Meetings with Purpose

I think I've mentioned before that I got my start in association management as a meeting planner. When I started I had zero experience. It was entry-level, and someone simply gave me a chance to provide myself. I found that I had a knack for it, and pretty soon my career in association management was off and running.

I say association management, but honestly, for a time I thought I might be looking at a career in meeting planning. I even contemplated getting my CMP to help bolster that possibility.

But eventually I decided that it wasn't meeting planning that I was interested in. It was association management, and meeting planning had simply been my introduction to it.

That backstory affords me a different take on meeting planning than most meeting planners. With no wish to denigrate, meeting planners are cut from a different cloth than association management professionals who know how to plan meetings. The incentives and reward systems are different. To describe it as simply as I can, for the meeting planner the goal is that the meeting run smoothly. To the association management professional the goal is that the meeting achieves its purpose.

Now, these are not mutually exclusive goals. In fact, they support each other to such a degree that it's almost impossible for one to occur without the other -- but only in one direction. In other words, it's completely possible to have a meeting run smoothly that does not achieve its purpose, but it's next to impossible to have a meeting achieve its purpose if it doesn't run smoothly.

This one-way co-dependency creates a trap that too many association fall into. Knowing that they can't achieve their meeting's purpose without it running smoothly, they elevate the importance of a smooth-running meeting in all of their decision processes.

Smooth running means not going over budget, so let's cut a corner here. Smooth running means automated processes, so let's forget about customizing the name badges too much. Smooth running means the right number of box lunches, so let's enforce our rules about needing a ticket in order to get a lunch.

If you follow this logic long enough, you'll soon realize that you've stripped all the humanity out of your meeting. Or worse, you won't realize it. Instead, one of your attendees will point it out to you. I used to look forward to coming to your meetings, but now they feel so impersonal and regimented. I don't think I'll bother coming any more.

This is a major problem because almost every association meeting has the same common purpose: bring people together so that they can learn, connect, and have fun. Without that, there's no point in having the meeting in the first place. Your members are not coming to your meeting so that they can follow all the rules you've put in place to make sure the meeting runs smoothly. They're coming to your meeting so that they can learn, connect, and have fun.

That's the purpose of your meeting. Don't let your meeting planning get in the way of that.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://images.app.goo.gl/g7XHurAUmGTeULs48

Podcasting Creates Interest and Excitement

Today we launched a podcast at my association. It's called Fluid Power Forward, and on it, we plan to interview interesting people who are helping to move fluid power technology forward. If you're interested, you can listen to our first episode here.

The project was fairly long in coming. The idea was first hatched at the tail-end of 2018, when I realized that there was a lot of interesting things going on in our industry, that we consistently presented and talked about those things at our workshops and conferences, and that podcasting might be a (relatively) quick and easy way to capture some of that content and push it out to a much broader audience.

As an avid podcast listener, I already had some ideas about how such a "show" could be packaged and delivered, but still what followed the initial idea was about six months of planning, developing, branding, rehearsing, recording, and packaging. As I write this today, I'm still a little surprised that we've got it up a running. I've got a soundboard and microphone at a table in the corner of my office, a love-hate relationship with Skype and Audacity, four episodes "in the can," appointments on my calendar to record two more, and plenty of lines in the water for future guests.

Lots of things surprised me along the way -- and I'm sure those surprises aren't over yet -- but one surprise that really stood out to me was how consistently the idea of doing a podcast was positively received by the people hearing about it.

My staff loves the idea. I've kept most of them somewhat at arm's length as we developed and learned how to deliver it. As you can see from the graphic, my face (and voice) is plastered all over this thing, and I think I instinctively knew that I needed to keep it close to my vest if it was going to sound authentic. But now that it's up and running I'm talking about it more broadly in the office and everyone seems engaged and excited by it.

But more than my staff, my members are also totally on board. For the first few episodes I reached out to members I knew well -- folks who I thought not only had interesting technology to talk about, but with whom I already had some kind of rapport. That, I thought, would make both me and them more comfortable, and help ensure that the first few episodes (which can often be clunky as the podcaster in question is learning their equipment and figuring out what they are really doing) go more smoothly.

When reaching out to them, I felt like I was asking them to do me a big favor. It's an experiment, I told them. If it turns out bad we won't use it. But they were all immediately on board. It's great, they told me. We'd love to participate. One even told me that his boss was especially interested and would be listening. Whatever they could do to help, just ask.

