The end of the year is a perfect time to strengthen your connection in the community.
12/10/2019 10:00
By Roger Weiss
The holidays are upon us and we are winding down 2019. It seems like just yesterday that we were saying the same thing about 2018. People often use this time of year to exhale and let off some steam. I say, use it to prepare for 2020, when I believe we will all have perfect vision. (See what I did there?)
Get creative during the hustle and bustle of party planning and ordering gifts galore for family, friends, colleagues, employees and clients. Organize some lunch ‘n’ learns to prepare collectors for tax time collections. Reward your team with an investment in their future by helping them earn ACA International’s Professional Collection Specialist designation. Engage your clients with a year-end summary, plus an overview of what they can expect, and not expect, in 2020.
This is also a time for exceptional generosity. Some families in your community struggle more than ever this time of year, and it’s not simply with having gifts under the tree. They may struggle with a mortgage payment, utility bills, a car payment or groceries. As everyone reading this knows, the collection industry has some of the most generous people in the world. We see the struggle on a daily basis, and now is our time to impact lives. Help a family, a food pantry or a shelter. Anywhere you turn there are people who need the assistance and we are grateful for it.
Many, if not most, of us do a lot throughout the year to help, but here is how we need to take it a step further. We need to tell our story. I’m not talking about bragging—I’m talking about telling our story. If we don’t tell our story, then it will be told for us—often inaccurately—and our generosity and the positive impacts we make on people’s lives will be overlooked.
Tell ACA about your community outreach efforts. Tell your local news channels, radio channels and newspapers about it. Post about it on social media and ask your teams to repost it. Tell them what you are going to do, and if the public wants to help out too, provide information on how they can get involved. You will be surprised at how people step forward.
By the way, now would be a great time to reach out to prospective members and inactive members to encourage them to get involved in ACA in the coming year. But then again, there’s never a bad time for that.
Start now because before you know it, we will be saying the same thing about 2021.
Roger Weiss, IFCCE, is president and of CACi in St. Louis, Missouri. He can be reached at [email protected]. This column appears in the December issue of Collector magazine.
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