In case you missed it, ASAE’s Collaborate forum (member login required) has recently been hosting a robust discussion of how associations are helping their members and the local community in Houston and southwest Louisiana respond to Hurricane Harvey. With Houston and Louisiana still drying – and digging – out and Hurricane Irma about to strike Florida, I wanted to summarize some good practices that have emerged.
Dues Relief. How this would work will vary based on your association’s dues structure and also how generous you can afford to be (driven by how many members are affected and how large a percentage of your overall revenue is comprised of membership dues), but many associations are extending expiration dates for members in the affected region. Some are doing it automatically, while some are doing it only upon request. Personally, I think automatic is preferable – while people are trying to salvage what they can from their flooded homes and businesses, they don’t need to worry about having to call their membership association to ask for a favor.
Suppressing Marketing Campaigns. Likewise, whether it’s recruitment, renewal, conference, new publication, professional development series, or whatever, many associations are suppressing addresses from the affected regions so they are not targeted by marketing campaigns for the time being. Again, your members don’t need to be worrying about your shiny new webinar series right now.
Have a Space/Need a Space. Some associations are hosting a forum where local members who have spare office space – or even spare bedrooms – can offer them to other local members. This might not work for every association – your members would need to be comfortable with this level of intimacy with each other – but for those who are, this would be a highly valuable service. For manufacturing associations, this could even include donating production capacity to affected members.
Industry/Profession-Specific Fundraising. This can come in many forms. Some associations are planning offer scholarships to events that will be taking place within the next few months to members in the affected areas. Some have launched GoFundMe campaigns to help members cope with uninsured losses. Some are organizing and matching member donations to nonprofit relief agencies (a good practice there is to focus on groups that are both local and already on the ground, like the local food bank or animal rescue organization). Some are focusing on helping members replace destroyed equipment or supplies, such as for teachers who pay out of pocket for many of their classroom supplies and may not be able to replace them on their own right now or firefighters whose handheld radios may have been destroyed.
One organization has tasked volunteers with calling every single member in the affected area (admittedly, it’s fewer than 100) and asking each of them if they need help. Anyone who answers “yes” is getting a check for $1000 immediately and automatically, no (additional) questions asked. While this is not something every organization can afford to do, I would encourage you to think big. It will generate positive feeling and member loyalty within your community and will provide a halo effect for your organization and potentially your entire profession or industry.
Public Service. For organizations whose members serve the public (like doctors, teachers, psychologists), many are providing materials to help their members help the community cope with the aftermath of and losses created by the hurricane. Some have also created materials for the affected communities themselves, like materials for parents to help their children cope.
A good friend of mine recently returned to the 9-to-5 office world after several years of freelancing while her kids were small, and she asked me if I had any advice about being a better boss, since she’s managing a team for the first time in several years.
And with Labor Day fast approaching, and having recently had the pleasure of a delightful lunch with the woman who taught me much of this, now seemed a good time to share what I learned from my first, best boss in my association career.
Treat people equitably (which is not the same thing as equally).
Praise in public, correct in private.
Adapt your style to your team’s personalities to the greatest degree possible.
Take an appropriate level of interest in them as people – you’re not their best friend, but they’re also not robots.
Be wildly generous in sharing credit.
Protect your team. Shit ALWAYS stops with you – it NEVER rolls downhill onto your people.
Set clear expectations and manage at the minimum your people need to achieve them. Don’t micromanage.
Don’t ask your people to do something you wouldn’t do.
Make sure they have authority commensurate with their responsibilities.
Find out what they’re interested in learning and seek opportunities for them to learn it.
And if you can’t remember all that, just remember this one thing:
Did you miss the July 12 webinar my Include Is a Verb co-author Sherry Marts and I presented for the Wild Apricot Experts series on living your talk on D+I? Never fear! The recording is now available:
Sherry and I got to as many questions as we could in the sidebar chat during the webinar, but as usual, we missed a few, so we’re answering them below:
Question: When holding a free public event, do you post a code of conduct? We have kid friendly “Core Values,” and I wonder if posting that would promote a safer environment.
EWE (addressed during the chat):It might not cover every situation you might want to try to address, but it certainly can’t hurt.
SM (more complete answer):Yes, definitely. Something short and simple, along the lines of:
[Organization] is committed to ensuring a safe and welcoming environment for all participants at [event]. We expect all participants at [event] to abide by this Code of Conduct in all venues at [event], including ancillary events and official and unofficial social gatherings.
Exercise consideration and respect in your speech and actions.
Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior and speech.
Be mindful of your surroundings and of your fellow participants.