And now that the word is out that we're podcasting, the messages are starting to roll in from people who would like to get involved. I'm not naive -- for most this is an opportunity to promote themselves and their technology, but that's okay, because that's what the podcast is for. As I said, there are a lot of positive things going on in our industry, and generally speaking, not enough platforms from which to promote them.

In some ways, I suppose it's surprising to me that a fresh approach on an unmet need should be met with such interest and excitement. But I guess, in most ways, that shouldn't really be surprising at all.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Keeping Up with the Waterfall

My association's Board of Directors has eighteen people on it. Whenever I'm comparing notes with other association executives about how big our boards are, I usually joke that I like having eighteen people on my Board because it guarantees that I can get at least twelve to show up at my Board meetings.

I'm only half joking. It's not unusual for three or four Board members to be unable to attend any particular Board meeting. Thankfully, these are not the same three or four Board members every time. It's just reflective of how busy everyone's schedules are and, increasingly, how little control we have over them.

But now a new dynamic has begun to creep into this environment. It's not just busy schedules keeping Board members away from Board meetings. It's job transitions keeping Board members from being Board members.

In the past month, for example, I had two such issues occur. One Board member got a new job at a company outside of our industry. That makes him ineligible (and frankly, uninterested) to continuing serving on our Board. Another Board member got a new job at a company inside our industry -- but that company already had a representative on our Board, and it's a violation of our bylaws to have two people from the same company on our Board of Directors.

I have an Excel document that I've been maintaining for years. It reflects an on-going record of every position on my Board of Directors, who has held each seat, how long each term is, and which positions are currently vacant. Because, like many associations, we stagger the terms on our Board, and because I've color-coded each block of staggered terms to better illustrate how long they last and when they become vacant, one past Board chair once referred to the document as my "waterfall" document, the color-coded blocks cascading down the page in something that appears something like a waterfall.

Keeping up with this waterfall has become a central function of my position. Development of future leaders is not something I can afford to ignore in my association, because there is almost always a Board vacancy that needs filling. And with these latest vacancies, two important things occurred to me as I was manipulating and updating this document.

First, I'm so glad I started this document. Keeping up with all these changes, and communicating clearly with the people that the Excel cells represent -- everyone knowing what position they represent on the Board, when their term starts and when their term ends -- would nigh well be impossible without it. In a very substantial way, it's amazing that there's never been a case when someone came to a Board meeting they shouldn't have or didn't think to call and provide a legitimate reason when they couldn't make one they were supposed to attend.

And second, it's time for a new joke. I like having eighteen people on my Board, not because it means I'll have at least twelve at my Board meetings, but because it means I'll have at least twelve of those positions filled.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-does-water-appear-white-while-going-over-a-waterfall.html

Participation Tracking Is Not for the Faint of Heart

We track our members. We don't use face recognition software, metadata, or complicated algorithms. We use an even more diabolical mechanism. Microsoft Excel.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about the sometimes difficult work of maintaining a member participation tracking system in your association. A way of knowing how many and which programs or activities each member is participating in. When done consistently, it provides invaluable information about which members are engaged and which are not, which members are likely to renew and which are not, and which members you should be seeking to engage and which you should not.

I had a meeting this past week where we took a fresh look at our system. It's a surprisingly complicated engine and it was probably due for a tune-up, so the meeting was a good use of our time. As we went through the many dozens of details, I was struck (again) by a really important decision we had to make in setting the system up.

As I said above, the purpose of our tracking system is to understand which members are likely to renew their membership and which members are not. The implied correlation is therefore that participating in programs is aligned with a member's likelihood to renew. Those members that engage in few or no programs are at a heightened risk for non-renewal, and therefore warrant additional attention and marketing from the association.

That, I hope, is pretty straightforward. It's an assumption, but a reasonable one from where I sit. But the next decision is often fraught with difficulties. Given that the goal is to predict which members may or may not renew, which programs should you track? All of them? Or just those that are highly correlated with member satisfaction and a member's likelihood to renew?

Our answer is the latter, and that's one of the things we did in our recent tune-up meeting: go through all the programs of the association and decide, based on which we believe are highly correlated with member satisfaction, which we should track and which we shouldn't.

