NTSA President Lisa Stubbs' Pressing Priority? One Word — Engagement

For Lisa Stubbs, it's all about membership engagement.

The 2023 NTSA president addressed attendees of the organization's Summit in Tampa in February, informing them of her vision and plans for her tenure.

"We're a fabulous organization, and those of us that are engaged reap tremendous benefits from that," Stubbs said in an interview following her session. "The problem is we have too few engaged people, and therefore even fewer people reaping the benefits. So, awareness is the first thing.

Better messaging that explains the resources, activities, and volunteer opportunities available to them is a challenge that the Membership Engagement Committee and its chair Erika DeBlasi are tackling.

"Once they're engaged, it's finding out what they would like to do and how we can involve them in creating a bigger circle," Stubbs added. "I'm not a small circle person; I'm a big circle person. We want to have as many people volunteering on committees and as many ideas as we can possibly have. So, that's our goal for the year, to grow engagement."

NTSA recently decided to go from two weekly e-newsletters each week to one, a strategic decision that she says will save resources that we can reallocate to other areas.

"In other words, we're going to have more social media, marketing, outreach, and awareness," she emphasized. "Instead of a newsletter that hits a certain group of people, where else can we engage with them if the newsletter is not in their hands? So, we will reschedule it to get engagement from other areas."

It's quality over quantity play. While technically over 6,000 members, the organization is structured in a way many people are "sucked into membership rather than choosing membership," and therefore, unaware of what it can do.

"At Security Benefit, where I work, we get, as a strategic partner, [a significant amount] of free memberships," Stubbs explained. "I sign up everybody that could possibly be touching our company's 403(b) business. Out of a couple of hundred people, there are about 30 that might be engaged. The strategic partners have only between 5% and 10%, or 10% and 15%, who are engaged."

A major Summit theme was SECURE 2.0, and she commented on its impact on 403(b)s.

"I wouldn't say it's a watershed moment, like when we had the new regs in 2007, 2008, and 2009. That was a watershed moment and a total industry shift," she concluded. "What I would say with Secure 2.0 is that it's an opportunity. The opportunity is that some things have gotten better, and we need to first educate our own people, the members of NTSA, as to what those changes were and how they can use them to grow their business or be a resource for how things have changed. To plan sponsors and school districts, SECURE 2.0 means nothing. They have no idea what it is and don't know how it applies, so we're going to 'educate the educators' and let them know how they're going to take Secure 2.0, make sure they're using it to its fullest, and make sure they stay in compliance."