Associations use the term “content curation” frequently, but to quote the great Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Many times, when we’re using the term “content curation,” what we actually mean is “aggregation.” That is, pulling together a list of related links.
That is helpful for your members, in that you’ve at least reduced the number of pieces of information they should be paying attention to. But it’s shallow, and you can do so much more to help them.
When Hilary Marsh and I talk about “content curation” in our new whitepaper, Cut Through the Clutter: Content Curation, Associations’ Secret Weapon Against Information Overload, what we’re referring to is something more akin to what museum curators do, a process called distillation, in which the curator selects from the available items, brings those items together, puts them in context, and provides the perspective that helps the people viewing those items to find meaning and make sense of the topic by telling a coherent story.
This is probably not news to you, but we’re at an information crisis point.
Your members and other audiences are dealing with a flood of information during a time when the role of traditional information gatekeepers has become severely devalued. People are overwhelmed with information, much of it false or untrustworthy, and are increasingly unable to discern what is reliable and what is not.
Associations can help.
In the latest, just-released, hot off the presses (or at least Adobe InDesign) Spark collaborative whitepaper, Hilary Marsh (Content Company) and I propose content curation as associations’ secret weapon for helping our members surface relevant information and place it in the context they need to help them make sense of their increasingly complex personal and professional worlds.
An interview with Bryan Kelly, one of the founders of rasa.io and the publisher-in-chief of Smart Letter, discussing the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in content curation.
A series of thought questions for you to use to spark discussion with your team.
An extensive list of resources in case you want to dig deeper on any of the topics addressed.
I’ll be blogging about the whitepaper in the coming days, highlighting some of our major findings, but in the meantime I invite you to download your free copy at https://bit.ly/34P5THr – we don’t collect any data on you to get it, and you won’t end up on some mailing list you didn’t ask for. We just use the bit.ly as an easy mechanism to count the number of times it’s been downloaded.
And don’t forget to check out the other FREE Spark collaborative whitepapers, too:
One of the key elements of blockchain networks is the network. This technology is a system-level technology. What that means is that its true power lies in the network effect, in the system. Any one application can have positive (or negative, or both) impacts, but disruptive change will come about as different applications begin to interact with each other.
…blockchain-related changes that come to your particular profession or industry are likely to happen not at all and then all at once…
If you do only ONE thing as a result of the white paper and this blog series, it should be to educate your senior paid and volunteer leadership. When the time comes that the network effect hits the profession or industry your association serves, you will need to be nimble enough to make rapid decisions. You can’t wait until then to start your educational process.
Where do you start?
Of course, I’m going to say: download the whitepaper, read it, assign your board to read it, make it an agenda item at your next board meeting, assign senior staff to read it, and make it an agenda item at your next senior staff meeting. Remember, it’s completely free, and you won’t be asked for any information or put on a mailing list.
The whitepaper itself includes advice for next steps after that, ranging from more detailed takes on everything I’ve covered in the past few posts to a substantial reference list to discussion questions to inform your conversations with your paid and volunteer leaders to information about where you can set up sandboxes.
I’ll close with one more quote:
Blockchain is likely to disrupt association operations, just as the arrival of the internet and social media did. Does that necessarily mean that blockchain will put associations out of business? Well, no.
However, it is going to change some fundamental things about the way we operate, and now is the time to start educating yourself as to how.
The tricky part is that now we’re getting into particular professions and industries, which means that the questions, problems, and answers differ.
Realizing that we couldn’t take on EVERYTHING, Shelly and I identified the following professions/industries and related questions as key areas in which to demonstrate the potential of blockchain technology:
Education: How can we quickly and cheaply verify credentials with 100% certainty?
Engineering: How can we accelerate the construction process while also reducing risk?
Government: If someone loses her documents or her papers are destroyed, how can she prove who she is?
Law: How do we ensure that contracts are executed correctly, that all parties understand them, and that they remain safe and secure?
Supply Chain: How can we be certain of the provenance of goods while also reducing the time (and associated costs) of getting them from point A to point B?
Real Estate: How can we make it easier to buy and sell property while also ensuring ownership records are correct and current?
