[Article] New Director of Membership at Building Performance Association?

A version of this article appears in the Fall 2019 issue of Home Energy Magazine.

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Kim Dresser has spent her 30-plus-year career working for professional and trade associations in the Washington, D.C., metro area. Fields in which she has worked include mental health, waste and recycling, wind energy, intermodal, home building and remodeling, and natural products. She has also worked for prominent dentists and physicians.

 Kim’s career started at an early age. While still in high school, she worked evenings at a mail house sending mailings from nonprofits and professional associations to their respective memberships. Working with dues invoices, meeting packets, and board of director binders taught her some skills she uses to this day.

In 1988, Kim’s dad was transferred to Melbourne, Australia, and Kim, having just graduated high school, decided to join her parents and live abroad for two years. During that time, she worked for a variety of companies and played lacrosse in Melbourne’s club leagues.

Returning from Australia, she attended college in the evenings and took her first association job with one of the clients of the mail house she had worked for—a three-person national mental health association. She was responsible for all the office operations, for membership, supporting chapters, maintaining a database, and event registrations. She also worked with individuals with mental disabilities as part of a work program sponsored by the association. The association promoted rehabilitation, not hospitalization, so it was a chance for these individuals to gain work experience while working toward a full-time job and independent living. It was a very enlightening experience, especially for a 20-year-old.

That job taught Kim to love the membership role in associations. She worked her way up to holding the top-level position in all the organizations she worked for, and while some of these positions entailed additional responsibilities, her real focus has always been working directly with the members of the organizations in her role as membership director.

Kim is very comfortable in small-staffed associations and enjoys the cross-departmental relationships that play an important part in the membership role. Helping a new member join and then exhibit at an event or attend a meeting or taking an exhibitor and moving him or her over to becoming a member, Kim excels at adding overall value for all involved.

Here at Building Performance Association, Kim is working to build a new association—one that collaborates with all the industry stakeholders; one where the members feel a connection to, and value, the mission of the organization, for themselves as professionals and for their businesses.

Kim lives in the Tampa Bay, Florida, area with her husband, a steamfitter and master welder with a commercial HVAC company, and her three kids.

Katie Aronoff is the director of marketing & communications at Building Performance Association

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