FEI Dallas: The Plan That Doesn’t Reset Every July

Client: FEI Dallas (Financial Executives International, Dallas chapter)
Industry: Professional association for senior finance executives

The challenge

FEI Dallas brings together the senior finance leaders of North Texas. It’s run by a volunteer board, and the presidency changes every year.

That turnover was the problem. The chapter’s last formal strategic plan was more than a decade old. Each new president arrived with good ideas and a one-year runway, so priorities shifted every July. Committees worked hard, but not always toward the same thing. Growth came mostly from word of mouth. And nobody could say which efforts were bringing in the members FEI Dallas wanted most.

Their marketing ran the same way. Messaging wasn’t managed in one place, LinkedIn ran on its own, and the website had no analytics. FEI Dallas had plenty of activity. It couldn’t see what any of it was producing.

What we did

First, the tools (2024)

We started with the basics. We put in a simple marketing stack (ActiveCampaign, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dripify), moved contacts out of scattered systems, and set up monthly reporting to the board. That gave the chapter a way to reach the roughly 2,000 senior finance executives in the Metroplex who fit its profile.

Tools don’t tell you where to point them, though. That needed a plan.

Then, the vision: Elevate (2025)

In the summer of 2025 we built FEI Dallas a strategic plan called Elevate. It’s based on Roger Martin’s Playing to Win, adapted into our ELEVATE model. In plain terms, it answers eight questions:

  • What results do we expect?
  • What’s our winning aspiration?
  • How are we positioned?
  • What’s working for us and against us (our headwinds and tailwinds)?
  • Who is our ideal member, today and tomorrow?
  • Where do we play, and where can we win?
  • What capabilities do we need?
  • How do we govern it so it lasts?

We ran 15 in-depth interviews with board members, members and sponsors. We put in more than 40 hours of market research and facilitated two board workshops. Every major decision was voted on in the room. The result was a plan the board owns, not one we handed them.

The winning aspiration says it best: “FEI Dallas elevates and connects finance leaders, building a dynamic community where innovation thrives, growth accelerates, and collaboration shapes the future of North Texas.”

The plan also named the real competitor. It wasn’t another association. It was the executive’s calendar. FEI Dallas now sets out to be the most valuable room in Dallas and the best return on a finance leader’s time.

The vision directs everything

A vision is only useful if it decides what happens on Tuesday. So we used Elevate as the guide for everything that came after.

  • Four initiatives: member activation, member experience, operational efficiency and brand awareness.
  • Twenty-two leaders on four teams. We facilitated a workshop in February 2026 where they turned the initiatives into action.
  • Sixty-five prioritized actions across nine committees, each tied back to an initiative and given an owner.
  • An alignment check. We reviewed every action against the vision and flagged anything drifting off it, with prioritized recommendations for the board.

Built to outlast any one president

This is the part most strategic plans skip. We designed the governance so Elevate survives the yearly handoff: a supervisory committee to carry the strategy across presidents, a scorecard that sits on every board agenda, a handoff plan for each incoming president, and a simple four-question test any new idea has to pass before it gets resources.

Execution that traces back to the plan

With the plan in place, the marketing had a job to do. Every piece of execution now ties to an Elevate initiative:

  • A weekly prospect email to mid-market CFOs, with sponsor thought leadership built in
  • A LinkedIn program we took over in December 2025, with a weekly content rhythm and persona-based outreach
  • A new feidallas.org with real analytics, live in June 2026
  • A six-month roadmap with a named owner for every workstream
  • A sponsorship playbook that moves renewals from relationships to evidence
  • A single lead tracker for the Membership Committee, scored against the ideal member profile
  • Hands-on CRM training, so the system stays with the chapter after leadership changes

The results

The plan is early in execution, and the board has set the targets that will measure it: +35 net new CFO members and +$25,000 in new sponsorship revenue this fiscal year, on the way to 450 members by 2029.

The early signs are strong:

  • LinkedIn impressions up 227% in the first two months after we took over the program (13,999 to 45,715), peaking at 93,288 in March 2026.
  • 80% open rate on prospect emails to CFOs, with zero unsubscribes. The industry average is 20 to 40%.
  • 62 to 65% open rates on the chapter newsletter, about three times the industry benchmark.
  • The prospect pipeline grew 46% in five months, from 1,807 to 2,637 finance leaders.

What changed most isn’t a number. FEI Dallas now has one plan that the board, the committees and the marketing all work from, and it’s built to still be there next July.