The problem is that not everyone may agree with the decisions in this space, and there is unfortunately a large absence of data on which to base some of these determinations. And even asking the question can sometimes lead one down a rabbit hole one would rather not go down.

Our Annual Conference? That's correlated with member satisfaction, right? I mean, if someone is taking the time and paying the cost to attend the conference, they're likely to renew their membership, right? What about our data programs? If the member is contributing their own data to help us to produce that benchmark report for the industry, then they're obviously interested in staying a member, right? And what about our trade show? And that job fair we launched for our industry? Members who participated there are satisfied with their membership, right?

Typically, my short answer to all these questions is "yes." It frankly has to be. To make the exercise worthwhile, we have to accept that higher levels of member participation in programs equals higher levels of member satisfaction.

But that, admittedly, is a generalization, and there are undoubtedly circumstances where such a correlation does not exist. They went to the Annual Conference, but were unimpressed with the speakers. They give us their data, but no one in the company can find a use for the resulting report. They exhibit at the trade show, but they didn't get enough leads out of it. They show up at the job fair, but are still struggling to hire the right people.

My advice is not to get trapped in these details and concerns. Separate satisfaction surveys and interviews are a better way to make these assessments and to correct them if necessary. When working on your participation tracking system, stay focused on the goal of just tracking participation where you think it matters.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://www.noobie.com/how-to-use-microsoft-excel/https://www.noobie.com/how-to-use-microsoft-excel/

The Chairman's Gift Revisited

I wrote a blog post back in July 2012 called The Chairman's Gift. It's a pretty popular post, making most of my year-end Top Five lists, and capturing the eighth most number of pageviews from among the more than 600 posts that have appeared on this blog.

In it, I describe a tradition we have in our association of giving a gift to our outgoing Chairman of the Board. Unlike some other associations, who traditionally give a desk clock or a Mont Blanc pen in these circumstances, our tradition is to give something with unique value and importance to the person receiving the gift. We want to get our outgoing chair something he or she will truly remember. Something he or she will appreciate just as much as we appreciated his or her service as chair.

Over the years we have given a great variety of items, usually enlisting the secret help of the chair's spouse to help us identify the right thing. We just went through the ritual again at our Board's fiscal year-end retreat -- the place where we set our goals for the new year and one chair passes the gavel to the next. And the look on our outgoing chair's face when he opened his gift -- at that very moment, like a kid opening a box on Christmas day, before he had the box fully unwrapped, but when he realized what it was that we had given him -- that's what reminded me of the message I had written in that post seven years ago.

As wonderful as it is to thank, to delight, to touch the person who I've worked with for another successful year in leading our organization forward, the best part of this tradition continues to be the message it delivers to everyone else at the retreat.

The other folks sitting at the banquet tables, some of whom have been part of the association leadership for years and others who are attending their first event. Folks who may not have known what they were getting themselves into when they accepted the invitation to attend or to join the Board of Directors. Folks who had sat solidly in "listen-only mode" for the strategic discussions we had just had for the past day and a half.

To those people, most of all, the chairman's gift, and the manner in which it was given and received, demonstrates more than anything else we could do that this association is a family, and that we care about each other in ways that go beyond financial reports, strategic objectives, and key performance indicators.

And that, as I said seven years ago, is worth the extra time and expense we put into our chairman gifts.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://iamdeewallace.com/product/gift/

Customer Service Not Worth Emulating

A bit of a rant this week.

On my most recent business trip, a staff member of mine rented a car for us. She is not a "preferred" member of the rental car company she worked with, so she had to stand in line and wait to be served.

It was awful. There was only one agent working the desk and I counted nine people in front of my staff member. I timed how long the first person took at the counter. Eleven minutes. I timed the second. Twelve minutes. At that rate we were looking at an hour and a half wait.

Then a second agent appeared and began helping the next person in line. All right, I thought. Now we're down to forty-five minutes. I can handle that.

Except that after the first agent finished with the customer he had been helping when the second agent appeared, he announced he was going on his lunch break and left. There were still five people in line in front of my staff member and three more that had queued up behind her.

At that point, I pulled out my smartphone and rented a car from the same company on their mobile app. As a "preferred" member, I was able to skip the remaining line and head directly out to the lot. After a quick stop at the "preferred" desk, my staff member and I were in a car and heading to our destination, no questions asked.

