Category: membership

Super Swap Recap

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

About two weeks ago, ASAE-GW held the latest Super Swap. This one had a slightly different format: in the morning, we had three short presentations, each of which included some structured activity/discussion time, followed by a table topic networking lunch, followed by the more traditional concurrent swap sessions.

Kylee Coffman kicked off the day with a presentation about creativity. Best statements:

“All I want to be is someone who makes new things and thinks about them”

“I’m smart, I’m brave and I’m strong.”

Then she led us through the same word association exercise Shelly Alcorn used to help us kick off 2012 right, and, unsurprisingly, just about everyone was channeling spring and new beginnings.

Then I presented on “so long and thanks for all the fish.” For the exercise, I divided the room into four groups and gave them each a task regarding retired and retiring members:

  1. Create a category of membership that offers realistic benefits at a realistic price
  2. Plan a fundraising campaign that uses their skills, experience and contacts to good advantage
  3. Design a mentoring program that focuses on industry/profession skills and knowledge for young professionals
  4. Design a leadership mentoring program for volunteer leadership succession planning

Finally, Adele Cehrs helped us all think about opposition strategy. Our associations need to scan trends and plan in advance how we’re going to address big ones, negative or positive.

Her tips included:

  • Don’t ignore lies about your organization
  • Address misperceptions directly
  • Learn from negatives
  • Identify your own preconceptions
  • Understand your own weaknesses

She urged us to try to answer the question: “What are your competitors NOT talking about?”

The lunch discussions were a little bumpy because ASAE staff was trying to turn the rooms, and it took a long time for everyone to get through the lunch buffet line. Maybe box lunches next time?

In the afternoon, I chose the session on free and cheap tech tools, led by Rhea Steele. She, in turn, drew a lot of her content from Beth Z, aka “Your Nerdy Best Friend.” Rhea pulled together a great list of the tech tools people shared in the session that were in addition to Beth’s tools, and I’ll bet if you tweet to her, she’ll share them with you, too.

 

Do We REALLY Know What Our Members Need?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on Do We REALLY Know What Our Members Need?

For ONCE I was able to participate in #assnchat this week! KiKi was taking the week off, so Nikki Jeske (aka “Affiniscape“) hosted. Nikki did a great job, but I thought her closing question was particularly good:

[Q7] What’s one thing you could do TODAY to better serve your members? Go do it! #assnchat
— Affiniscape, Inc. (@affiniscape) January 10, 2012

And….there was silence. And this was in the midst of a hoppin’ #assnchat. Which I think was really informative. I don’t think we know the answer to that question. I think, if most of us association professionals were honest with ourselves, we’d admit that we’re so insulated from our members that we don’t know what they need. We know what WE THINK they need, but we don’t truly know what they think they need.

So my real A7 is: find ways to have more interaction w mem so I can answer that question from place of knowledge #assnchat
— Elizabeth Engel (@ewengel) January 10, 2012

Of course, that begs the further question: how? How do you – how do I – ensure that meaningful member interaction between large numbers of our members and large percentages of our staff takes place on a regular basis? And how do we capture the knowledge that results?

I don’t know the answer to this – but I damn well am going to try to find out.

“Done is the engine of more.”

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 7 Comments on “Done is the engine of more.”

A few months ago, I was having a discussion with some smart association peeps, and we got talking about the fact that, in membership organizations, it’s not so much that we fear failure for its own sake. What we really fear is criticism – from our colleagues and bosses, sure, but even more so from our members and boards.

Because of that, we’re change-averse, decision-averse, and completion-averse. If I keep working on a project forever, and never roll it out, no one can ever find anything wrong with it, right?

The thing is, all those partially completed projects that should’ve been done in 6 weeks but drag on for 6 months weigh us down. If it’s never finished, you never get to check that one off and move on to the next project or idea. You never even get to move on to the 1.2 version of the current project.

We get so caught up in the “everything has to be PERFECT” mindset that we shut out our members and their ideas and opinions, and make them passive consumers rather than active partners.

