Category: membership

Retention is a Relationship

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Retention is a Relationship

And you can’t claim to have a relationship with people you don’t know.

This topic has come up frequently with clients in the past six months, both within full engagements, where we’ve been looking at how to increase membership, and in speaking engagements, where I’m trying to help chapter leaders learn how to be more effective.

Retention is key to long-term membership growth and to maintaining vital, lively chapters. While recruitment is like dating, retention is like getting – and staying – married. It’s about being in it for the long haul, about making an increasing commitment of time, energy, attention, focus, and money on BOTH sides.

The problem is, too many of us don’t know our members. That’s a data issue. We don’t think about what data we should be collecting on our members and other audiences. We don’t think about how to store that data in a way that it’s accessible and useable. We don’t think about how to integrate disparate data sources. We don’t think about how to use that data wisely, analyzing it to look for meaningful answers to important questions, and then acting accordingly. ACTING is key.

Being honest with ourselves, we’re lazy, and we throw up our hands: “It’s too hard!”

And we become takers in the relationship. We want the members to give us their money and their time and their attention, but we don’t give anything meaningful back (a subscription to your magazine is not a meaningful relationship). We don’t make any attempt to get to know them: their professional (and personal, where appropriate) wants, needs, problems, dreams, fears, goals. We don’t work to find out how we might be able to help them meet and fulfill those.

That’s unacceptable.

It’s OK to start small.

This week, call five members. Not because you’re trying to get them to renew or register for your new professional development series or donate to your foundation. Call just to ask what their number one biggest professional challenge or most important goal is for 2016. Record that somewhere that your colleagues can access. Share that information with your team at your next meeting. Start the conversation about ways you can, as an organization, get to know your members better. Brainstorm about how that knowledge could impact how the association intends to invest your resources (staff time, staff attention, volunteer effort, public focus, money, etc.) in 2016.

But start. Now. Today.

No more excuses.

 

 

Recapping the Outside-In Engagement #Assnchat

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Recapping the Outside-In Engagement #Assnchat

Anna Caraveli (The Demand Networks) and I had the opportunity to guest moderate #assnchat on Tuesday, July 14, with discussion focused around the issues we raise in our new whitepaper, Leading Engagement from the Outside-In (download your free copy at http://bit.ly/1GPNUM6).

In case you missed it, here’s a recap of the high points of the conversation.

Q1 How do you currently learn about your audiences? How do you share that knowledge internally?

People up brought up a lot of the usual suspects: demographic data collection, emails, calls, surveys, focus groups, online profiles/subscriptions, and event evaluations.

Partners in Association Management had a great response:

Q2 How are you capturing and sharing learning from less formal interactions?

Brandon Robinson asked:

We all agreed that it did, and Lowell Apelbaum added:

Partners in Association Management also keeps something they call “back pocket lists”: good ideas that couldn’t be implemented at the time someone came up with them that they reserve for a more suitable time.

Q3 What do you know about the outcomes your audiences seek? How are you helping them achieve those outcomes?

This question launched some observations about different generations in the workforce and the association having different goals, with Karen Hansen also pointing out:

We also talked about the whole “what keeps you up at night?” question (which is one of Anna’s favorites), and Lowell Apelbaum observed:

Q4 How do you discover what your audiences really value? How do you use that information?

People had lots of good suggestions here, ranging from pilot programs to trial and error, asking them, tracking behavior, observing what they spread/share/talk about/promote, and Ewald Consulting went kind of Zen Master on us:

That’s deep, man.

 

Q5 How do you facilitate building authentic relationships w your audiences? Between members?

 

Lots of great chatter here, too, but Karen Hansen had a simple, powerful response:

Treat members like human beings?!?! Radical concept!

Q6 How do you develop new products/programs/services? How do you collaborate with members on this?

Lowell (who was really on a roll today) had another great response for this one:

When we got to question 7, we kind of heard crickets:

 

Q7 How do you encourage collaboration between audiences and association? Among members?

 

Opinion was pretty much universal that this is a big struggle for associations. Kait Solomon pointed out:

Q8 How do you currently define engagement? Is your definition adequate/satisfactory?

Where Kait also observed that “engagement” has become a buzzword, and I quoted Ed Bennett, who recently pointed out that if there’s no ring involved, we probably need to stop talking about engagement and focus on what we really mean: conversation, talking, listening, relationship.

Q9 What do you do with members once you engage them? What’s the next step/goal?