Alert community leaders if you notice a dangerous situation, someone in distress, or violations of this Code of Conduct, even if they seem inconsequential.
IF YOU ARE BEING HARASSED, NOTICE THAT SOMEONE ELSE IS BEING HARASSED, OR HAVE ANY OTHER CONCERNS, CONTACT [NAME] AT [CONTACT INFORMATION]. [Alternatively: PLEASE CONTACT A MEMBER OF THE [organization] STAFF IMMEDIATELY. Staff can be identified by [clothing, name badges, or other way to ID staff]. All reports are confidential.
Question: One thing to consider – while harassment is most frequently men harassing women, using language that presumes that may make men or nonbinary people uncomfortable coming forward. Also, gender isn’t binary – language like ‘men and women’ can make nonbinary people feel invisible / excluded.
SM: Yes, all of that is true. However, it becomes really awkward and clumsy to try to address all possible combinations of target/harasser each time one is talking about a harassment situation. And harassment is about 85-90% men harassing women, so that ends up being the simplest way to present it. When I do longer (i.e. two-four hours) workshops, I do talk about other harassment scenarios, gender identity, etc.
And, frankly, when it comes to talking about this stuff, I really am not concerned about making sure the men present are comfortable. I’d prefer it if they were just a wee bit uncomfortable.
EWE: While using gender-neutral language is overall a good practice, as Sherry points out, meeting harassment is largely a gendered problem. In my view, it’s a case where obscuring the role of gender is not only not helpful to solving the problem, it actively works against our ability to address it.
Question: Is it considered patronizing to seek diversity by offering to pay that board member’s financial obligation? Or do you change the obligation to “give or get” a specific amount?
(Seeing as we’re writing for an association crowd here, a bit of explanation might be in order. In fundraising organizations, it’s common for board service to come with a financial obligation. Each board member is required to contribute a certain (usually significant) amount of money to the organization each year of her board service. This obviously restricts your pool of candidates, which can make diversifying your board difficult. Blue Avocado has a good piece that explains this conundrum in more detail.)
EWE: Yes, finding alternate ways for your board members to meet their financial obligation is important to board diversity. The “give or get” method is one way of doing that (in which your board member either needs to GIVE the amount specified herself or GET other donor/s to give that amount). You can also think about non-financial ways a board member could make significant contributions to the health of the organization, for instance, by putting in significant time nurturing relationships with major donors, by providing services or goods the organization needs, etc.
SM: Yes, it is worth considering whether it is a barrier to diversifying your Board membership. Ask:
Why do we have this obligation?
What strategic goal does this serve?
What else could serve this goal without putting a financial burden on Board members?
I know some organizations expect Board members to pay their own travel to meetings. One organization I worked with changed that to offer to reimburse Board members for travel, and those who could afford to pay it could submit their reimbursement form and indicate that they did not want to be paid back, and that this was an “in-kind” donation to the organization. It worked well, no one (other than the admin and accounting staff) knew who paid and who was paid for.
I have heard of the “give or get” policy that requires Board members to either donate or solicit donations. Again, if there is an amount specified that could be a barrier to participation. If it is as “give or get, within your means” with the actual amount determined by each Board member, that could go a long way to lowering the barrier. The Board could also establishe a policy for waiving the “give or get” requirement, and ask staff to implement it, so that individual Board members don’t know who gives, how much is given, and who gets a waiver. I know some funders look for “100% participation” by Board members (i.e. everyone has donated or solicited a donation), but they don’t ask amounts, so if a Board member gives $1.00 that counts.
The bottom line is that IF the organization is truly committed to D&I, THEN they may have to alter their expectations/requirements of Board members, outside of the legal and fiduciary duties (i.e. yes, they have to show up for and contribute to discussions at meetings, pay attention to financials, and serve on committees and do all the other functions of a Board member). They may have to do some budget re-arranging to reach their D&I goals.
Finally, there is one question that has come up frequently with regards to this whole process: Is it appropriate for two white women to even be talking about diversity and inclusion, much less profiting off doing so?
First, let me address the “profiting” bit. No profit. In fact, cost. All the Spark whitepapers are freely offered to the nonprofit community (I don’t even ask for contact information to put people on a mailing list to download them). No one pays me and my various contributors for our contributions (no sponsors or anything). In fact, most of my co-authors have been, like me, sole practitioner (or small business) consultants, so the time that we put into creating these resources is an opportunity cost, consuming what could otherwise be billable time invested in clients. Additionally, we pay out of pocket for copy editing and layout. And we give our time freely to do things to promote the whitepapers like guest blogging, article writing, and webinars.
