Elevating Your CLA Experience

August 2024

By Nicole Stragalas, CMEO

In the newly created position of Chief Member Experience officer for CLA, I’m honored to be part of an accomplished team of dedicated CLA staff, and I’m committed to applying my efforts and talents, alongside our great team, to enhance the overall experiences of our members across all sections.  

I have been privileged to begin working with our CLA CEO, Chris Nguyen, to shape some of these enhancements for the remainder of this year, moving into 2025 and beyond.  The initiatives cover these key areas:

• Broadened programming to meet new educational needs across multiple sections
• Expanded benefits to improve the professional lives of CLA members and section groups
• Member touchpoints analysis (e.g., review of the registration experience) and hand-off analysis (e.g., in the workflow of event planning, reviewing the hand-off  from planning an event to marketing that event) 
• Process design and process improvement, drawn from the results of the touchpoints and hand-off analyses
• Innovation in marketing approaches to support greater reach and better audience segmentation while also countering audience attention fatigue
• Community-building frameworks to foster cross-section collaboration, increase communication between sections, and level up individual and group communications with CLA staff
• Technology maximization to ensure software platforms are fully utilized in service of member experience (e.g., touchpoints and hand-offs in workflows; online communications; etc.)
• Anticipating needs to deliver memorable, worthwhile experiences for individual members and section groups

I am excited to further the important work of making our member’s professional lives better.  I welcome your thoughts and suggestions on how I and the CLA team, working closely with our CEO Chris, can best fulfill your needs—we are your association, committed to your success!