List of Services
Led by our CFO, a CPA, Thomas Associates manages all our clients’ finances, from billing, collecting dues, and quarterly financial statements to financial audits. Our accounting policies provide for checks and balances and complete transparency for our clients. We take responsibility for all tax filings, which are performed under the direction of our on-staff CPA, and all clients go through external audits or financial reviews.
From answering phones to managing the member database to managing your association’s email, all day-to-day operations are handled by a dedicated client services team.
Thomas Associates maintains a special certification department dedicated to designing, implementing, and managing personnel and product certification programs. Our services help professional societies and trade associations to increase the expertise and professionalism of their members and verify the performance of their products. Our expertise in the requirements of certification programs extends from design and implementation of training programs to development and administration of exams, and ongoing needs for continuing education and recertification. Knowing the importance of such credentialing services, our professional staff is available to respond to all questions and requests, maintaining confidentiality and impartiality. One certification program we manage for a client association, based on ANSI standards, has trained more than 10,000 people. TA’s certification services help associations provide added value to their members, driving membership growth and increasing revenues. Certification services meet a growing global demand for people and products that meet or exceed standards, demonstrating your association’s commitment to excellence.
As you would expect, we handle all aspects of association meetings, the core activity of associations. Our client services team members all have extensive experience in handling all aspects of meeting planning. This includes site selection/recommendations, securing speakers, hotel negotiations (all commissions are returned to the association), registration, onsite coordination, arranging activities, and all communications from meeting notices to meeting minutes. We routinely organize and manage trade shows and meetings of all sizes, from conventions to tabletop displays.
The depth of our engineering and technical expertise is rare in the association management world. Our technical department, managed by an experienced Professional Engineer (P.E.) with a Ph.D., is immersed daily in codes, standards, research, testing, and regulatory activities. This includes working with the model code organization ICC, state code regulatory bodies throughout the U.S., standards organizations such as AISI, AISC, ANSI, ASHRAE, ASME, ASTM, NFPA, NFRC, and UL, and regulatory agencies including CPSC, DOE, the FCC, and OSHA. Thomas Associates provides our technical services on a project basis to handle your group’s important technical functions involving codes, standards, and regulatory work.
ANSI Experts. Several of our clients are ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organizations (SDO). We handle the periodic ANSI audits of processes, ensuring that proper procedures are followed to comply with ANSI requirements. We not only handle audits, but more importantly manage the ANSI consensus process for the development of new and revised American National Standards.
International Standards. We participate in developing and administering ISO and IEC international standards. We serve as the administrator for several U.S. Technical Advisory Groups, which develop the U.S. position on relevant international standards. Accordingly, we work with corresponding bodies of other countries to resolve differing opinions, achieve consensus, and harmonize standards for member companies. We also serve as the Secretariat for an IEC Technical Committee, administering the IEC process for the development of international safety standards, which are then adopted in the U.S. and other countries.
We represent industry on several UL and CSA Technical Harmonization Committees (THCs), UL Standards Technical Panels (STPs), as well as serving on consensus bodies of other ANSI Standards Developing Organizations.
Codes, standards, legislation, and regulation can pose a serious threat to your industry by imposing manufacturing, installation, environmental, safety, or product performance standards on your industry’s products without industry input. Thomas Associates excels in helping associations address these potential challenges.
We develop and maintain the websites for all of our clients. Our experienced IT staff keeps our association websites running and updated, under the direction of association leadership. We develop and maintain both B2B and B2C social media programs for our associations.
A key part of association management is growing and retaining membership. We process all member applications and respond quickly to all queries and requests. Our goal is to respond to all membership inquiries on the same day and no later than within 24 hours. We work with membership to develop prospect lists and conduct outreach through different programs depending on the association.
Each organization retains antitrust legal counsel, adopts antitrust guidelines, has a set of association bylaws, and regularly reminds membership of appropriate conduct. Since every association experiences a regular influx of new representatives and new members, antitrust awareness is an ongoing responsibility that cannot be taken for granted.
We produce a variety of publications and marketing communications for our clients including four-color magazines, digital and printed newsletters, best-practices documents, catalogs, directories, manuals, standards, and more.
We have strategic partnerships with select marketing firms schooled in the needs of our clients. Under our direct supervision, these firms handle critical marketing, design, and public relations tasks. This approach offers clients a better selection of vendors, cost containment, and superior performance from a firm that is competing for your business.
Most associations benefit from gathering and distributing statistics about their industries. Our in-house statistics department confidentially handles approximately 110 different reports for our groups. These reports cover the full range of marketing, sales, and other data, including industrial relations information, safety statistics, financial performance ratios, factory level sales, and end-use marketing data. Due to our expertise in statistics, we provide statistical programs to standalone associations without their own statistics departments.