Secondly, yes, we are both white. But as Sherry has pointed out, when you’re part of the in-group you stand a better chance of getting other in-groupers to listen to you, e.g. when men call out other men on their harassment, or white people call out other white people on their racism. (Joe Gerstandt, one of our contributors, makes this point in his work as well.)
Also, of course, the two co-authors aren’t the only people who worked on this project. We had a total of 12 contributors. Of those:
Five are people of color
Five are LGBT people
Three are adherents of minority religions
Two are people with disabilities
One is a veteran
And, not to miss the thing staring us in the face, eight are women
It’s important to be aware of the places where we’re each privileged, and to work to use that privilege to be and create the change we want to see in the world. Or, as Sherry put it: “We did this as a way to contribute to co-creating the kind of world we want to live in.”
Does your organization have a compelling statement on diversity and inclusion that doesn’t seem to be reflected in your day to day operations? Don’t worry – lots of organizations face the same challenge.
Join Sherry Marts (S*Marts Consulting) and me for a FREE webinar (thanks to our host/sponsor Wild Apricot) Wednesday, July 12 at 2 pm ET to to learn how to move your organization from talk to action when it comes to authentic diversity and inclusion (D+I).
The webinar content will be based on our recently-released whitepaper Include Is a Verb, which is also free to download.
In the webinar, you’ll learn:
The barriers that stand between words and action on D+I
How to lead D+I change with the audiences you serve
Concrete steps you can take to have an immediate, positive impact on D+I in your organization
Register now. (Interested but can’t make the live event? Register anyway to be sent the recording afterwards.)
For those of us who are “on the bus” on the value of genuine diversity and inclusion, this is the crux of the matter: how do we effectively walk our talk on D+I?
We have to work from the inside out, starting with our own selves, taking steps to uncover and combat our implicit biases, understanding where we do – and do not – have privilege, and answering the question “Now that I know, what will I do?”
To quote Include Is a Verb:
That is, how will you move from unconscious reaction to conscious responsibility? How will you use your privileges to help others and, at the same time, let them use theirs to help you in areas where you lack privilege?
Only then can we begin to move outward, to working on our associations as workplaces, then to our boards of directors and other volunteer leaders, then to our members, then to the professions and industries we serve.
I’d like to conclude this week’s focus on Include Is a Verb: Moving from Talk to Action on Diversity and Inclusion with another quote from the whitepaper:
There’s a poem that begins, “When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.” As the man relating the parable lives his life, he realizes that was too grand a goal. He scales back to changing his nation, only to recognize that, too, as too grand a project. So he decides to focus on his town, and then his family. By the time he’s an old man, he realizes that the only thing he can change, the only thing he can control, is himself, but that when you change yourself, that impacts the people around you, and the people around them, and through that, you can change your nation and the world.
Start there. Pick one thing to change in yourself. Then think about one thing you can work on in your workplace with your colleagues. Then identify one program your association o ers that you can enlist your volunteers and members to help you transform. Small steps will add up to big shifts over time.
My co-author Sherry Marts and whitepaper contributors Joe Gerstandt and Jess Pettitt will be joining KiKi L’Italien for an Association Chat focused on Include Is a Verb on Tuesday, July 11 at 2 pm. You can register here.
And, of course, don’t forget to download the whitepaper itself at http://bit.ly/2peWwP0. It includes interviews with a DELP mentor/scholar team (Shawn Boynes and Desirée Knight) and with Cie Armtead, the current chair of ASAE’s D+I committee; sidebars from noted D+I experts Jessica Pettitt, Joan Eisenstodt, and Joe Gerstandt; and case studies of three associations that are doing outstanding D+I work for the audiences they serve (the Association for Women in Science, the Entomological Society of America, and the Geological Society of America).
Beautiful statements and a handful of ghettoized programs don’t fundamentally change behavior.
We create “goals” that are not actionable and have no measures attached.
Every single person has implicit biases – sometimes against things that they themselves are – and we don’t do enough to combat them.
Mandatory training tends to bring out our inner misanthropic teenager: “You’re not the boss of me!”
Fortunately, there are proven strategies to combat all of these problems, one of which is consciously training yourself to be an ally.
What is an ally? To quote Jessica Pettitt’s sidebar on allyship:
An ally supports the struggles of a historically underrepresented group even though she is not personally a member of that group.
Becoming one involves doing work on oneself and then reaching out to engage in advocacy and agency, and her sidebar includes details of how to go about all those things.
Most of the focus on diversity and inclusion in the for-profit world is on staff and, to a lesser degree, boards of directors (which, of course, only some for-profit companies have).
The association operating environment is much more multi-layered.