Blockchain for Dummies offers some qualifying questions when you’re trying to figure out whether blockchain is an appropriate solution for your association and for which projects:
Do we need to track transactions that involve more than two parties?
Is the current system overly complex or costly, possibly due to the need for intermediaries or a central point of control?
Can the network benefit from increased trust, transparency, and accountability in recordkeeping?
Is the current system prone to errors due to manual processes or duplication of effort?
Is the current transaction system vulnerable to fraud, cyber-attack, and human error?
Now, that probably sounds like every single thing you do.
But wait! There’s one more question you should pose to yourself, suggested by CompTIA in their Harnessing the Blockchain Revolution report:
Are there non-blockchain solutions that are available and effective?
In the VAST majority of cases, the answer to that is: yes.
Credentialing (degrees of all types, licenses, certifications, certificates, digital badges) is possibly, next to cryptocurrency, the most mature application of blockchain technology (and it’s certainly far more beneficial from a social good perspective). People earn credentials, but, with current technology, the issuing institutions own those credentials for verification purposes. That leads to all sorts of “friction”: slow, expensive processes to verify credentials, faked credentials, challenges dealing with non-traditional or micro-credentials.
Credentials that are on the blockchain cannot be faked, cannot be altered, and are owned by the person who earns them for verification purposes. Status updates are immediate and transparent, whether that’s about earning, maintaining, or even losing a credential.
For instance, I’m a CAE. But how can you know? I can claim it, but without the issuing institution (ASAE, in this case) confirming, you can’t know whether or not I ever earned it and, even if I did, whether or not I’m maintaining it. (I did, in January 2004, and most recently renewed this past fall, but again, how can YOU know?)
Now for something like a CAE, you might look at that and say, “So what if Elizabeth never got around to submitting her renewal paperwork last fall, lapsed, and hasn’t updated her LinkedIn profile yet? Nobody’s dying on the operating table here.” But what about a medical license? Or an industrial refrigeration technician certification (they’re the nice folks who keep our food supply chain operating, and they work with ammonia-based refrigeration systems that, if things go wrong, can kill people)?
However, the crux of the blockchain matter for associations, as Shelly and I see it, is less “how is blockchain going to affect associations?” and more “how is blockchain going to affect association members, in their professions and industries?” Which will be the topic of my next post in this series.
At it’s most basic level, blockchain is a ledger-style database.
“Wait a second!” you might say. “There are PLENTY of database options out there. Why do we need ANOTHER one?”
Blockchain allows two people who don’t know or trust each other to exchange value over the internet without the involvement of a third party. It keeps a historical, time-stamped record of transactions involving things that are valuable. Those valuable things can be physical objects (like a diamond or a head of lettuce) or intangible items (like an ebook or electronic music file).
It addresses two key problems in any value exchange:
It prevents double-spending.
It provide immutable verification of the transaction.
And again, it does this without involving a third party intermediary, which means the transactions can happen faster and at a lower cost.
To learn more about how the technology actually works, via a clever (if I do say so myself) analogy about two people going to a ballgame together, check out the full whitepaper, Blockchain for Associations: Separating the Hype from the Promise, downloadable for free at http://bit.ly/2YwYIjn, no divulging of any information about yourself required.
In the spring of 2018, I had the opportunity to attend one of my favorite conferences in the association year: digitalNOW. At that event, among all the cutting-edge content, I heard one word over and over: blockchain. Two things quickly became apparent to me: one, it was an emerging trend associations should pay attention to and two, nobody seemed to really understand it all that well.
What is blockchain?
How does it work?
How does it relate to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
The whitepaper includes an interview with Tim Haynes, founder of Signal and Story, who you may have heard speaking on blockchain at ASAE’s 2018 Tech Conference last December, and a case study from Central New Mexico Community College, which, under the direction of CIO Feng Hou, has been at the forefront of student-owned and -administered credentials maintained on the blockchain. It also includes an extensive bibliography for those who wish to REALLY geek out.
I’ll be blogging about the whitepaper in the coming days, highlighting some of our major findings, but in the meantime I invite you to download your free copy at http://bit.ly/2YwYIjn – we don’t collect any data on you to get it, and you won’t end up on some mailing list you didn’t ask for. We just use the bit.ly as an easy mechanism to count the number of times it’s been downloaded.
The complete whitepaper team – Shelly Alcorn, Tim Haynes, Feng Hou, and myself – will also be participating in SURGE Co-Creation, a free interactive virtual conference on May 1-3 hosted by AssociationSuccess.org. You can find out more about the event as a whole and our session at https://surgeco.snoball.events/s/elizabeth-engel. (You can also register, which is required, but is, as mentioned above, free.)
And don’t forget to check out the other FREE Spark whitepapers, too:
If you’ve been around the association industry for more than a few minutes, you’ve undoubtedly heard at least one membership professional say that.
Volunteerism is a MAJOR opportunity for engagement.
But as we’ve discussed continually throughout this Membership 101 series, engagement, like brand, is defined by your audiences, not by you.
So how does that impact volunteering? After all, the association defines the board and committee structure, right?
Well, yes, but in 2018 I hope those aren’t the only opportunities for volunteering you’re offering your members.
In 2013, Peggy Hoffman (Mariner Management) and I wrote a whitepaper titled The Mission Driven Volunteer. It’s free, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should get a copy.
Our thesis was – and this remains true – that forces of generational change and differing needs and expectations mean that volunteering needs to change, too. Younger generations aren’t as interested in the type of prestige and position-based volunteering as their elders. They are still willing – even eager – volunteers, but their goals are different, concerned more with independence, meaning, and impact.
We proposed a model, mission-driven volunteering, that empowers individuals through things like micro-volunteering and adhocracy, and provides episodic and virtual opportunities to contribute.
The image above is from one of our case studies, the Oncology Nursing Society.
As Diane Scheuring, ONS’s membership and SIG manager, said: “We don’t want checkbook members. We want our members to say “yes” to ONS and to personally connected with us.”
One way they went about that is, rather than restricting definition of volunteer to committee or board service, ONS asked their members how they DO contribute and how they WANT TO contribute. Members’ responses led them to define volunteerism much more broadly, and also helped them better understand the concept of different levels of volunteering, represented by the clock image above:
Small investment: voting in an election, serving as a mentor
Bigger investment: item writing for their ONCC certification
Even bigger investment: national conference planning team
Biggest investment: serving on one of their few remaining standing committees or the board
By both changing the opportunities they offered and surfacing – and then recognizing – what people were already doing, they increased their volunteerism ration from one person in 26 to one person in five. In other words, 20% of their members are considered – and recognized as – active volunteers. This has had a positive impact on two of their key organizational metrics: membership retention and leadership development for individual nurses, which then increases the capacity of the entire system.
What are you doing to increase opportunities for different kinds of people to volunteer with your association? What are you doing to recognize the “hidden” work that’s already happening?
In my last post, I shared the link to the webinar my Steal This Idea! co-author Sohini Baliga and I presented for Wild Apricot on March 21. Sohini and I got to as many questions as we could at the end the webinar, but as usual, we missed a few, so we’re answering them below:
How can wildlife conservation related organizations tap into millenials if we are asking them to be a hero for another species?
EWE: This provides a great opportunity to tell a story of an endangered animal (or species or wild place) in a way that’s compelling and, in that story, explain how your donor/member can be the hero who saves that animal (or species or wild place) by her donation.
What if your membership is a low fee like $25/year?
EWE: Well, at least you’ll probably never hear the objection: “Dues were too expensive”! Seriously, though, that hopefully means you have a lot of people in your membership file. The trick now is to start looking for the ones who do more than just pay their $25 a year – or who want to do more than that.
How have you had best success at gathering stories from members/donors?
EWE: Talk to them. That can be individual and formal (like a phone interview), group and formal (like a focus group), or individual and informal (like a conversation at an event). Pay attention to when he starts talking faster, or a little louder, or in a higher pitch. Watch for when her eyes light up and her face gets more animated. That means you’ve struck gold – you’ve discovered something that member is passionate about. Then it’s your job to look for ways that member’s passions tie to your organization’s mission, and explain to her how involvement in your organization will make a difference to that issue she’s passionate about.
