Looking to increase your association’s revenue?
Growth can come about either through acquiring new customers/members or increasing sales to existing customers/members. And you can sell either existing programs, products, and services or new programs, products, and services.
In short, Ansoff’s matrix.
The thing is, associations often struggle with this. Why?
I would argue it’s because of a lack of clarity, a lack of commitment, and/or a lack of execution.
Image credit: Edraw
“Every 20 years or so, a new generation enters the workforce, and the rest of us, quite frankly, freak out about it.”
I recently had the opportunity to read a review copy of When Millennials Take Over, a new book by Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant designed to help us get past the freak out and to a “ridiculously optimistic” view of the future of work.
Their basic thesis is that the environment in which our organizations operate has changed – we have to move faster, with less hierarchy and more sharing of information, and learn how to be digital native institutions.
Sounds hard, right?
Fortunately, the Millennials, the generation born between 1982 and 2004, can help us. Although GenX is currently the largest segment of the workforce, within the next three years, the Millennials will be taking over. And that’s a good thing. As Notter put it during a recent book release event sponsored by ASAE: “The goal is not to ‘deal with’ Millennials but to learn from them. It’s not that Millennials are extra special or have all the answers, but they’re a ‘secret decoder ring’ to help us understand and adapt to these changes.”
Notter and Grant have identified four key capacities that they believe will drive the future of business:
Digital expects widespread customization and personalization, which includes staff as well as customers and members, and continuous improvement. Going digital is not just about how much you spend on technology (although most of us ARE underinvesting); it’s also about developing a digital mindset, in which you design around the needs and convenience of your audiences (both internal and external), even if that makes things harder for the organization.
tl;dr: In the era of Amazon and apps, your old excuses for 20 years outdated tech and processes won’t fly.
Clear demands information at everyone’s fingertips. Millennials have always had the “why” explained to them – that’s how they were raised. The great thing about this is, when our organizations share more information in a more transparent way, we dramatically increase both the speed and the quality of the decisions we make.
Fluid requires us to break out of our silos, not to the point that there’s no hierarchy at all (Google tried that and found it didn’t work), but to the point that teams are flexible and ad hoc, and different people get opportunities to lead based on their skills match with the project and task at hand. That means that EVERY person needs to know what your organization’s key performance indicators, that is, the keys to success, are.
Fast is the end result of all of these. As Notter and Grant point out, not everything needs to be ultra-fast all the time – there is still room for institutional knowledge and deliberation – but speed is important. As Grant observed at that same book release event, think about how quickly you dump a smartphone or tablet app that doesn’t work as expected. We need to move faster on idea generation, creating rudimentary prototypes, gathering information, and improving/scaling, pivoting, or killing those ideas as appropriate.
tl;dr: Don’t do another member survey! And don’t make decisions about what to do based on the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). Create a Minimum Viable Product, and decide what happens after that based on actual data about whether people buy and use it, and what they think about it.
The book makes an excellent companion to Notter and Grant’s earlier Humanize. But where Humanize was a bit heavier on theory, When Millennials Take Over focuses heavily on the practical, sharing detailed case studies of four organizations who exemplify the authors’ four key capacities:
The American Society for Surgery of the Hand, a small membership organization that still manages to invest well in technology, personalize and customize, learn from experiments, and incorporate results-only work environment principles.
Menlo Innovations, a software firm that is so transparent about information that they’ve invented their own resolutely low-tech project management system so that every person knows exactly what every other person’s top priorities are and where they stand on achieving those goals. This lets teams that are ahead of schedule know immediately who needs help and offer it without the intervention of boring project status meetings or project managers or complicated negotiations over email. Menlo even invites clients into the office on a weekly basis so they can see first-hand what’s going on with their projects and make more effective decisions about their own budgets and priorities.
Quality Living, a rehab center for people recovering from brain and spinal cord injuries, that understands the importance of shifting decision-making authority and action to the individuals and groups who are best equipped to be successful in a particular situation, no matter what their official place in the organization’s hierarchy. That might mean that someone very “low level,” who is closest to the patient and her needs, values, hopes, and dreams, directs care for that patient across the entire team of more “senior” people.
Happy State Bank, a community bank operating in Texas, that is able to make good decisions almost absurdly fast thanks to their laser focus on caring and relationships (not exactly traditional for financial institutions). As Notter is fond of pointing out, trust enables speed, and that’s exactly the environment Happy State has created, not just among staff but between staff and customers.