Now, this is not the first time I've experienced the kabuki theater that is the rental car counter. Before becoming a "preferred" member I had stood in that interminable line myself, and am still occasionally subject to it when traveling with someone else.

One big question I have is why. Why, in this day and age, is the process of renting a car anything other than the "preferred" experience? "Preferred" or not, we all make the reservation online, we all choose our options, we all enter our drivers license and credit card information. Why is any other step necessary other than showing your license and proving you are who you say you are?

But an even bigger question I have is how these companies stay in business if this is their model of customer service. Imagine an association conference in which the registrant shows up after having registered and paid online, and then is forced to stand in line where the association takes ten minutes with each and every person ahead of them to both verify their information and to try to upsell them on a variety of products and protections they have already decided they don't need or want.

How long would that registrant stay a member of that association? How long would that association be in business?

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://www.masterfile.com/search/en/people+in+queue+texting+images

Contacts of Quality, Not Just Quantity

I lead a trade association. That means that our members are technically companies, not people; but, of course, the companies in question are made up of people, and we work hard to maintain good contacts and communications with those people.

A common objective for trade associations is to grow the number of contacts that they have at each of their member companies. Frequently, even though the decision to join or renew membership in the association rests with one individual, it is seen as advantageous to have a number of other "champions" within the company who find value in the association's programs and services. In making her decision, the boss may very well ask around her organization. "Is anyone getting any benefit from this expensive dues payment we make every year?" If the answer is yes, the boss is much more likely to keep writing those checks.

In this spirit we recently did an inventory of the contacts in our member database. We typically classify our contacts based on the role that they play in their company -- for example, are they an Executive? a Marketing Professional? an Engineer? a Human Resource Professional? And in our first pass we focused almost exclusively on quantities. How many contacts do we have? How many in each category? How many per company? How many in each category per company?

It was a good first dive into the subject, but the quantitative focus immediately revealed some weaknesses. For many companies, we have almost an overabundance of contacts in our database. Names and emails no one in my staff organization is familiar with. Some of them dating back years and years.

My initial reaction was that we need to inventory the quality of our contacts as well as the quantity. For how many companies, for example, can we say we have a solid Executive, Marketing, Engineering, and Human Resource contact? Solid as in someone on staff can put a face with a name and that they participate in some activity of our association?

Whatever that number is, working to increase that -- rather than just the raw number of contacts per company in the database -- seems much more likely to pay dividends when it comes to our member retention and engagement objectives.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/happy-business-people-shaking-hands-after-reaching-an-agreement-gm958662444-261768839

I Want the Right Pageviews

This week's blog post is partly inspired by this post on Seth Godin's blog. In it, he makes the case that the idea of "reach" is overrated.

Why do you care if you can, for more money, reach more people? Why wouldn’t it make more sense to reach the right people instead?

I agree entirely. Here's a specific case in point.

My association has a website. There's a lot of good content up there, most of it intended for our members. But there are a few pages that focus on what fluid power (the technology my association represents) is. Those pages aren't really for our members. They already know what fluid power is. We don't have much of a public relations or advocacy focus, but as the trade association representing the fluid power industry, it feels wrong not having some information up there about what it is and what it does in the market.

Here's the problem, though. Every time we go to look at our web analytics, guess what comes up as the page with the most pageviews? That's right. It's our "What Is Fluid Power?" page. There are some in the organization who track and trumpet this. Look at how many pageviews our website got last month! We must be doing a really great job.

I have a different view. Let me phrase it in striking terms so I can underscore how strongly I feel about it.

I don't care about the people visiting the "What Is Fluid Power?" page of our website. They -- whoever they are -- are not our members, and our website is not for them.

Do you know how I know they are not our members? Look at the traffic source for all those pageviews. The vast majority are coming from organic search -- meaning that they are typing "what is fluid power" into Google or Bing or some other search engine and finding our page in the results that come back to them. Our members aren't doing that.

Show me the pageviews of the people coming to our site because they've bookmarked it, or they clicked on one of the links in our member e-newsletter. Those are the right pageviews to watch and pay attention to, because those are much more likely to be our members.

As someone whose job depends on connecting our members to the programs and services of my association, I can't get complacent about this. I simply do not want more pageviews for the sake of having more pageviews. I want more of a certain kind of pageviews -- the ones that reflect our members reading and accessing our programs.

