Kathleen Hogan
SENIOR COUNSEL & DIRECTOR OF KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT, BMO FINANCIAL GROUP
TORONTO, CANADA
MEMBER SINCE 2011
ACC Launches the 2015 New Member Recruiting Campaign
Deepen your connections with in-house friends and coworkers by inviting them to become ACC members. When your in-house peers join ACC, you grow opportunities to engage with colleagues, expand your professional network and share ideas and expertise. You also introduce them to the value of ACC: access to the association’s wide array of in-house resources, discounts for world-class educational programing and a network of over 35,000 in-house professionals from around the world.
Over the next several months, we will introduce you to ACC members who have actively recruited friends and coworkers to join. They will explain, in their own words, why they encouraged others to become ACC members, offer tips for what you can do to recruit peers, and explain the benefits they and the new members have enjoyed. We will celebrate the success of our 2015 “Engage Your Network” campaign by recognizing our Top Recruiters in the ACC Docket and at the 2015 ACC Annual Meeting.
In 2011, BMO’s Legal, Corporate & Compliance Group (LCCG) made a strategic decision to purchase an ACC membership. There were a number of reasons for this decision. ACC Docket spoke with Kathleen Hogan about how she became a top recruiter.
Why did you feel it was so important to get your colleagues involved?
We believed that the investment in ACC was appropriate. It is a global association for and of legal counsel, which meant that all our investment dollars would focus on resources and CLE specifically for in-house legal counsel. Our LCCG employees had previously been members of various local, state/provincial, national and industry bar associations. However, their content, while useful, tended to focus on the needs and practices of private practice lawyers and law firm management. This content was simply not useful enough for legal counsel to justify continued spend. LCCG sees the ACC membership as a valuable strategic investment.
What did you do to engage your colleagues?
We wanted to centralize professional association memberships within LCCG. As we encouraged individual employees to relinquish memberships in other associations, we made sure to communicate the strategic reasons we chose ACC as our preferred legal association.
We worked with ACC to develop communications to go out to all the lawyers in LCCG. This included a general email with self-enrollment instructions and an intranet posting celebrating the membership. I also created specific emails to legal group leaders to cascade to their teams asking that they encourage their reports to enroll, and I visited our practice groups to personally explain the benefits of membership.
Many of our legal counsel immediately self-enrolled, and we obtained significant penetration across LCCG. After this initial big splash, we continued to send out occasional reminder emails to those that had not enrolled.
Are your colleagues enjoying their ACC membership? What feedback have you received?
Since 2011, we have made great use of the ACC’s resources and programs, such as sending our in-house lawyers to the ACC Annual Meeting. We are delighted that as new counsel join LCCG, many make requests to become ACC members. Group leaders continue to ask me to speak about membership benefits at meetings, showing real “buy-in” at senior levels.
In mid-2014, we reassessed our membership. I sent an email, specifically to non-members, that outlined the benefits of ACC membership relevant to their particular practices. This time, I included a voting button in the email, allowing lawyers to indicate an interest in being signed up — or not. Those that indicated an interest (including many that had received self-enrolment emails before) did put up their hands. I then enrolled those counsel myself. With this tactic, we obtained nearly 100 percent membership of current legal counsel employees.
As LCCG continues to hire new legal counsel, we are creating a new, simplified process to ensure they have ACC membership during their first weeks with us. With the tactic, we will be sure to continue to reap the value of our investment in ACC.