Ultimately, this is about all of us – Boomers, Xers, and Millennials – working together for the good of ourselves, our organizations, and our customers/members. We take turns leading the change:
For every Luke Skywalker (Millennial), there is always a need for an Obi-Wan Kenobi (Baby Boomer), and even an occasional cynical and independent Han Solo (Generation Xer). We know it is cliché, but we’re all in this together.
When Millennials Take Over is available in Kindle and print editions at Amazon.com. For a limited time, the Kindle edition is only $0.99 (that is not a typo), or you can download a chapter as a preview for FREE.
A few weeks ago, the Washington Post ran an article about some of the latest developments in military leadership, and, as part of it, they shared the idea of the Mission Command Mindset.
At its simplest, Mission Command dictates that senior leaders provide guidance and intent — the what and the why — and that subordinate leaders have maximum latitude to design the how. It embodies deep trust between senior and subordinate.
In other words, senior leadership sets the vision, and all the details about how that vision is executed are pushed down to those closest to where the activity is taking place, like so:
All I can say to this is: YES!
Associations NEED this approach, because far too often, we go the opposite way, with senior staff micromanaging every detail of every thing.
Our Executive Directors/Chief Staff Officers are supposed to be the bridge to the Board. Like the Board, they should be focused on the 30,000 foot vision and strategic direction, but often they don’t, and they end up dans la merde, losing their focus on where the association is trying to go overall, and in the process, working a million hours a week.
“But I can’t trust my people to do a good job if I don’t insist that they let me review every single marketing email before it goes out!”
(That’s an actual recent example from a $100M annual revenue association client.)
Look, if that’s really the case, then you either:
I’ve written about this before around the concept of being willing to unplug, but the point is that your staff members know things you don’t by virtue of being close to the situations they’re dealing with on a daily basis. Which the US military apparently understands, and their situations are often life-and-death. Don’t you think you can trust your staff to send out a marketing email without getting five layers of approval first?
Image credit: globalsecurity.org
What does it take for associations to succeed at innovation?
I’ve been doing some research on innovation initiatives in associations for a client and had written a bit about it for the Spark blog a few weeks ago. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mark Athitakis from ASAE about what I’d learned in a little more length, and he wrote the following piece for Associations Now. They’ve graciously given me permission to share it.
The best ideas for your association may come from your employees, but how do you get those ideas launched? Money matters, but so does trust and support.
Your staff has ideas about new services your association can provide for members. Some of those ideas may be very good ones. Problem is, how do you help get those ideas organized and tested?
Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE, CEO and chief strategist for Spark Consulting, has recently been interviewing leaders at associations that have launched internal innovation and new business development programs. “We talk about innovation in the association world a lot,” Engel says. “I wondered what was happening. Is anybody doing this well?”
The answer is yes, though not without some serious effort. Engel’s research uncovered three common elements of successful programs.
1. It needs its own funding. Success here, Engel says, requires “paying attention to opportunity and then being able to do something about it now, not in 24 months when you can finally make room in the budget.” The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, for instance, maintains a $500,000 fund that’s used annually to invest in new ideas from staff. That includes hiring people dedicated to working on it, as opposed to burdening current staff with new duties.
2. It needs a clearly defined process. A marketing staffer may have a brilliant idea, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she has the financial know-how to put together a business plan to show how it might work. The three associations Engel studied each had a clearly defined process for staff to propose an idea, institutional support for making the proposal, and a clear set of benchmarks for it. “They’re asking, ‘What criteria do you need to meet in order for this thing to continue passing the test?’” Engel says. “It can be a revenue criteria, but it doesn’t have to be. It has to be clear what standards you’re going to need to keep going.”
3. It needs institutional support. This can be trickier than it seems. Chuck Cochran, CAE, ASHA’s chief staff officer for operations, says the association launched its own program in 1997, during a reorganization. ASHA was in silo-smashing mode, looking to flatten hierarchies, make board activities more transparent, and involve staff in more of the decision making. “The culture change in the organization was huge,” he says.
That kind of hard-won trust and transparency encourages staffers to come forward with their ideas. “I can’t imagine what [the program] would be like if there was distrust,” Cochran says. “People would be afraid they’re going to be zapped.” Cochran estimates that today about 80 percent of the ideas proposed via the fund are successful—that is, proved themselves financially viable after three years and became part of the regular operating budget.
You don’t get to that point, Engel says, without leadership endorsing the concept. “The CEO or executive director has to be supportive of the decision,” she says. “Senior leadership has to say, ‘Yes, this is a good thing.’”