What if, rather than waiting until we had everything just so to roll out our new member service, we went to our members with: “This is a new service we’re considering. We don’t have all the kinks worked out yet, so we know some of you will want to wait to check it out until it’s in a more completed form. And that’s fine. But for those of you who are willing to try something that may not be 100% functioning yet, we’d love it if you could test it and give us your feedback so we can make sure that, once it is fully ready, it truly meets your needs and is easy for you to use.”?

What would that world look like? How much more engaged would your members be? How would that change their perception of ownership in your association? How would that impact relationships between staff, members and board? How much faster could you move? How much more could you provide for your members?

She Tells Two Friends…And They Tell Two Friends…

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Remember that old Faberge shampoo commercial, where the hook was that the shampoo was SO amazing that a woman told two friends about it, and then they each told two friends, etc., until the screen was covered with little boxes containing pictures of female heads with awesomely feathered hair?

Witness word of mouth at work.

The exact number offered differs, but we’ve all heard the old trope that someone who has a good experience tells a small number of other people, while someone who has a bad experience tells a MUCH LARGER number of other people.

For associations, the customer service we offer our members is a huge source of word of mouth, positive and negative.

So how can you make sure your customer service is in tip-top shape?

First of all, even if you’re “senior,” don’t take yourself out of the loop. It’s easy to say: “Let the call center/junior staff handle it. I’m too busy/important/expensive.” Wrong. The day-to-day treatment your members receive IS your organization to them. No matter what super-important, high-level project you’re working on, if your members have a lousy experience every time they call, email, or otherwise ask for help, they aren’t going to care.

Second, empower your staff. Tell all your front-line staff that they have the authority to do whatever seems fair to them to resolve a member’s problem without fear of punishment. And back that up. Yeah, they’re going to make mistakes. And you’ll want to make sure that post-game analysis is part of your process, so you can talk through what your staff chose and whether there might be an even better way to respond the next time. But seriously, your word on “no punishment” has to be IRON CLAD. If it is, I guarantee that beautiful things will happen between your staff and members.

Third, secret shop, or better yet, ask trusted members to do so for you and report back.

Fourth, ask your members. We all survey, actually probably over-survey, our members about EVERYTHING. And we love those Likert scales, because we can make all sorts of pretty charts and graphs from them. But ranking your conference location or the quality of a webinar speaker or the ease of your renewal process on a 1-5 scale is way less important than this one question, that should be on every survey you ever send:

“If there was ONE THING we could do to make your experience withbetter, what would it be?”

Yep, that’s an open-ended comment box type question, which means you won’t be able to make a nice graph out of it that you can show to your boss or your board and compare across time. And 90+% of the time, it will be empty when your survey is submitted. But 10% of the time, you are going to get fantastic intel about what your association could be doing that would make a real difference for your members and other audiences. And isn’t that why you exist in the first place?

Money, Money, Money, MO-NEY

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

I tend to believe that if the same topic or issue or idea or person or whatever keeps showing up in your life, you should probably snap to: something is trying to get your attention.

For me, lately, that’s been the concept of non-dues revenue. I heard a good presentation on this, received an opportunity from an association colleague, presented on this topic myself (and will be doing so again in a week), had the chance to visit one of our non-dues revenue partners at their home office, and of course, this morning there was a Bisnow event on this issue (that I couldn’t attend – anyone go? how was it?).

Here’s the thing: as associations, we can get revenue from two places – our members, and people who aren’t our members.

According to continuing research out of Decision to Join (none of which I can find now that I need it, of course, but updates appear in Associations Now all the time), members whose employers pay their dues remain likely to drop membership if their employer no longer pays. That can come as a result of employers cutting costs, or as a result of people losing their jobs – and with reported unemployment hovering around 9% and real unemployment probably more in the 20-25% range, that’s a lot of people.

That leaves us all looking for alternative sources of revenue, both from an altruistic perspective (we want to burden our members as little as possible, while still providing products and services that meet their needs) and pure self-interest (you never want too much of your revenue coming from any one source – too risky).

That’s where non-dues revenue comes in. But it’s not all created equal. It comes down to a value calculation: is the amount of effort required, both from the association and the non-dues revenue partner, commensurate with the value everyone will receive? And “everyone” includes the association, its members, and the partner.

It’s easy to be distracted by promises of lots of cash from something that has NOTHING to do with the purpose of your association. Or to make a bad calculation about how much time something is going to take, or how much revenue it’s going to return. Or to try to squeeze a partner too hard. Or become myopically focused on the association’s (revenue) needs and not think enough about what the nice partner who’s giving you all that money needs.

But the best partnerships, the ones that endure and make everyone happy (as opposed to making everyone annoyed and pissed off), are the partnerships where everyone’s needs are being met, not necessarily equally but certainly equivalently. Which is a great thing to remember when a vendor comes dangling a shiny new opportunity in front of you – or when you’re doing it yourself for a potential corporate supporter.

User Innovation v. Producer Innovation

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

A recent piece in MIT’s Technology Review by Eric Von Hippel (excerpt freely available, subscription required to read the entire piece) on the topic of the sources of innovation got me thinking about innovation and associations.

The innovation faith is being widely preached in the association world these days, and many of us have converted. But that brings with it a certain amount of pressure, namely, to come up with great new ideas (since that’s really what’s at the root of innovation).

But there’s hope: YOU don’t have to come up with all the great new ideas in order for your association to be innovative. You just have to be open to new ideas, recognize them, and be ready to pursue them, no matter what the source.

How does that play out for associations? Technically, we’re all in existence because of our members (remember them?), to serve them and their professional or industry needs.

Does your association allow room for innovation, aka great new ideas, from the people who actually use what you produce – you know, your members and other audiences?

What mechanisms do you have in place to solicit their ideas on a regular basis? No, not just the board – the “regular” rank and file members. We all tend to be guilty of the fallacy of composition when it comes to our boards, including the board members themselves, but in reality they tend to speak mostly for their own needs and not be some sort of objective, impartial voice of the membership as a whole.

Once ideas bubble up from the membership, what happens next? Do you do anything with them? Do you even reserve the capacity (time, money, staff, other resources) to do anything with them?

Regardless of the outcome (because not all new ideas are necessarily good), how do you let people know what happened and why?

The thing is, your members are a lot closer to what you’re doing and producing, ostensibly for their benefit. Why not ask them what they think about how you can make your offerings better for them, and then try to do something beneficial with what they tell you?

Stop Asking for Information You Already Have

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Stop Asking for Information You Already Have

There’s this marketing company out there that provides tons of great free and paid content.They send me notices about new, really interesting-sounding white papers and studies they’re releasing (or promoting for others) for FREE at least several times a month. Hot topics, actual research, well-designed materials. And did I mention FREE?

Yet I almost never download them.

Why?

Because almost every time I click the link to download the latest awesome-sounding white paper they ask for ALL my contact information. All REQUIRED fields. Again. And again. And again.

I know for a fact they already have all my contact information.

Since I’m not a paid subscriber, there is no option to have an account.

But couldn’t they set a cookie on my machine or use name and email matching to determine that they already “know” me? And if there is no match on name and email, ask me for complete contact information at that point?

How does this apply to associations?

Most of us have – I think, I hope – gotten to the point where we don’t repeatedly ask our members for the same demographic information over and over. We might ask them to confirm/update their information on a set cycle, but we don’t ask them to start from scratch and provide full name, company, title, address, email, phone, fax, URL, mobile, certifications, degrees, FB and Twitter handles EVERY time they come to us for anything.

But what about “frequent flyers” who AREN’T your members? Check your abandon rates in your web stats program, and beware of putting unnecessary hurdles in people’s way. They will walk – and get annoyed at your organization in the process. Trust me on this one.

Be Human

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

There’s a great story that’s been making the rounds of the Interwebs about a Southwest pilot who held a plane so that a grandfather could make it to the bedside of his dying grandchild.(Get the full scoop here.)

The big thing that jumps out at me in this tale is the contrast between the way the TSA agents behaved – mindlessly following the rules – and the way the Southwest personnel behaved – using their judgment to do the right thing.

The thing is, the TSA agents aren’t allowed to use their judgment – they HAVE to blindly adhere to the regulations, no matter what. They aren’t empowered. The Southwest employees, on the other hand, are. Now I’ll bet that if TSA chief John Pistole had been there in that terminal at LAX, he would’ve given the security agents the OK to give Mr. Dickinson priority. But he wasn’t, so they couldn’t.

I hope the applicability of this situation to associations is clear, but just in case, let me spell it out for you: your senior staff can always make exceptions based on member needs and doing what’s right, but that’s totally unhelpful, since they are rarely the ones dealing with the immediate need in the moment. If your line staff members aren’t empowered to make decisions and do what they need to do in the moment to make things right for a member without worrying about being punished afterward for not following the rules, any statements your organization makes about being member-focused or providing excellent member service are so much bullshit.

Big Questions for Associations – Part 3

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Big Questions for Associations – Part 3

This is part three (aka “the conclusion”) in the series inspired by Jeff De Cagna’s March breakfast briefing on associations and mobile technology. Read Part 1.  Read Part 2.

Question 3: How will we manage the change from a pre-set package of options (membership) to an individually negotiated exchange of value?

In other words, we’re moving from “you can have any color you want as long as it’s black” to a world of mass personalization.  And many of us don’t do a particularly good job at the whole “value proposition” in the first place.

This idea has actually been around associations for awhile, in the guise of “cafeteria membership” (if you follow that link, you’ll notice the article is dated 2002).  The thing is, cafeterias generally have a limited set of options.  Is “print journal” versus “no print journal” really a meaningful choice?

On the other hand, we’re also constantly exhorted to focus on our “core competencies” as organizations (often with the implied “and outsource everything else” trailer).  Don’t try to be everything to everyone – just know what’s really important to your audience and do it better than anyone else.

Another thing we have to contend with is the whole membership model – i.e., you have to be a member to get X at all or to get X at a reasonable price.  But what I’m not actually a participant in the profession/industry, and, as an interested onlooker, all I want is X?  Is it really OK to price gouge me?  Or totally deny me access?

This becomes an even bigger deal as associations start promoting what we do through social media channels, with the potential of LOTS more people finding out about the good stuff we offer (positive)…and then not being able to participate (extremely negative).

We recently ran into this at NACHRI, when someone forwarded a potential tweet to that week’s editor about an upcoming webinar that was free, as long as you’re a NACHRI member, but not available at all to non-members.  You couldn’t even see information about the webinar if you weren’t a member.  And it was a topic with potential wide interest, if it “got out.” After a fairly lengthy internal debate, we opted to create a landing page outside our member wall (and notice the fortress terminology there, and don’t pretend you don’t use it at your organization, too) with information, rationalizing that anyone who was really interested enough to register (which required membership) probably had an affiliation with one of our member hospitals anyway.  We haven’t gotten complaints (that I’m aware of), but it’s only a matter of time.

But shouldn’t our offerings stand on their own two feet?  If people want something, they’ll pay for it.  If they don’t want it enough to pay for, then maybe we should stop doing it.  I realize there are limits to this line of thinking (witness all the people who bitch & moan about taxes and the federal government, yet keep using the police, the fire department, public roads and bridges, public water and sewage systems, public education, etc.).  But if a program can’t support itself, unless it genuinely is for the good of the profession, the industry or the public, maybe it’s time to kill it.

The comfortable thing about the membership model – and the reason so many of our organizations are loathe to even consider alternatives – is that, with very few exceptions, it provides a steady and reliable source of revenue that allows us to keep on ignoring those sacred cows.  Thing is, they aren’t going to die on their own.  And this problem is just going to get worse.

I don’t have an answer to this. But I do know that, particularly for individual membership associations (and trades, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we’re immune), we’re already past time when we need to figure out how to let our audiences have it their way.