You said yes at a chapter meeting six weeks ago. The previous Vice President shook your hand. A laminated card got handed over. And now it is your job, and the actual contents of the job were not really explained at any point.
If that sounds familiar, you are in the majority. Most new VPs find out what the role is by doing it badly for two months. This article is the version of the conversation that should have happened on day one.
What the VP role actually is
On paper, the Vice President is responsible for membership, for the membership committee, and for chapter growth. In practice, the VP is the chapter's quality control function. The President is the face of the meeting. The Treasurer keeps the books. The Secretary handles communications. The VP is the only person in the leadership team whose job is to ask is this chapter actually working?, every week, in detail, with the authority to do something about it.
That is not how the role gets described in the handover, but it is how the role is judged by the chapter twelve months later.
Your three meetings
The VP has three recurring meetings to run, in increasing order of importance, and getting the priority right is the single biggest lever on whether your year goes well.
Meeting one: the weekly chapter meeting
You sit on the leadership table. You give the VP report. You introduce the speaker if the President is absent. This is the visible part of the role and it gets disproportionate attention from new VPs, but it is actually the lowest-impact of the three meetings.
The VP report should be three minutes, almost always. Cover: this week's referrals given and TYFCB, last week's visitor count, the one or two categories the chapter is currently hunting, and one concrete ask. The concrete ask is the only part that matters. "Three of you have not booked a one-to-one this month. I am going to message you after the meeting." That sentence does more for chapter health than any KPI slide.
Meeting two: the membership committee meeting
Monthly. You chair it. The agenda is mostly the same every month: applications in the funnel, members at risk, attendance review, open categories. The job of the chair is to keep the meeting short and to force decisions. Membership committees that drift for ninety minutes without deciding anything are the warning sign that the VP has not figured out the difference between discussing things and chairing them.
Try this structure for ninety days. Twenty minutes on applications (decide on each by the end of the slot, even if the decision is "defer to next month with the following two questions answered"). Fifteen minutes on at-risk members (one named action per member, with an owner). Ten minutes on open categories (no longer than that, the list does not change much). The remaining time is buffer for whatever has come up. End on time. Members will start volunteering for the committee.
Meeting three: the one-to-one with the President
This is the meeting nobody schedules, and it is the most important one of the three. Fifteen minutes a week, by phone or coffee, on the same day every week. Topic is always the same: what does this chapter look like in six months, and what is in the way?
The VP-President relationship is the engine room of the chapter. If you and the President disagree about direction, the chapter feels it within a month. If you agree and you talk weekly, almost no other problem in the chapter can grow undetected.
The hidden third of the job
Beyond the meetings, the part of the VP role that does not appear on any handover document is the small one-on-one conversations with members between meetings. Not strategic. Not formal. Just: "Hey, noticed you missed last week, everything okay?" Or: "Saw you brought a visitor two weeks running, who do you have lined up next?" Or: "Heard the deal with the bookkeeping referral fell through, what happened?"
These conversations are the chapter's nervous system. The VP is the central node. Without them, problems compound silently. Most VPs underinvest here. Aim for two of these conversations a week, off-cycle from the meeting. If you do nothing else from this article, do that.
The trap of acting like the President
New VPs often slide into a copy of the President's role. Speaking up in meetings the same way. Wading into the same problems the President is already on. Co-chairing things that do not need two chairs.
The chapter does not need two Presidents. It needs a President and a quality control function. These are different jobs, and they are most effective when they stay distinct. Your job is to ask the inconvenient questions in the membership committee, to track attendance, to chase the conversations that nobody else is having. That work does not get applause. It gets paid back as a healthier chapter at the AGM.
The handover problem
If you are reading this two weeks into the role and you did not receive a real handover, you are not alone. The fix is not to chase the previous VP. The fix is to write the handover document now, while everything is fresh and confusing. Write down what you wish someone had told you. Two pages. Save it somewhere the chapter can find it.
When you hand the role over in twelve months, that document is what you give them. The role becomes easier for the chapter each time a VP writes one of these. The role gets harder each time a VP does not.
The metric you should not ignore
One number tells you whether you are doing the job well. It is not visitor count. It is not referrals given. It is the percentage of members who are still in the chapter twelve months after they joined.
That number is downstream of everything you do. The one-to-ones with the President. The membership committee meetings that end on time. The conversations between meetings. The willingness to keep a seat empty rather than fill it badly. All of it shows up in retention twelve months out.
If you can move that number from 70% to 80% over your year, you have done something that almost no other VP in the network has done, and the chapter will feel different for years afterward. That is the actual job.