or sales focused,’ Fletcher says. ‘And employees in departments that have not traditionally been customer-facing, such as IT, now have to present and sell.’

A lot of organisations are trying to round out their people to be more creative or sales focused. And employees in departments such as IT now have to present and sell.

Kinsella adds: ‘Tools of improvisation work brilliantly. Even if you are introverted, if you’re passionate about a topic or an idea and you need to sell something, whether it’s a new process or yourself, you need to be able to turn your ideas and thoughts into language and communicate at a human level.’

One common reaction at the start of a workshop is fear of ridicule. ‘We can see them tighten up, ‘ Kinsella says. ‘They think, Oh my god, I’m going to have to act. People are really frightened of losing face: what if they’re not a good actor and everyone else is really good at this activity?’

They warn participants that they will fail. ‘These are just improv exercises, but if you’ve never done them before, why should you get it right? It’s really important to fail,’ Kinsella says. ‘We need to be able to take that risk and, if we do fail, to stay good-natured and not be that person who punishes themselves. We all punish each other enough.’

This post originally appeared on Inside Small Business and was written by Russell Fletcher and Sarah Kinsella

A new study aimed at pinpointing the innovation capability of the Australian not-for-profit Sector reveals that nimble, market-responsive charity organisations are best-placed to capture community interest and support.

The 2015 Innovation Index - The Australian Not-for-Profit Sector (1.79mb) (PDF), commissioned by Australia Post and digital giving provider, GiveEasy, was generated from a survey of more than 700 professionals working in the sector.

The peer-based survey revealed an overall Innovation Index of 66% for the sector, showing that there is substantial scope for improvement when it comes to innovation, while unpacking a number of factors that drive, and hinder, innovative practice.

Movember, Oxfam and Charity Water were identified as the top three 'most innovative' not-for-profit organisations in Australia according to the peer-based ranking in the survey.

To find out more about this study please click here.

Download full report (1.79mb) (PDF)

Download Innovation Index infographic (212kb) (PDF)

This blog post appeared on Graham Catt's LinkedIn

As a CEO my job is to create a vision for the future, and to talk about how we’re growing and changing. I’m often asked by colleagues about what we’ve reformed and how we successfully changed.

It is also my job, however, to avoid change for changes’ sake, and to protect and nurture the things that shouldn’t change, because they are at the heart of our organisational culture.

I had a call yesterday from an AVA member, concerned about an old classmate whom he knew was working in Vanuatu. Two emails later, we’d been able to reassure him his colleague was OK, and let a vet in a bad place know that people were looking out for her.

The AVA is the professional association for veterinarians, and animal health and welfare lies at the heart of the profession. Taking care of our people lies at the heart of our professional association.

It is sad but true that things don’t always go well for people, veterinarians included. We can be impacted by everything from natural disaster, to illness, to financial troubles. So the AVA needs to be there for our people, their families and their teams when things don’t go well.

We have a range of resources available to assist people. A counselling service, benevolent fund, wellness resources, and we are currently developing our national graduate support framework.

These are important and we’ll continue to grow them, but often it isn’t the formal support service that makes all the difference. It might just be a drink with someone who cares, advice from someone more experienced, or someone checking up on your welfare when you least expect it.

That is why our most valuable resources haven’t really changed much for nearly 100 years. People. Connections. Community. And the ability of our association to act as the fabric that can pull all of these together.

Graham Catt is the CEO of Australian Veterinary Association and is on the Board of the Australasian Society of Association Executives

Every five years, the Australian Government produces an Intergenerational Report that assesses the long-term sustainability of current Government policies and how changes to Australia’s population size and age profile may impact on economic growth, workforce and public finances over the next 40 years.

The first three Intergenerational Reports were produced in 2002, 2007 and 2010. The new report has been released this year in 2015.

The 2015 Intergenerational Report contains analysis of the key drivers of economic growth in Australia – population, labour force participation and productivity – and examines what projected changes in these areas mean for our standard of living and public policy settings.

It is a projection into the future, giving us an estimate of the challenges we face as a nation and where opportunities could come from.

The 2015 Intergenerational Report is the social compact between the generations – with our children, grandchildren, parents, grandparents and each other.

Find out more information and watch Dr Karl's presentation on the 2015 report here.

Download the report summary here and download the full 2015 report here.

Article By: Jeffry Powell, Executive Vice President, Americas, Charlie Horrell, Managing Director, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Al Percival, Managing Director, Australia and New Zealand, Eslinda Hamzah, Managing Director, APAC

Today there are more reasons than ever to move to electronic board communications. Lack of timely information, security vulnerabilities and privacy concerns. And the sheer bulk of paper, not to mention the proliferation of versions and notes. Yet, as much as electronic board communications make sense, there are many routes a company can take.

Organisations on the road toward digitally enabled board communications face a choice: Many migrate directly to portal solutions designed specifically to support boards, while others choose generic software or create their own internal approaches, believing these to be lower-cost alternatives.

Please find the full whitepaper here to find out the benefits of migrating your organisation to a digital board papers solution with Diligent Boardbooks.

AuSAE Annual Partner - Diligent Boardbooks

Diligent Boardbooks® is the world’s most widely used board portal because it was created with one purpose in mind: to provide secure and intuitive access to the information that underpins the best-performing boards. So intuitive that it’s as easy as reading a book, the portal gives instant access to updated and archived meeting materials and related resources, combined with the ability to share notes, vote and access the same secure app online or offline. Robust security and privacy are found at all levels of the product — from the data hosting infrastructure, to encryption of content in transit and on the device, to security processes. 

Each client gets a dedicated account management team and unlimited consultation, training and 24/7/365 live phone support from Diligent employees. Diligent has served boards since 2001 and has a proven track record as a public company.

Contact Diligent here.

Charities that have not lodged a financial statement for the past two years are on notice that they will have their status revoked if they fail to respond by March 30. More than 1400 groups have been given the warning by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission. The commission has released a list of “double defaulters” who have not submitted an annual statement for 2013 and 2014. Assistant commissioner David Locke said not all of the 1423 charities listed would still be operating.

“We suspect that some of them may have wound up but we believe some of them may still be active and they should have filed,” he said. “We were established to promote public trust and confidence in charities. It is a legal obligation on these charities to complete an annual information statement.” Mr Locke said some groups may simply be disorganised or unaware of their obligations, despite ongoing publicity by the commission.

“At its worst, it could be that they don’t want to publish anything because they’ve got something to hide,” he said. “The Government gives very generous tax concessions to charities but part of the deal is you’ve got to be open and transparent about what you’re doing. This is serious now. This is the deadline.

“We’re hoping that any charity that is still active contacts us and sorts this out.” In SA, the charities listed include Little Livers, the Roxby Downs SES Unit, the SA CFS Training and Research Foundation and Henley and Grange Community Centre, which is operated by Charles Sturt Council. A spokeswoman for the Australian Wombat Rehabilitation Centre, at Callington, said she was aware her charity was on the list but it had since lodged its forms.

“We had some problems but we got it fixed up last week,” she said. The Tatiara Royal Flying Doctor Service Support Group is among the 188 on the SA list but an RFDS spokeswoman said that the listing was “an anomaly”. “It doesn’t mean the support group will cease to exist,” central operations media and communications manager Kate Hannon said.

She said all 23 support groups were registered under the one Australian Business Number and all filed their statements to the RFDS, which was not on the double-defaulters list. The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission received a register of charities when the commission began in December 2012.

Registration was based on information provided by the Australian Taxation Office. To check a charity’s details, go to acnc.gov.au

This article first appeared the Advertiser