We are a membership association of cause-oriented organizations. But we don’t have a cause ourselves. Will there be materials in this webinar that will help me?
EWE: Sohini and I would like to think so. When you’re a federation of organizations, it can be hard to make that direct, personal tie with people. I’m about to use an example that’s a bit politically charged, so stick with me. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton founded an organization called Onward Together. It uses her high profile and large audience to raise money for small, scrappy nonprofits that are doing excellent work, but that may lack the audience base to effectively raise money themselves. Can you highlight the stories of the organizations you serve?
We are thinking about doing a major gala. What is the best way to get corporate table sponsorships if you don’t know people within the individual businesses?
SB: The first thing to consider is that corporations look at the bottom line, and want bragging rights – it makes them look good. Now, put yourself in a corporation’s position. You’re not just spending money because it feels good – you have to pay employees and benefits, investors and backers want to see returns on their investment, and you need to be able to stand behind your spending decisions. All of them. So what’s going to make you give? What’s going to make you say, “Sure, I’ve got bills, but you can not only have a big chunk of change, you can put my name up in lights so others come asking me for the same thing”? What will make you say yes? What will make it hard for you to say no? Therein lies your answer – make your best case; make the story of the gala compelling; make it really hard to say no. Make them an offer they can’t refuse.
This is where I will say that nonprofits should not skimp on fundraising staff and professional executive development. A good, connected development officer is worth every penny of salary. And it is their job to make those sponsorships happen in tandem with a board and executive staff that is not shy, and can make the ask clearly, comfortably, and elegantly. There are grants available for hiring fundraising staff and professional development at all levels of the nonprofit world. The bigger the budget, the more they exist – because everyone understands that you have to support staff so they can do their best. It’s not a perk; it’s an investment that allows nonprofits to continue growing and serving their core mission.
What is the best way to get feedback from members? Surveys at events, letters, or…?
EWE: Yes. You want to turn your organization into a sponge for information. That means you want to collect data on your members and other audiences formally (like surveys and interviews) and informally (like conversations and responses to emails). You want to collect it actively (asking people to answer questions) and passively (paying attention to what they do and tracking what behaviors you can without turning into Big Brother and creeping people out).
Collecting the data is only the first step, though. You also have to share it with your colleagues. You’d be amazed at what your “line” staff in customer service knows that you don’t know, because they talk to your stakeholders all the time. Likewise, you’d be amazed at the insights your newer or more junior staff might have into some of your “C-suite” information, because they have a fresh perspective and aren’t jaded by “we’ve always done it this way” and “we tried that five years ago, and it didn’t work.” No information hoarding!
I have a large number of small dollar donors that I want to cultivate to be higher donors. I would like to meet with them to know them better. How should I go about doing that?
EWE: Ask them. I am a donor to Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (one of our case studies). My relationship with them started by going to one show. I liked it, so I went to more. I liked them, so I became a season subscriber. I realized I supported their mission, so I started donating. Now I’m donating much more, on an annual basis, than I was then. The Woolly development staff started building that relationship by calling me up to ask if I would like to meet for coffee.
Any suggestions on where to start with an all-volunteer organization?
EWE: It’s tough when you have no paid staff. Sustained projects, like fancy integrated multi-channel campaigns, are really hard to do. You need to assess what, for your organization, would constitute low-hanging fruit. Can you easily identify who your super-members are? Can each volunteer take responsibility for calling one of them in the next two weeks? Do you have young people in your volunteer base? Can you get them talking about what sorts of engagement activities they would find appealing? Does your organization have a compelling story, where it’s easy to frame the member as the hero? Could you send out one email that does that? Figure out what the easy thing is, do it, (hopefully) experience some success and learn some things, and build from there.
Missed the webinar? Wild Apricot’s got you covered.
Special for those of you who prefer to learn from methods OTHER than reading: Two are videos; one is a podcast. We embrace all types of learners around here!