When I talk about the "right" pageviews, those are the ones I'm referring to.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TgdlWhMZAw

Don't Put Association Benefits Before Member Outcomes

Amanda Kaiser on her Smooth the Path blog had a good reminder last month for all us association professionals about the importance of speaking to members in a language they understand. In Association Marketing: They Said/We Said, Kaiser says: "When members talk about the value of their membership they tend to talk about outcomes ... But when associations talk about the value of the membership they tend to list benefits."

I had an opportunity to put this advice to the test when I visited one of the largest members in my association last month. They are already heavily engaged in many of our activities, but I wanted to provide them with an overview of all our benefits anyway. It would provide the structure, I thought, to call their attention to how much value they already get out of their membership, but also allow me to highlight a few areas where they could amp that value up even further.

So, in putting my slides together, I initially focused on listing all the benefits my association offers. Mindful of Kaiser's advice, I decided to group them by the over-arching strategic objective that each was designed to address, and for a while I thought that would also reveal to outcomes that mattered to them. But slowly I began to realize that the strategic objectives in question were the association's, not the member's, objectives. They were the things we wanted to achieve so we could provide the best value to our members.

I needed something different -- and that's when I remembered an exercise we had done last year, when we had defined the "pain points" our members felt that could be addressed by the benefits we offered. I blogged about these back in May 2018, and there are six of them:

• Enhance my brand
• Understand the market
• Increase my sales
• Reduce my costs
• Find technical or engineering staff
• Educate me and my team

Reworking my presentation so that our benefits were organized along these lines suddenly made so much more sense for the purpose I had in mind.

Why do company executives decide to have their companies join our association? I could now ask. They want to enhance their brand -- which they can do by engaging in the following programs that heighten their profile in our market and among their peers. They also want to understand the market -- which they can do by subscribing to the exclusive market data programs that our association offers.

I think you probably see my point. By structuring my presentation this way, I was able to talk about our programs, and the places that the member company was and was not engaged, but I was able to do it in the context of the outcomes that mattered most to the member.

In essence, I didn't put the cart before the horse.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/put-the-cart-before-the-horse.html

Member Visits Are the Way

Two unconnected things got connected this week in a fun and interesting way.

First, at the beginning of the week I was in Texas for another one of the conferences I've been talking about. And as I often do when I travel, I built some extra time into my schedule so that I could go visit one of the members of my association that was in the same general vicinity.

It was great. It always is. This particular member has been in and out of our association over the years, is currently in, and is deeply involved in only one of our four main program areas.

The visit was a great opportunity for me to introduce them to the other three, but more importantly, it was an opportunity for me to learn more about them. Learn about their business, their people, their products, and their challenges. When I do these member visits, I'm certainly there to talk, but I am also very much there to listen. To listen and learn. And I learned a lot.

Second, at the end of the week I interviewed another candidate for an open position at my association. This candidate asked a lot of good questions, one of them being: "How does a new employee coming into your association best go about learning more about the members and their businesses?"

I kid you not. "By visiting them," I happily answered. "By sitting across the table from them and asking them about their business and the challenges they are facing. By touring their production facilities and trying to understand how the products they make are created and how they make their way into the marketplace. I have been leading this association for more than eleven years now, and to this day, every time I visit a member I learn something new about them and our industry that helps me do my job better."

Member visits are the way. I couldn't have scripted it any better if I had been given the chance.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://www.madejacksonhole.com/products/journey-journal

When Decisions Get Made, Part 2

Last week, in When Decisions Get Made, I talked about when a member's decision to renew or not to renew their membership in an association gets made. Using a cautionary tale of my own experience as an association member, I confirmed that the timing of this decision typically occurs well in advance of the delivery of the association renewal invoice in the member's mailbox. In my own situation, I had made the decision not to renew about four months ahead of the dues invoice -- but, of course, the association in question didn't know that.

I didn't call the organization and tell them I had made this decision. As far as they knew, I was one of their most engaged new members. Look at my track record of participation! The fact that I hadn't found enough value was unknown to them. So, when the renewal notice came, and I did tell them I would be dropping my membership, they were understandably surprised.

I've been thinking more about this in the intervening week. I said that this same dynamic plays out in every association, so what should an association do about it?

