The Charity and Accountability - more IPC focus areas

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In my post "What should be the focus of my informal private club (or IPC)?," I define four basic focuses of an informal private club; Social, Professional, Field and Hobby. As a result my continuing research, I'll add a couple more focus areas, Charity and Accountability. Unlike the basic four, I would term the follow two a little bit more advanced because of what you need to consider in order to manage them.

Charity
This is an outstanding focus for an IPC, and done correctly, would be very popular. A charity IPC would take aspects of most of the basic IPC types, possibly adding field work or fund raising as activities within the IPC, along with discussions and socials that keep everyone interested and focused on the goals of the IPC's charity work. Charity could also be used as a 'plug-in' activity, like I've written about Salons, but to be truly effective, probably the best expression for charity work in an IPC is a free-standing group. It's probably advisable to associate with a larger association to establish or expand credibility.

If a charity focused IPC is going to do fund raising, it's going to take in money. This means accounting and bookkeeping. If you decide to take in money, everything needs to be absolutely correct, transparent, and in line with county, state/province and Federal laws. Do your homework ahead of time; research as much as possible and ask questions. This advice would be good for any IPC taking in money, either as membership dues or as simple donations. People rightly want to know where their cash is going. Also, it's always a good idea to be absolutely clear about where the money is going and keeping the books open for inspection by the membership. I'll discuss membership dues and money handling in later posts.

Accountability
I encountered the Accountability social organization in the Fast Company Magazine under the article "What You Need To Know To Create An Accountability Group That Works." Basically, an accountability group helps people stay focused on tasks they want to accomplish by reporting their progress to other folks. This is how businesses like Weight Watchers work. With WW, you join follow the plan and do a scheduled weigh-in, report your progress and receive encouragement to keep going. This would be a unique focus for an IPC, which can focus on anything that is task oriented. The Fast Company article threw out health, novel writing, professional uses as examples, but accountability can take many, many forms. Unlike other IPCs, you need to be very aware of the events and activities to present. You'd not want to have dinner parties if the goal of your IPC is help members stay fit and trim, unless the dinner party was about health food, or how to eat better.

An Accountability IPC would have some unique considerations, tact being foremost. Telling someone that they need to do better can be a difficult thing, if you want to empathetic also. You'll need to mentor people about how to be firm, but not rude or overbearing. Consider how the accountability will be handled in the design of your IPC.

Both of these IPCs speak to a higher purpose, and even though they would require some additional work, they could be most worthwhile IPCs you could create.