Your Role in CSMFO’s Strategic Direction – Update Your Member Profile

Your Role in CSMFO’s Strategic Direction – Update Your Member Profile 

By: Margaret Moggia, CSMFO Executive Director 

Like the municipalities we serve, CSMFO needs a roadmap — a plan that ensures we stay focused on what matters most, use our resources wisely, meet members’ needs, adapt to change, and remain sustainable over time. Based on member feedback and leadership input, we've seen some areas where we are achieving our goals and other places where more information and resources are needed to meet our member needs.

Adopted by the CSMFO Board, there are three core goals for our organization:

• Organizational Sustainability: Building long term fiscal and operational health. This means refining roles and responsibilities (both staff & volunteers), improving process consistency, and long-range financial planning so that CSMFO can reliably deliver programs and services into the future.

• Professional Development: Delivering high quality training, educational opportunities, mentorship, leadership development, and networking. Essentially, meeting members where they are in their careers and helping them advance.
  

• Member Engagement: Understanding what members need, encouraging more participation (courses, conferences, volunteer roles), being inclusive and diverse, and expanding outreach so more people can benefit from CSMFO. Greater communication, feedback, and engagement are essential.
  

Related to these goals, there are three initiatives where CSMFO leadership has focused their efforts: 1) identifying member needs and wants, 2) enhancing member communications regarding training and educational resources, and 3) improving data collection and reporting on member engagement metrics.

In support of these initiatives, CSMFO took a comprehensive view of our members’ needs through surveys, evaluation of member profiles, and the current action plans of our Board, committee, and chapter leadership to identify what programs and topics have generated the most member interest. What we found is that a more tailored member profile will help us achieve greater clarity of member needs by requesting specific information needed for each member type. For instance, our government members tend to focus on specific areas of training (accounting, budget, treasury/banking, debt, procurement, risk management, forecasting, benefit administration, pension), and the pursuit of degrees and certifications, such as an MBA or CPFO. For our commercial members, understanding their business models and customer demographics will aid us in connecting our government members to their products and services. For our student members, the focus should be how CSMFO could support them in their pursuit of work and developing a career path after graduation. And lastly, a retiree profile that indicates their availability for hire post-retirement will help fulfill our evolving needs of finding talented public finance professionals to support our organizations.

CSMFO relies on accurate, up-to-date member information to deliver personalized services, communicate effectively, and make data-informed decisions. What we found is membership profiles are missing or have outdated critical data points, which limits our ability to engage members meaningfully and measure key metrics such as retention, satisfaction, and career growth and training interests. Expanding and updating the member data we collect will provide better focus for strategic planning, allow for targeted marketing, and enable CSMFO to offer more relevant programs to the members we serve. Enhanced member profile information will allow CSMFO to be good stewards of your membership dollars by knowing how to better invest our resources and will support CSMFO’s goal of financial and operational sustainability.

Your Call to Action!
On November 1, CSMFO will be opening the membership renewal period for 2026. When you renew your membership, we ask that you also please take a moment to update your existing data and complete any new data fields that have been added to your member profile. This information will ensure accurate name, title, organization (made available to members), and other key data points which will be used by CSMFO for the purposes stated above.

Thank you for your support of this effort to enhance the value of your CSMFO membership.

After a successful 28-year career, Margaret retired as the Executive Manager of Finance for West Basin Municipal Water District. An opportunity to support the Town of Discovery Bay CSD as their Finance Manager provides her the opportunity to help guide them through transformative. Margaret began her professional career at Coopers & Lybrand focusing primarily on governments and nonprofits. Margaret earned her B.A in Economics from U.C. Santa Barbara. She maintains her license as a certified public accountant (CPA).

Margaret was appointed by the California Society of Municipal Finance Officers (CSMFO) Board to serve as Executive Director where she has overall strategic and operational responsibility for CSMFO programs and execution of its mission. Margaret served as the 2018 President for CSMFO and also served in a variety of volunteer capacities. Margaret has also been active with CMTA and GFOA. In June 2022, Margaret joined California Class, a joint powers agency, as a Board of Trustee to serve a four-year term for this local government investment pool. In April 2024, Margaret joined the NIGP Certification Commission as a public stakeholder member.