I’m going back to Lowell again:

Our final question, which is the challenge I’m going to leave you with, too was:

Q10 What is one action you could take today to start your association on the path to outside-in engagement?

Not sure how to answer that? Check out the whitepaper at http://bit.ly/1GPNUM6 to get some ideas!

Leading Engagement from the Outside-In

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Leading Engagement from the Outside-In

I’m excited to share the launch of the sixth whitepaper in the ongoing Spark whitepaper series, Leading Engagement from the Outside-In: Become an Indispensable Partner in Your Members’ Success.

Co-authored with Anna Caraveli (The Demand Networks), the whitepaper tackles the question: if engagement is so critical to associations (and we would argue that it is), why aren’t we doing a better job of it?

Of course, associations have always been “about” engagement, and in the past several years, we’ve had a renewed focus on engaging our members and other audiences. The thing is, most of us aren’t really doing it well. Could that be because we’ve been thinking about engagement all wrong, focusing on what we want members to do and how we define value? Leading Engagement from the Outside-In describes a radical shift in our understanding of engagement, one based on an approach that encourages us to view the world from our audiences’ perspective, focus on the outcomes they want to achieve, build authentic relationships, and harness the power of collaboration to co-create the value our organizations provide.

Speaking of, I’ll be blogging more about the whitepaper in the coming days, but in the meantime, pick up your free copy at http://bit.ly/1GPNUM6, no divulging of information about yourself required.

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

 

Turning Good Ideas Into Action

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Ansoff Matrix Template

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

Let Your Member Data Show You the Way

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Associations Now recently did a story on my awesome client NICSA and the new membership model project we worked on together last summer. They’ve graciously given me permission to share it.

How one association unbundled some of its benefits and packaged them around “clusters of behavior” in its member engagement data.

The winter of 2014 brought a lot of cold weather and snow to much of the United States. And, with apologies to polar vortex, it also brought us one of my favorite new words: sneckdown.

Both a delightful portmanteau and a revelatory phenomenon arising in urban streetscapes during snowstorms, the sneckdown appears when drivers follow narrow paths through snow-covered roads and intersections. The snow that’s left shows urban planners where curbs (or “neckdowns“) could easily be extended to slow traffic and provide safer crossings for pedestrians.

We were able to make sense of different packages that would reflect or be representative of behavior that we had observed.

The power of the sneckdown is what it reveals about human behavior. This Old City blogger Jon Geeting’s photos of sneckdowns in Philadelphia in February are a perfect illustration of how, paradoxically, a blanket of snow uncovers the most natural paths for cars and pedestrians. Being able to see these paths so clearly makes urban street planning suddenly seem simple.

Behavioral data will do that. Rather than trying to guess what people want to do, or even trying to ask them what they want to do, you can just observe their behavior and design to match it. This is the path that NICSA (formerly the National Investment Company Service Association) followed to a dramatically simpler membership structure last year.

Prior to November 2013, NICSA asked its 170 member companies to join into one of 18 different member categories. In short, 18 was too many, and their aging definitions weren’t keeping up with post-recession conditions in the global investment management industry, anyway, says Michele Liston, CMP, deputy executive director at NICSA. “People were really having a hard time seeing where they fit within the categories, and I think it actually impacted our ability to bring in the dues that we needed to,” she says.

Today, NICSA now offers just five membership levels based on number of employees, removing any ambiguity for the joining member or NICSA’s membership staff. Additionally—and this is where the behavioral data is paying off—members can buy one of three optional membership packages that offer extra benefits at a discounted rate. Each one—the Educational Package, the Marketing Package, and the Global Leader Package—is tailored toward different ways NICSA’s members were already commonly engaging with the association:

NICSA Optional Membership Packages

NICSA analyzed member activity data to develop three optional membership packages that roughly matched members’ “clusters of behavior.” Click to enlarge.

These “clusters of behavior” were uncovered through analysis of member activity data conducted for NICSA by Elizabeth Engel, CAE, CEO and chief strategist at Spark Consulting. She and NICSA kept it simple, analyzing use of key products and services like conferences, webinars, publications, and exhibitor booths. Looking at the numbers revealed the sneckdowns in the member activity.

“By playing around with different options, we were able to piece together that we have clusters of behavior around these certain number of registrations or certain number of webinar attendances or certain publication purchasing patterns and things like that, and then we were able to make sense of different packages that would reflect or be representative of behavior that we had observed,” Engel says.