But practically speaking, you also don’t get there without money, and not every association has half a million dollars available to road-test a new idea. Cochran encourages associations to look at the status of their reserves; if they’re in excess of 50 percent of annual unrestricted operating expenses (the typical target for reserves), those excess dollars may provide the start-up costs for a fund.
Because new ideas may require dedicated staff, the amount of money matters. But Engel suggests that even a smaller-scale effort is worthwhile. “It’s a lot easier to find a spare $500,000 set aside for your innovation budget if you’re ASHA than if you’re a $2 million association,” she says. “The raw amount of money doesn’t scale. But the concept—if all you can set aside if $5,000, even if you can get 5 percent time, that part of it is scalable.”
Does your association have a program to encourage staff to propose new ideas, and how do you make it work? Share your experiences in the comments.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright, ASAE: The Center for Association Leadership, July 2014, Washington, DC.
About a year ago, the Harvard Business Review did an interview with Maya Angelou. I definitely recommend checking out the entire thing, but there was one thing in particular she said that stuck with me:
One of the great dangers of leadership, I think, is the tendency to believe your own hype. If you achieved this great, high, responsible position, it must be because you’re that much better than everyone else, right? You earned it, all by your awesome self!
The thing is, no one exists in a vacuum. You are the sum certainly of the abilities you drew in the natural lottery and how you’ve been able to develop them but also of all the people who’ve helped you and influenced you and taught you and mentored you and led you and followed you and worked with you to achieve bigger goals than any one person could accomplish alone along the way.
And I think that’s what Dr. Angelou’s quote is about. True greatness isn’t running around singing “I AM SO GREAT! I AM SO GREAT!” It’s saying “YOU are so great.” It’s highlighting how others’ ideas helped you. It’s sharing credit. It’s talking about everyone’s contributions at least as much, if not more than, your own. It’s knowing that what you’ve achieved has been the result of many, many people’s efforts and making sure OTHER people know you know that, too.
How many of us, as leaders, are strong and confident enough to do this? How would our world be different if we did?
Image credit: Daily Good
I’m in St. Paul today presenting for the Midwest Society of Association Executives’ annual meeting today. Two of my sessions are on familiar topics: The Mission Driven Volunteer and my Carpe Annum IGNITE session. But one’s new: Your Membership Dilemmas SOLVED!
In it, I plan to share the great secret of consulting.
Of course, not everyone can be in St. Paul today, and I don’t want to exclude people unfairly, so I’m going to share the magic trick here, too.
Are you ready?
That really is it. I mean, consultants also bring (hopefully) experience in the field (in my case, associations) and in particular disciplines in that field (membership and marketing for me) and the breadth of knowledge and experience that comes from working with a bunch of different types of organizations and keeping up on the latest research and trends.
But I truly think that what helps us help you is that we focus on asking better questions (one of THE keys to making good decisions) and that we don’t let you settle for the first, most obvious answer – we make you keep digging.
That’s really it.
So now you don’t ever need to hire someone like me again!
Ok, not really (I hope). But if you can build the capacity to think in those terms – ask better questions and push for more hypotheses – you can definitely increase your success with solving problems in-house.
From the new Spark whitepaper, Getting to the “Good Stuff”: Evidence-Based Decision Making for Associations, written with Peter Houstle:
So once you’ve got the data, are you all set?
Nope.
Data is a necessary component of making smart, evidence-based decisions, but it is not the only component. Data needs to be supplemented by experience. In fact, neither experience nor data can exist successfully on its own. They come together through the scientific method. Don’t worry – we’re not advocating that you go back to school and earn a graduate degree in physics. We are, however, advocating that you think a little like a scientist.
To learn more about how data and experience can combine to help you make better, faster decisions, download your free copy of the whitepaper at http://bit.ly/1jwXcDX.
From the new Spark whitepaper, Getting to the “Good Stuff”: Evidence-Based Decision Making for Associations, written with Peter Houstle:
What are the things you need to do to get ready to use your data?
Want to learn more about each of these? Download your free copy at http://bit.ly/1jwXcDX.
From the new Spark whitepaper, Getting to the “Good Stuff”: Evidence-Based Decision Making for Associations, written with Peter Houstle:
Ultimately, Big Data supports innovation and allows us to do predictive marketing.
Why is that? With Big Data:
Want more? Download your free copy at http://bit.ly/1jwXcDX.
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: