Category: whitepaper

Engagement: You’re Doing It Right!

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

One of the other hot topics on the engagement virtual panel Mary Byers had organized for the Veterinary Medical Association on April 22 was: Who’s doing member engagement well, and what can we learn from them?

A few years ago, Anna Caraveli and I wrote Leading from the Outside-In, in which we describe what member-centric engagement looks like, enumerate eight keys to member-centric engagement, and profile 11 different membership organizations that are doing a great job at it.

Some of those were “big” stories, organizations that had completely transformed themselves, or were built from the ground up, as member-centric: the National Grocers’ Association, the Society for Hospital Medicine, SERMO, and The Community Roundtable. But most of the stories we shared were of associations that had transformed one program, one service, and were using that as a springboard to further change: American MENSA’s SIGs (special interest groups), the Homebuilders & Remodelers Association of Connecticut’s awards program, the Hydraulic Power Association’s standards locator, etc.

Even in one of the first collaborative white papers I produced, The Mission-Driven Volunteer, with Peggy Hoffman, we shared the story of the Oncology Nursing Society, where they were able to go from 1:26 active volunteer members to 1:5. THAT is an engagement success story.

Growing up, my dad was a big fan of Saturday morning PBS educational shows (This Old House, The Victory Garden, and the like), and there’s a running joke in my family about a gazebo-making machine into which you feed a tree and a fully assembled gazebo pops out the other end. The thing is, engagement is more like on the New Yankee Workshop, with master carpenter Norm Abram: Every project is unique, and requires attention to detail and a specific application of the materials and tools at hand.

What’s my point?

Every engagement success story is different and unique to the audiences that association is serving. There isn’t some sort of Universal Association Answer to Engagement, there’s only your audiences, their challenges and goals, and what your association can do to be their go-to solution provider.

Because that’s what I want for you.

Too many associations are a “nice to have” not a “need to have.” Being a “nice to have” is enough when times are good, but when times get tough (professionally or personally), people drop a “nice to have.” I want your association to be a vital partner in your members’ and other audiences’ success, and absolute dedication to a member-centric perspective is the way to get there.

NP Tech Podcast: Cut Through the Clutter

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

A few weeks ago, Hilary Marsh and I had the opportunity to sit down (virtually, of course) with fusionSPAN’s Justin Burniske to talk all things content curation.

The conversation was based on Hilary’s and my recently released whitepaper, Cut Through the Clutter: Content Curation, Associations’ Secret Weapon Against Information Overload. We discussed topics such as:

  • Why now? Why focus on content curation now, when there are so many pressures on association resources?
  • What new opportunities does a virtual work environment present?
  • What are the differences between active content curation and advanced search?
  • Is effective curation push, pull, or both?
  • What impact does a member paywall have on content curation strategy?
  • What skills do staff members need to do content curation effectively?

You can get the full recording on your favorite podcast platform, or at the fusionSPAN website.

Stop Trying to be Google

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

If an association wants to move beyond mere aggregation and serve your members by providing real curation, what should you do?

To quote my co-author HilaryMarsh: “Stop trying to be Google.”

Quoting from our new whitepaper, Cut Through the Clutter: Content Curation, Associations’ Secret Weapon Against Information Overload,

Your association’s community is experiencing information overload in a time when it’s become increasingly difficult to assess the quality of that information due to the proliferation of sources and to the declining trust people have in traditional gatekeepers of information.

Piling on links to a bunch of stuff absent context isn’t going to help solve that problem. If your association really wants to get to the root of this for the people you serve, you are going to have to move beyond mere aggregation and use multiple methods to achieve distillation, or museum-style curation.

There are a number of things you’re going to have to do differently to achieve that, from letting go of your “we’re the best – the only relevant – source of information for our profession or industry” arrogance to interacting differently with your own content to hiring and training for different skills to changing your association’s orientation towards and relationship with your members and volunteers.

To find out more about how you achieve “curation greatness,” download the full whitepaper at https://bit.ly/34P5THr, no divulging of information about yourself required.

What IS Content Curation?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Associations use the term “content curation” frequently, but to quote the great Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Many times, when we’re using the term “content curation,” what we actually mean is “aggregation.” That is, pulling together a list of related links.

That is helpful for your members, in that you’ve at least reduced the number of pieces of information they should be paying attention to. But it’s shallow, and you can do so much more to help them.

When Hilary Marsh and I talk about “content curation” in our new whitepaper, Cut Through the Clutter: Content Curation, Associations’ Secret Weapon Against Information Overload, what we’re referring to is something more akin to what museum curators do, a process called distillation, in which the curator selects from the available items, brings those items together, puts them in context, and provides the perspective that helps the people viewing those items to find meaning and make sense of the topic by telling a coherent story.

Museums curate artifacts. Associations curate information.

You can help your members achieve their most important goals and solve their most pressing problems by curating information effectively.

To find out more about how you do that, download the full whitepaper at https://bit.ly/34P5THr, no divulging of information about yourself required.

Help Your Members Find the Signal in the Noise

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

This is probably not news to you, but we’re at an information crisis point.

Your members and other audiences are dealing with a flood of information during a time when the role of traditional information gatekeepers has become severely devalued. People are overwhelmed with information, much of it false or untrustworthy, and are increasingly unable to discern what is reliable and what is not.

Associations can help.

In the latest, just-released, hot off the presses (or at least Adobe InDesign) Spark collaborative whitepaper, Hilary Marsh (Content Company) and I propose content curation as associations’ secret weapon for helping our members surface relevant information and place it in the context they need to help them make sense of their increasingly complex personal and professional worlds.

Cut Through the Clutter: Content Curation, Associations’ Secret Weapon Against Information Overload opens by detailing the scope of the information crisis we’re currently facing, describes the key elements of effective content curation, and provides detailed, actionable steps that association executives can take to curate information effectively for your audiences.

The whitepaper includes:

  • An association content curation maturity model.
  • A case study with the Institute of Food Technologists.
  • An interview with Carrie Hane and Dina Lewis, CAE, who co-authored the recent ASAE Foundation content strategy report, Association Content Strategies for a Changing World, with Hilary.
  • An interview with Bryan Kelly, one of the founders of rasa.io and the publisher-in-chief of Smart Letter, discussing the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in content curation.
  • A summary of the ASAE Foundation report, Association Content Strategies for a Changing World.
  • A list of “how-to” guides and curation tools.
  • A series of thought questions for you to use to spark discussion with your team.
  • An extensive list of resources in case you want to dig deeper on any of the topics addressed.

I’ll be blogging about the whitepaper in the coming days, highlighting some of our major findings, but in the meantime I invite you to download your free copy at https://bit.ly/34P5THr – 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 collaborative whitepapers, too:

What Should We Do to Get Ready for Blockchain?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

One of the key elements of blockchain networks is the network. This technology is a system-level technology. What that means is that its true power lies in the network effect, in the system. Any one application can have positive (or negative, or both) impacts, but disruptive change will come about as different applications begin to interact with each other.

In a practical sense, to quote Blockchain for Associations: Separating the Hype from the Promise, that means:

…blockchain-related changes that come to your particular profession or industry are likely to happen not at all and then all at once…

If you do only ONE thing as a result of the white paper and this blog series, it should be to educate your senior paid and volunteer leadership. When the time comes that the network effect hits the profession or industry your association serves, you will need to be nimble enough to make rapid decisions. You can’t wait until then to start your educational process.

Where do you start?

Of course, I’m going to say: download the whitepaper, read it, assign your board to read it, make it an agenda item at your next board meeting, assign senior staff to read it, and make it an agenda item at your next senior staff meeting. Remember, it’s completely free, and you won’t be asked for any information or put on a mailing list.

The whitepaper itself includes advice for next steps after that, ranging from more detailed takes on everything I’ve covered in the past few posts to a substantial reference list to discussion questions to inform your conversations with your paid and volunteer leaders to information about where you can set up sandboxes.

I’ll close with one more quote:

Blockchain is likely to disrupt association operations, just as the arrival of the internet and social media did. Does that necessarily mean that blockchain will put associations out of business? Well, no.

However, it is going to change some fundamental things about the way we operate, and now is the time to start educating yourself as to how.

 

How Will Blockchain Affect My Members?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

As you may recall from my previous post on my new whitepaper, Blockchain for Associations: Separating the Hype from the Promise, my co-author Shelly Alcorn and I think that this is the REAL question association execs need to be asking ourselves right now.

The tricky part is that now we’re getting into particular professions and industries, which means that the questions, problems, and answers differ.

Realizing that we couldn’t take on EVERYTHING, Shelly and I identified the following professions/industries and related questions as key areas in which to demonstrate the potential of blockchain technology:

  • Education: How can we quickly and cheaply verify credentials with 100% certainty?
  • Engineering: How can we accelerate the construction process while also reducing risk?
  • Government: If someone loses her documents or her papers are destroyed, how can she prove who she is?
  • Law: How do we ensure that contracts are executed correctly, that all parties understand them, and that they remain safe and secure?
  • Supply Chain: How can we be certain of the provenance of goods while also reducing the time (and associated costs) of getting them from point A to point B?
  • Real Estate: How can we make it easier to buy and sell property while also ensuring ownership records are correct and current?

To learn the answers, check out the full whitepaper, Blockchain for Associations: Separating the Hype from the Promise, downloadable for free at http://bit.ly/2YwYIjn, no divulging of any information about yourself required.

Should Associations Care About Blockchain?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Should Associations Care About Blockchain?

And if so, why?

Blockchain for Dummies offers some qualifying questions when you’re trying to figure out whether blockchain is an appropriate solution for your association and for which projects:

  • Do we need to track transactions that involve more than two parties?
  • Is the current system overly complex or costly, possibly due to the need for intermediaries or a central point of control?
  • Can the network benefit from increased trust, transparency, and accountability in recordkeeping?
  • Is the current system prone to errors due to manual processes or duplication of effort?
  • Is the current transaction system vulnerable to fraud, cyber-attack, and human error?

Now, that probably sounds like every single thing you do.

But wait! There’s one more question you should pose to yourself, suggested by CompTIA in their Harnessing the Blockchain Revolution report:

Are there non-blockchain solutions that are available and effective?

In the VAST majority of cases, the answer to that is: yes.

The one exception Shelly Alcorn and I identified in our new whitepaper, Blockchain for Associations: Separating the Hype from the Promise, is credentialing.

Credentialing (degrees of all types, licenses, certifications, certificates, digital badges) is possibly, next to cryptocurrency, the most mature application of blockchain technology (and it’s certainly far more beneficial from a social good perspective). People earn credentials, but, with current technology, the issuing institutions own those credentials for verification purposes. That leads to all sorts of “friction”: slow, expensive processes to verify credentials, faked credentials, challenges dealing with non-traditional or micro-credentials.

Credentials that are on the blockchain cannot be faked, cannot be altered, and are owned by the person who earns them for verification purposes. Status updates are immediate and transparent, whether that’s about earning, maintaining, or even losing a credential.

For instance, I’m a CAE. But how can you know? I can claim it, but without the issuing institution (ASAE, in this case) confirming, you can’t know whether or not I ever earned it and, even if I did, whether or not I’m maintaining it. (I did, in January 2004, and most recently renewed this past fall, but again, how can YOU know?)

Now for something like a CAE, you might look at that and say, “So what if Elizabeth never got around to submitting her renewal paperwork last fall, lapsed, and hasn’t updated her LinkedIn profile yet? Nobody’s dying on the operating table here.” But what about a medical license? Or an industrial refrigeration technician certification (they’re the nice folks who keep our food supply chain operating, and they work with ammonia-based refrigeration systems that, if things go wrong, can kill people)?

However, the crux of the blockchain matter for associations, as Shelly and I see it, is less “how is blockchain going to affect associations?” and more “how is blockchain going to affect association members, in their professions and industries?” Which will be the topic of my next post in this series.

To learn more about this technology and how it’s going to impact our industry in the coming months and years, check out the full whitepaper, Blockchain for Associations: Separating the Hype from the Promise, downloadable for free at http://bit.ly/2YwYIjn, no divulging of any information about yourself required.

 

What IS Blockchain?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

At it’s most basic level, blockchain is a ledger-style database.

“Wait a second!” you might say. “There are PLENTY of database options out there. Why do we need ANOTHER one?”

Blockchain allows two people who don’t know or trust each other to exchange value over the internet without the involvement of a third party. It keeps a historical, time-stamped record of transactions involving things that are valuable. Those valuable things can be physical objects (like a diamond or a head of lettuce) or intangible items (like an ebook or electronic music file).

It addresses two key problems in any value exchange:

  1. It prevents double-spending.
  2. It provide immutable verification of the transaction.

And again, it does this without involving a third party intermediary, which means the transactions can happen faster and at a lower cost.

To learn more about how the technology actually works, via a clever (if I do say so myself) analogy about two people going to a ballgame together, check out the full whitepaper, Blockchain for Associations: Separating the Hype from the Promise, downloadable for free at http://bit.ly/2YwYIjn, no divulging of any information about yourself required.

Blockchain for Associations

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

In the spring of 2018, I had the opportunity to attend one of my favorite conferences in the association year: digitalNOW. At that event, among all the cutting-edge content, I heard one word over and over: blockchain. Two things quickly became apparent to me: one, it was an emerging trend associations should pay attention to and two, nobody seemed to really understand it all that well.Image of cover page of whitepaper

  • What is blockchain?
  • How does it work?
  • How does it relate to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
  • Are there other applications of the technology?
  • What does it all mean for associations?

Those are some of the questions Shelly Alcorn (Alcorn Associates Management Consulting and Ubiquity University) and I seek to answer in our new collaborative whitepaper, Blockchain for Associations: Separating the Hype from the Promise. 

The whitepaper includes an interview with Tim Haynes, founder of Signal and Story, who you may have heard speaking on blockchain at ASAE’s 2018 Tech Conference last December, and a case study from Central New Mexico Community College, which, under the direction of CIO Feng Hou, has been at the forefront of student-owned and -administered credentials maintained on the blockchain. It also includes an extensive bibliography for those who wish to REALLY geek out.

I’ll be blogging about the whitepaper in the coming days, highlighting some of our major findings, but in the meantime I invite you to download your free copy at http://bit.ly/2YwYIjn – 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.

The complete whitepaper team – Shelly Alcorn, Tim Haynes, Feng Hou, and myself – will also be participating in SURGE Co-Creation, a free interactive virtual conference on May 1-3 hosted by AssociationSuccess.org. You can find out more about the event as a whole and our session at https://surgeco.snoball.events/s/elizabeth-engel. (You can also register, which is required, but is, as mentioned above, free.)

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