So far, the packages have “gone crazy,” Liston says. “We’ve got firms calling us saying ‘Hey, tell me about these packages.’” The cost savings are attractive to NICSA’s financially inclined members, and prepurchasing also offers a “set it and forget it” appeal. They’re also an easy sell because NICSA can show a member company its historical buying behavior and recommend the package that matches. While the base dues rate is up about 8 percent to 10 percent overall, the package discounts mean a member’s “total spend” may go down.

Knowing that total spend data was key to pricing the packages, Engel says. “It was not just how much were they paying in dues, it was how much are they spending as a whole with NICSA throughout the entire year,” she says. It was also vital during the planning process as NICSA tinkered with its options. Being able to plug in historical activity data gave it realistic revenue estimates for any potential combination of dues and benefits packages.

Such a drastic change in membership structure was accompanied by the adoption of a new association management system, Liston says. (This seems to often be the case in these sorts of overhauls.) The transition year has been tricky, but “the fact that we’re simplifying a lot of this, making it less of an administrative burden, is freeing us up to take more time to go after prospects and potential members,” Liston says.

NICSA is preparing for June, when about half of its members come up for renewal. Come November, once all members have been renewed and transitioned to the new member structure, NICSA staff will begin a full evaluation of how the new structure has fared.

From my perspective as an association blogger, I’m a big fan of NICSA’s membership restructure because it reflects at least four different themes we’ve discussed here before: using behavioral data, assembling it all in one place, giving members unbundled options, and putting a clear dollar value on them.

But from your perspective as an association membership pro, you might find NICSA’s case inspiring for its simplicity. NICSA has five staff members, and Engel conducted her analysis in Microsoft Excel. “Don’t let the fact that you don’t have a huge research department and high-level analytical software stop you from looking at your data. Sometimes you just need a little will to make it happen. You can do a lot with the tools most of us have access to,” Engel says. “For small and medium-sized associations, don’t let we don’t have the tools be an excuse. You can still look at what’s going on and say, ‘How are our members actually behaving?’”

How is your association tracking member behavior and engagement? Are you using that data to shape your benefits packages? Where are your association’s sneckdowns? Please share in the comments.

Republished with permission. Copyright ASAE: The Center for Association Leadership, Washington, DC, April 2014.

You Have to Woo Them

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on You Have to Woo Them

During my weekly project call with a client earlier this week, we were talking about the fact that it’s time to move to “phase two” of our engagement. We’ve already done a lot of good work addressing things that were negatively affecting their ability to retain members, and we’re ready to move on to their recruitment efforts.

I broke out a metaphor I use a lot: you can’t ask prospects to marry you before you’ve even taken them on a date.

We were laughing about using that as an example as Valentine’s Day approaches, and she remarked: “I get it – you have to woo them.”

I loved that way of expressing it!

What I’m really talking about is the ladder of engagement. Fundraisers use this concept a lot (Beth Kanter, in particular, writes and speaks about this frequently), and I think it’s equally important for membership organizations.

We talk a lot about membership being a relationship, not a transaction. If that’s the case, we need to genuinely treat it that way. Just like you wouldn’t – I hope – ask someone to marry you the first time you meet him (or her) for coffee because it’s rude and weird and not likely to work, so the first time a prospect hears from you shouldn’t be a membership pitch. But all too often, that’s what happens: “You signed up for our free enewsletter and maybe even got your first issue? Wouldn’t you like to pay us big bucks to commit to us for a year?!?!”

Um, how should I know (yet)?

You have to give that prospect time to get to know you a little more, so she can assess whether or not she wants to commit, and whether a commitment is right for her and for you. The way you do that is to construct a ladder of engagement. It might look something like:

  • A new person signs up for your free enewsletter.
  • After she’s received a few issues, you send her an email inviting her to do something else with your association that’s also free – maybe download a whitepaper, or get a trial subscription to your magazine, or download a free article from your journal, or attend a free educational webinar, or go to a chapter event where newbies can attend for free.
  • Assuming she does that, you offer her one of those other free options.
  • Assuming she does that, you should be starting to get some sort of a sense of what she’s interested in, so you offer her something that will cost her some money, but not much, and that you’re reasonably sure she’ll like. If she’s downloaded a bunch of stuff to read, maybe offer her a book to purchase. If everything  she’s participate in has to do with the topic of leadership, offer her a webinar on leadership that costs to register.
  • Assuming she takes you up on that offer, you can work through offering her additional things that cost some money (but maybe not as much as membership) and take some time (but don’t require a year’s commitment), learning as you go what types of things she likes to do and what topics she’s interested in.
  • Then, once you’ve both had a chance to get to know each other better and put time and energy into developing and deepening your relationship, and only then, you can ask her to commit, to join. And when you make that membership pitch, rather than just being some generic, “Join us! We’re gr-r-r-r-eat!” bit of fluff, you can actually tailor your explanation of how membership would help her based on what you know about her.

