Category: innovation

Evidence-Based Decision Making for Associations

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 5 Comments on Evidence-Based Decision Making for Associations

I’m excited to share the launch of the fifth whitepaper in the ongoing Spark whitepaper series, Getting to the “Good Stuff”: Evidence-Based Decision Making for Associations. 

Co-authored with Peter Houstle (Mariner Management), the whitepaper tackles the question: how can associations use data to start asking meaningful, mission-driven questions and to inform our decision-making processes around them?

Big Data presents a tremendous opportunity for associations, but in order to realize its potential, there are some things you need to know and do. First, your data needs to be reasonably clean and complete. Then you need to look for patterns, and data visualization tools can help with that. Then you need think about the questions those patterns raise and create hypotheses to answer those questions. Then you test your hypotheses, hopefully find strong correlation (since proving cause and effect is rare), and make decisions accordingly. In the course of our research, we did discover a secret sauce to decision making success, but I’ll share more about that later this week.

Speaking of, I’ll be blogging about the contents of the whitepaper all week, but in the meantime, pick up your free copy at http://bit.ly/1jwXcDX, no divulging of information about yourself required.

Don’t forget to check out the other FREE Spark whitepapers, too:

Content Curation Revisited

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Content Curation Revisited

Thanks in part to the recent release of the Looking Forward 2014 survey by Association Laboratory, associations execs are once again thinking about our members’ experience of information overload.

According to the Association Lab survey, the association executives who responded believe that information management, including both volume and quality of information, is their members’ top concern in 2014.

Although Association Lab concludes that:

the development of comprehensive strategies to help members deal with information management issues is a strategic priority for associations

(indeed, one might argue that it’s a top strategic priority, if, in fact, the survey respondents are correct in their assessment of their members’ concerns), they also found that:

Executives anticipate that members will continue to rely on their associations as a primary source of information.

I’d like to question that. And in a recent post to Associations Now, Joe Rominiecki discusses the same thing, urging associations to begin taking on more of an information curator role for our members, shifting from our more traditional information creator role.

Inherent in the shift from “association as source of information” to “association as hub of information” is that the community of professionals, experts, and organizations your association lives in is now a constant driver of knowledge in your field. (It always was, of course, but now everyone has blogs and social media.) This dynamic is both a source and result of our information overload. Which means good information management is curation of both content and community.

Information overload and what associations can do about it for our members was the focus of the very first Spark whitepaper, published in November 2012. As I wrote in Attention Doesn’t Scale:

Content curation provides a potential path to a new type of thought leadership [for associations], one that is more suited to a world where information is no longer the scarce resource…But that type of support will require a significant shift in our business models.

It also requires a shift in how we think on an organizational level and how we relate to our various audiences, both member and non-member.

The key for associations, I believe, is to select carefully and provide context for our audiences.

In other words, don’t write another article on leadership for your enewsletter. Find the three best pieces that have been written on leadership in the past six months from places like Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review and Forbes and Fast Company and Seth Godin and Dan Pink and Clayton Christensen, etc., and explain why they’re the best and how the points they raise are going to impact executives in the particular profession or industry your association serves (the reconceptualized Associations Now, by the way, provides an excellent example of what this looks like).

What is your association doing to help your audiences cope with our information-saturated reality? How are you shifting what you provide and how you provide it to position yourself as a trusted adviser to your audiences?

The free whitepaper describes the scope of the information overload problem we all face, poses content curation as a potential solution, discusses the types and modes of curation an organization can engage, looks at that required shift in thought and relationship, describes some of the skills we need to nurture in order to curate effectively, and shares a few examples of organizations (both non profit and for profit) that are doing curation well.

Download your free copy.

 

Are You a Student or an Attendee?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 8 Comments on Are You a Student or an Attendee?

Thanks to the efforts of Jeff Hurt (among others), those of us who speak frequently in the association world are well aware of the principles of adult learning, particularly those around frequent, active participation, engagement, being solution-oriented, providing content in small chunks with ample opportunity for practical application, etc.

And yet I know I’m not the only one who works to incorporate those sorts of things into presentations, even warning people at the beginning of sessions that they’re going to be highly interactive and sharing an agenda up front that includes active learning exercises, only to get dinged in evaluations for not standing there and talking at the room for an hour.

“But everything I know about adult learning tells me they want and need all that interaction and activity! Why don’t they?!?”

This morning on the subway, I was reading a recent New Yorker article profiling author Jennifer Weiner. One of the events it covers is a presentation she gave for the Renfrew Center Foundation, so the audience would likely be mostly clinicians who treat people with eating disorders. But her presentation, which was reported to have gone over very well, was of the inspirational life story variety. Which struck me as odd. Wouldn’t doctors want scientific presentations? Also, Lauren Hefner and I presented the Membership Development course for ASAE’s Association Management Week yesterday. The course intentionally incorporates some adult learning principles, the two of us worked in even more, and, by all reports, it went over well.

Putting the two together, I had a small epiphany: what if it comes down to the difference between between being a student and being an attendee?

What difference?

Students are there to LEARN. Attendees – at least some of them – are there to BE ENTERTAINED. And if what you’re expecting is to sit there for an hour and be told a nice story, and the person in the front of the room is asking you to engage and think and interact, that session is not meeting your expectations. A little over a year ago, I had a total crash-and-burn, salt-the-earth speaking experience that foundered on exactly this problem.

What does this mean for conference organizers and the speakers they line up? I think it’s important to try to figure out which type of audience you have, and choose/inform your speakers accordingly. And what if events offered “passive” and “active” tracks, in addition to subject area tracks? We’d probably have to come up with a better name for them, though. Maybe “traditional” and “interactive”?

Frequent speakers, what do you think? Am I on to something here? If so, what do we do about it?

Innovate Like DARPA

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is known for innovation. Aside from being the people who invented the Internet (thanks, in part, to legislation sponsored and funding secured by Al Gore when he was a Senator), they also invented GPS, stealth technology, and drone technology, among other things. Yet they’re a relatively small budget ($3 billion) agency. How have they done this?

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review attempts to provide the answers, and tell businesses how to have moves like DARPA. They identify three key components: ambitious goals, temporary teams, and independence.

OK, I know what you’re thinking. “THREE BILLION is a SMALL budget? Plus, we don’t do cutting edge tech R&D innovation. How does any of this apply to associations?”

Creating “innovation teams” or “innovation initiatives” is definitely a trend in associations. But a lot of them go nowhere. And I think the reason may relate to some of what HBR identifies in what DARPA does – and we don’t do.

DARPA picks a particular problem. They don’t just tell people “go innovate…something. You know, anything. Whatever looks interesting.” No. They give their teams a specific problem to solve. To quote HBR:

The presence of an urgent need for an application creates focus and inspires greater genius.

What particular, pressing, defined problem your association is facing right now? “Come up with a cool idea about something” does not work. “We need to figure out how to keep our retired and retiring Boomer members engaged in ways that are meaningful to them and us” does.

DARPA also gives their teams limited time. It’s not “get to this whenever you like.” They have deadlines, and they are expected to meet those deadlines, which forces them to come up with and rapidly assess potential solutions to those defined problems.

Is there a sense of urgency to the problem you’ve identified? Does your staff respect deadlines and take them seriously? If not, why not? What can you do to fix that? What other tasks might have to come off people’s lists of responsibilities in order to make space for your innovation project?

DARPA uses ad hoc teams, with members from outside the agency. This allows them to get the best minds to address their problems and invite and incorporate fresh perspectives. Again quoting HBR:

In other words, the projects get great people to tackle great problems with other great people.

Who is allowed to have a new idea in your association? What happens then? What are you doing to generate diversity of perspective? How are you incorporating ideas from your volunteer leaders, members, and other audiences and stakeholders? From your competitors? Do projects have an end, where people can feel a sense of closure and accomplishment? Does anything actually happen with their great ideas?

What other tips do you have to share with your association peers about successful innovation?

 

The Steve Jobs Problem

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

At the inaugural ACE Symposium two weeks ago, one of the topics we discussed was theFuture of New Value Creation graphic recording future of new value creation in associations.

One of our speakers, Jami Lucas, Executive Director/CEO at the American Academy of Otolaryngic Allergy & Foundation, admonished us to go beyond asking members what they want. She pointed out that members don’t know what they don’t know. She encouraged us to “be like Steve” and create things people don’t even know they need.

But I think that may be the problem for lots of organizations, perhaps especially including associations: how do you know you need an iPod until it exists?

When we got into the post-presentation conversations, what I mostly noticed is that people were trying mighty hard to use new sounding words to describe the same stuff we’ve been offering for 50 years: education, advocacy, networking. We end up talking about the same old shit all the time and can’t picture anything outside our existing ruts.

We distract ourselves with hamster-wheel “doing” and don’t imagine enough.

What are you doing to bring truly new ideas into your association?

Why Is Membership the Only Relationship?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 10 Comments on Why Is Membership the Only Relationship?

Way back in March at ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference, I had the opportunity to participate in an early morning conversation facilitated by Jeff de Cagna. Rob Barnes (at the time of Fitness Australia and now of Aptify) and Bob Rich (the American Chemical Society), Jeff and I debated the member relationship and, more specifically, why membership associations insist on behaving as if membership is the only relationship people can have with us.

I’ve been rolling this idea around in my head ever since then, and even promised a later blog post. Well, this is it.

Historically, associations have focused heavily, even exclusively, on the membership relationship. Makes sense, right? After all, we’re membership associations.

The thing is, we have LOTS of other stakeholders and potential stakeholders, don’t we? Just to name a few: volunteers (committee or ad hoc), subscribers, advertisers, authors, in-person event attendees, virtual event attendees, presenters, speakers, accreditation holders, certification holders, certification students, members of our industry or profession who aren’t association members, beneficiaries of our advocacy work, government officials, legislators (local, state, federal), customers who “just” want to buy products or services from us, our members’ customers, vendors and suppliers who serve our members, and even, in some cases, the general public. And I’m sure there are others.

We have managed to formalize some of these relationships. We offer sponsorships for vendors who want access to our members. We offer non-member rates for publications and events. We track CE credits for our certification holders.

But we also push all these people towards membership. In fact, taking any of the above actions is guaranteed to turn you into a membership lead, who will be pursued relentlessly until she joins or tells us to piss off (or just starts ignoring everything we send her).

Why does everyone have to be a member? Why are we still operating with the “you can have it in any color you want so long as it’s black” mindset? The world has changed to one of mass customization, and we aren’t keeping up with people’s expectations and experiences.

In order to continue to thrive, associations need to figure out ways of formalizing other relationships than the member relationship and allowing space for informal relationships as well. We need to study our audiences far more deeply and extensively, learn about them and what they want, and then become more flexible in our attitudes and offerings in order to meet them where they are, rather than demanding they all fit into the one box we’re willing to provide.

 

The Single Biggest Opportunity for Associations Today?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on The Single Biggest Opportunity for Associations Today?

When I was speaking with the nice folks at Naylor for Association Adviser TV, they also asked me to address:

What do you think is the single biggest opportunity for associations today?

My response? Addressing the education to employment gap.

Back in January, I had the opportunity to participate in Shelly Alcorn’s Association Forecast on the same topic. We discussed Education to Employment: Designing a System That Works, a McKinsey research report that brought together global data from students, higher education institutions, and employers to address issues related to workplace readiness. The short version is that we have a crisis in youth unemployment worldwide at the same time as we have a shortage of critical skills. And while colleges and universities think they’re properly preparing students for the workforce, students and employers – and the data – disagree.

McKinsey graph - does education prepare you for employment?

Image credit: McKinsey, Education to Employment, pg. 19

To me, this presents a tremendous opportunity for associations to fill that gap.

There are many ways we could do this: facilitating deep mentoring relationships (thus also allowing us to address the burgeoning retiring members issue), providing REAL professional development (not just some webinars and conference breakout sessions), supporting apprenticeship programs, creating certification programs, creating certificate programs (and no, those are not the same thing).

And it presents the chance for us to do good (for our members and other audiences, and our entire industries and professions) while also doing well (making the switch from being a locus of information and networking people can now get elsewhere, often for free, to providing real value).

 

 

 

Next-Gen Membership

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Next-Gen Membership

I recently had the opportunity to be interviewed by the nice folks at Naylor for Association Adviser TV. One of the questions they asked me to address was: What are the top three things that an association can do maintain the value proposition for the next generation of membership?

  1. You must understand the difference between life stage characteristics and generational  characteristics. Are Millennials slow to join and participate in associations for generational reasons, or because the oldest of them are in their late 20’s and they’re just figuring out the whole job/career thing. There are lots of “generational experts” out there who will say they can answer that question for you. To my way of thinking, the gold standard is the Lifecourse Associates work of William Strauss and Neil Howe, and the answer, likely, is, “don’t freak out – this is a life stage issue.”
  2. That said, there is a generational problem on the horizon – the hourglass issue. I’ve written about this before, but the short version is that, while a much larger Millennial generation is coming, associations are going to have to figure out how to bridge the Gen-X gap between the large Boomer and Millennial generations. One way to do that is by keeping retiring members involved through mentoring, teaching, and fundraising.
  3. Finally, check your assumptions. Even the best generational cohort research consists of generalizations. To really know what’s going on in your industry or profession, you have to actually talk to your members and other audiences about their lives, experiences, needs, and preferences. Associations must shift from the mindset that we have to be 100% right and 100% perfect all the time to the start up mindset of “launch in beta, experiment, actively solicit feedback, learn, and iterate.” Regardless of generation, your members will cut you slack if you let them know what’s going on. Really they will.

What do you think associations need to focus on to remain vital resources for the next generation of members and other audiences coming up?

 

Getting Lean

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Getting Lean

Is it just me, or is lean process trending?

I recently read a great Harvard Business Review article on the lean startup. According to HBR, lean:

…favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development.

It also includes the ideas of the “minimum viable product” and the decide –> experiment –> learn –> iterate cycle.

Per the HBR article, lean is built on three truths:

  1. All you have to start with are untested hypothesis, aka “good guesses.” And investing a lot of time in crafting a detailed five-year business plan based on “good guesses” is a fool’s errand.
  2. Your good guesses will never be more than that until you actually start interacting with your potential customers. So the sooner you start talking to them, the better. Yes, before you actually have a product to show them.
  3. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Get a product out there, even if – especially if – it’s still in beta and plan to make improvements immediately and continually.

Lean also requires us to be transparent. No more operating in secrecy until you have everything just right – invite your customers in as part of your design and development process, with the goal of making your product better.

How does this all apply to associations?

Associations Now recently addressed that, with an article looking at lean process in associations. The AN article addresses the more old-school concept of lean manufacturing, developed by the Japanese after WWII, which focuses on eliminating waste and redundancy.

While I get that eliminating waste and redundancy is important, particularly in typically thinly-resourced tax exempt organizations, if we stop there, we’re missing the good stuff.

I think the most important thing for us to remember is that, at the beginning of any new program, product, or service all we have are good guesses. Admitting that publicly and celebrating it is the key to everything that follows. It grants us tremendous freedom, because it removes a lot of the ego involved in decision making, allowing us to have more than one good guess and to know right from the beginning that they aren’t all going to work out. If you’re just making an educated guess that you know you’re going to have to test, it removes all the pressure to be 100% right 100% of the time.

What could your association accomplish if you could be free to guess, test, and learn?

 

Association Alumni Networks

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on Association Alumni Networks

I was recently reading an article in Harvard Business Review on the changing employer-employee relationship. The main point of the article, to quote, is:

The time has come, we [authors Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh] believe, for a new employer-employee compact. You can’t have an agile company if you give employees lifetime contracts—and the best people don’t want one employer for life anyway. But you can build a better compact than “every man for himself.” In fact, some companies are doing so.

Hoffman, Casnocha, and Yeh propose taking lessons from start-ups and learning to work with and accommodate the “entrepreneurial” employee. They have a lot of interesting suggestions, and if you have time, I recommend reading the entire article, but one in particular drew my attention: Employee Alumni Networks.

Again, to quote:

The first thing you should do when a valuable employee tells you he is leaving is try to change his mind. The second is congratulate him on the new job and welcome him to your company’s alumni network.

The idea behind employee alumni networks is similar to that behind college alumni networks: they allow you to maintain long-term relationships with good people after your formal relationship ends, and for them to keep affiliation with you, even if they no longer have a direct financial relationship with you.

According to the article, 98% of Fortune 500 companies have formal or informal employee alumni networks. The benefits to the company include rehires, expanding your network of evangelists, new business opportunities, and collecting competitive intelligence.

The authors also stress that there needs to be a two-way exchange of value. They posit things like discounts, company swag, free insights or intelligence reports, and alumni newsletters for company alumni.

It got me thinking: why don’t we have association alumni networks?

When members leave, we tend to write them off. Why? Members leave for a variety of reasons that may have nothing to do with the association: they changed careers, they retired, their employer stopped supporting(financially or philosophically or both) association membership, etc.

What if, rather than treating them as disloyal pariahs, we could figure out a way to keep them engaged as an alumni audience?

Why wouldn’t your association want to get the benefits of rejoins, added evangelists, information sharing, and new business opportunities?

What could you offer to your membership alums? A LinkedIn or Facebook group? Discounts? A special newsletter? Association swag? Occasionally sending them a free publication?

I think this all gets to a larger question I plan to address in an upcoming post: why do we feel compelled to act as if “membership” is the only relationship people can have with our associations?