Of course, we also have staff teams and boards of directors. But associations have very different relationships with our boards than for-profit companies do. Although our members are also our customers, the membership relationship is vastly more complex than the consumer relationship. We also have relationships with – and responsibilities to – the professions and industries we serve for which there is no parallel in the for-profit world.
The Association for Women in Science has successfully navigated the transition from a largely homogenous board of directors to one that is truly inclusive, while also avoiding the trap of tokenism.
The Entomological Society of America has created a strong code of conduct for their events that not only aims to reduce instances of harassment at events but also provides a concrete action plan for dealing with them appropriately when they do occur.
The Geological Society of America has responded creatively to the dual imperatives to recruit more people into the field and to increase the diversity of those recruits.
So that’s where Sherry Marts and I start: by defining terms, some of which may be familiar to you and some of which may be new.
What do we actually mean when we use the term diversity? What about inclusion?
What “counts” as diversity, and why does it matter?
What is intersectionality? How does it affect us?
What is “covering,” and why is it a problem?
What is tokenism, and how can we move past it?
Or as Joe put it:
Powerful statements of commitment to diversity and inclusion matter. But without a clear understanding of what we mean when we say “diversity” or “inclusion,” widespread agreement on how that will affect our daily actions, and a shared sense of responsibility for taking those actions, such statements are ultimately meaningless.
Associations know the research that the Millennial generation that is rapidly becoming the majority of our workforce and membership base is the most diverse generation we’ve ever had in the US – and that the yet-to-be-named generation coming up behind them is even more so.
We know that increased diversity and real inclusion produce increased innovation, better decision-making, faster and more creative problem-solving, better outcomes, and an improved bottom line.
We know that D+I is the right thing to do.
And we tend to have strong statements that reflect all that.
The place we often struggle is with turning our beautifully crafted D+I statements into real change in our staff teams, our volunteer leadership, our memberships, and the professions and industries we serve.
In Include is a Verb: Moving from Talk to Action on Diversity and Inclusion, Sherry Marts, PhD (S*Marts Consulting) and I tackle the challenge of turning associations’ powerful talk into equally impactful walk. We share some key concepts in D+I, discuss what makes the association D+I environment unique and the pros and cons that come with that, and provide concrete steps you can take for yourself, your staff, your volunteers, and your members to become a truly diverse and inclusive organization.
I’ll be blogging about the whitepaper for the rest of the week, highlighting some key findings and action steps you can take, but in the meantime, I invite you to download your free copy at http://bit.ly/2peWwP0 – 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 whitepapers, too:
Attention Doesn’t Scale: The Role of Content Curation in Membership Associations (with Jeff De Cagna, FRSA, FASAE), available at http://bit.ly/WVpP4a
Getting to the “Good Stuff”: Evidence-Based Decision Making for Associations (co-authored with Peter Houstle), available at http://bit.ly/1jwXcDX
Leading Engagement from the Outside-In: Become an Indispensable Partner in Your Members’ Success (co-authored with Anna Caraveli), available at http://bit.ly/1GPNUM6
It’s an open secret that associations are deeply concerned about – and struggling with – our ability to recruit and retain Millennial young professionals, both as members and as association executives and talent in our industry. We’re trying all kinds of things – changing our membership tiers, dues structures, and value propositions; changing our volunteer offerings and opportunities; changing our work and office cultures – to try to attract young people and keep them involved.
Fortunately, there’s a ton of research on this generation – Pew, Project New America, the US government’s Corporation for National and Community Service’s Volunteering in America reports, etc. – and we’re using that research to figure out how to revitalize our organizations to draw them in.
Millennials share many attitudes that differ from their elders. One of the largest differences is around the role the government should play in protecting the environment and preventing climate change. According to a recent Project New America study, 76% of Millennials believe the government should play a larger role in environmental protection, and 69% call for greater involvement preventing climate change.
Which makes this recent piece in the New York Times deeply concerning.
The piece addresses regulatory rollbacks under the Trump administration, with a particular focus on environmental rollbacks. I quote:
“In many cases, records show that the changes came after appeals by corporate lobbyists and trade association executives…”
I know – and you know – that the majority of associations are not out there lobbying to allow their members to trash the environment for short-term economic gains. But we all also know that there are some bad actors, too.
And then the US Chamber’s Tom Donohue comes out and says, “After a relentless, eight-year regulatory onslaught that loaded unprecedented burdens on businesses and the economy, relief is finally on the way,” to the Times.
I worry that this is going to give our industry a huge black eye generally – “we don’t care who we screw, as long as it’s good for our industry” – is going to undo the good work ASAE has been doing highlight the good associations do in the world, and will make our already challenging task of recruiting and retaining young members and staff even more difficult.
