Many moons ago the company that I worked for, negotiated the position of becoming a national operations and call centre for the Prudential with respect to fire and flood claims (long before the Rainbow’s and Chem Dry's).
The problem was that we were not national, so we came up with the idea that as much of the work was carpet related we would employ a network of carpet cleaners.
They would have to pay us £300 for joining and additional training and if they didn’t receive at least that amount of work back in the first year, we would give them their money back, and so a network was borne in excess of 120 carpet cleaners if I remember correctly.
Like all best laid plans the Pru pulled out at the last minute leaving us with a big problem. The company decided that it could still make use of the network as we still received an element of works and embarked on a national sales campaign, which ultimately resulted in failure.
The network started to crumble, until one prominent member who had acted as their spokesman until now, decided to go one step further ultimately taking this network and its responsibility off our companies hands, which resulted in one of today’s largest franchise companies in the UK.
So what’s the connection you may ask. Well I don’t think much has changed, the onslaught of moans, gripes false accusations and general discontent took us completely by surprise (even though they were offered their money back) long before we had any real problem with the Pru.
I think as long as you take a low key or part time interest with small joining fee's thereby little funding and no real commitment to fulfilling group wise targets, you will be asking for trouble.
The big turnaround of the above story was proper full time marketing paid for by serious investment by its members and a management team that was answerable to its members.
There is nothing new here at all, as this has been attempted with various success over a great number of years under different guises (same box different wrapping).
My recommendation is either: Don’t promise anything and try for another accreditation body with some benefits to its members thereby low fee's (however do we need another?).
Or: Do it properly with serious investment and a full time management and marketing team as a business with all members benefiting.
But either way please don’t romance about all the moral values (that has been so done to death) and have some very good answers for your members when they start to ask those awkward questions like “who is really getting the benefit out of this”.
After all doesn’t the word "Ethical" have a number of meanings these days dependant on your point of view.
Dp (well somebody had to disagree
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