Result? You make fewer membership pitches, but with a much higher success rate, and you see less early-membership churn, because you both were reasonably certain this match was right before you made it. In other words, you’ve built the foundation for a successful long-term relationship.

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.

 

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?

 

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?

The Looming Retirement Crisis

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 5 Comments on The Looming Retirement Crisis

No, I don’t mean the typical “Boomers haven’t saved enough!” wailing, although that’s certainly likely to be a problem. I mean the hourglass problem.

As in, there are somewhere between 72-79 million Baby Boomers, and there are a lot fewer Gen-Xers. I’ve seen figures ranging from 39-49 million, and I find it telling that while it’s easy to get a definitive answer to “how many Boomers are there?” it is not easy to get the same information on Gen-X.

Much like we hear today in regards to Millennials, in the early/mid-90s, associations were freaking out about Gen-X not joining. “It’s the damn Internet! Websites will be the death of us!” Uh, no. Turns out, it was mostly a life stage issue. As in, “I’m 25, and if you’ve seen Slackers, you realize that there’s a good chance that I not only haven’t settled on a career, I’m not even sure if I’m coming back in to THIS job tomorrow.” Sure enough, as Xers started to settle on careers, we also started to join associations.

But – and this but is important – we’re approximately 50% smaller as a generation than the Boomers that preceded us. What that means is that, even if we join and participate at the exact same rate at Boomers, associations are potentially facing a membership and leadership (both paid and volunteer) crisis.

But – and this is also an important but – it’s probably temporary. Coming up behind Gen-X is the even larger than the Boomers (80+ million) Millennial generation. Who are currently in their “I’m 25 and I’m not settled” phase. The good news is, due to various generational characteristics (like their team orientation, interdependence, connectedness, and community-mindedness), the future looks pretty good for civic and professional engagement, volunteering, networking, involvement.

So there’s probably no reason to panic, but associations are still going to need to bridge that gap created by the Gen-X waist of the hourglass. How?

Reach up, and reach down.

Plenty of associations are currently focusing on young professionals, with discounted or even free dues, mentoring programs, outreach, networking opportunities, leadership programs, educational programs, creating set-aside seats in governance for young professionals, reaching out to students in their professions or industries, career services, etc. And all that’s important. This is a generation that is likely to be more loyal and respectful of authority than their cranky Gen-X elders, which means bringing them in and giving them a place early is likely to pay good dividends.

The area that I see associations ignoring, though, is reaching up to retired and retiring members. They are a huge untapped resource for associations. Boomers are, generationally, people who will support things for the common good, at least far more so than cynical Gen-X. They are retiring more gradually and partially than previous generations. They are living longer, healthier post-retirement lives.

In retirement, or at least semi-retirement, they have some tremendous assets that associations can use. They have time, wide networks, and expertise. They also have less money than at the height of their careers, and less need to stay up to date on all the latest in their professions or industries.

How might that play out in keeping them engaged to help associations over the Gen-X dip, until the Millennial cavalry arrives?

Boomers make great mentors. Not so much to Gen-Xers (remember, we’re the “kids these days are no good” generation), but definitely to Millennials, who are just starting out in their careers and who are inclined to like, trust, and want to work with their elders. And they like to share their expertise in new technologies. Is your association running a cross-mentoring program to match experienced Boomers with early career Millennials, who can, in turn, help those Boomers learn tech?

Boomer make great fundraisers. Retaining elements of their youthful idealism, they do believe in causes. And they have the time and networks to do some dialing/visiting for dollars, or even contribute themselves as major donors. What Big Idea projects does your association wish you had the funds to try? Who among your long-term members can help you get there?

Boomers have great experience and institutional knowledge. They can teach courses on key issues in your industry or profession, or even help prepare the coming generations for volunteer leadership roles in the association. Some might provide that expertise for free, and some might appreciate a little extra cash for developing and teaching high-level courses in your field.

What other ways can you think of to engage your “elder statesman” members to benefit your profession, your industry, your association, your membership, and your young professionals?

I think finding good answers to that question will be one of the major keys to association financial health in the coming decade.