Many associations, and hopefully most, track the number and type of programs and services their members engage in. Some associations have fully-integrated CRM systems that produce colorful dashboards with a click of the mouse, and some, like mine, have an Excel spreadsheet with numbers in certain columns representing member participation and totals calculating member participation scores. However an association does it, tracking participation like this is a powerful tool. It allows an association to see who is engaged and who isn't, and to intervene when a member is scoring low on the dashboard or on the spreadsheet.

Or does it?

From the point of view of the association that had me as a member, I was a very engaged member. As I described last week, I had participated in their webinars, I had spoken to their staff, I had attended their annual conference. I must have had a very high participation score in whatever system they used. Why then, did I drop my membership?

I dropped because I didn't find enough value in these activities. And there's no way for a traditional participation tracking system to capture that. Instead of measuring attendance, we should be measuring the value our programs deliver to our members.

I recently started calling each new member that joins my association. A kind of welcome message from the CEO. Hello. I'm glad you've joined. I'm the President/CEO. We offer a lot of programs and services, and I want to make sure that you plug into something valuable for you and your company. Please call me at any time if you ever have questions.

But now I'm realizing that this is not enough. If I don't want my association to be as clueless as the one I just quit, I should be calling each new member after they participate in their first activity and asking about the value, if any, that they found there.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://www.bcashflowpositive.com.au/blog/get-on-top-of-ato-bills-with-invoice-factoring/

When Decisions Get Made

Amanda Kaiser at her Smooth the Path blog gave me a good reminder this week about association membership dues notices.

The most interesting result from the member research on renewal notices is that these letters, emails, and phone calls do not serve to change most member’s minds about renewing. Instead, renewal notices merely remind them to renew. The decision to renew is made far ahead of the renewal period.

Her post makes the point that the time to engage a member comes long before the dues renewal is sent, and that attempts to persuade a member to renew with a bunch of marketing materials send with the dues notice are often wasted. In most cases, the decision to renew or not renew has already been made.

One of the reasons this hit home for me is that I was recently the member in exactly this situation.

There was a new organization starting up in one of the spaces my association operates. I joined, thinking I could better understand that marketplace, advocate for my industry within it, and connect members of my association to resources and partnerships that could help them navigate these waters.

I participated in the webinars put on by the new organization. I talked with their staff about what I wanted to achieve and what part I could see myself playing. I attended their annual conference and networked with as many people as I could.

And at the end of that, about four months ahead of when the annual renewal notice was going to be sent, I decided that this organization was not for me. Like the image I found to accompany this post, I had spent eight months increasing my knowledge about the organization's value proposition, and now was the best time to decide, because looking forward, all I saw was decreasing benefit or increasing loss. The connections I was looking for were not there, or were in such short supply that I would have to expend tremendously more time, money, and energy to find them and make them work for me and my association.

So, I checked out. I stopped reading their newsletters and stopped signing up for their webinars. My decision had been made. It was four months before they were going to send me a renewal invoice, but I wasn't going to pay it when it arrived.

But importantly, here's what I didn't do. I didn't call the organization and tell them I had made this decision. As far as they knew, I was one of their most engaged new members. Look at my track record of participation! The fact that I hadn't found enough value was unknown to them. So, when the renewal notice came, and I did tell them I would be dropping my membership, they were understandably surprised.

This same dynamic plays out in every association. The only thing unique about my experience was that I was the unsatisfied member, not the association desperate to keep them.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://www.decision-making-solutions.com/decision-timing.html

Before You Begin: 5 Co-Creation Tips

Back in May 2018, I participated in a virtual conference session on co-creation. It was called SURGE Spring 2018, and the organizers just posted a blog summary of some of the points I made in the session. You can read that post here, but I thought I would also re-publish it on my blog.

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Before You Begin: 5 Co-Creation Tips

Co-creation happens when an association and its members work together to create something that is valuable for both the association and the members. Generally speaking, it is important for the association to maintain decision-making control over the use of resources in the co-creative project, whereas the participating members should be given control over design decisions. If too many of the design decisions are made on the staff side, you risk creating something that might be sensitive to the needs of the marketplace, but without having engaged in a co-creative exercise with your members.

1. MEMBERS DERIVE VALUE FROM THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT

Remember that members can and should derive value not just from the finished, co-created product, but from the process of development itself. At my own association, we’ve done a series of roadmapping sessions where we use a facilitated process to identify technological challenges facing our industry. The end product helps us set an agenda for the overall industry, and our members can take the end product back to their own companies and embed it in their own development processes. But members who participated in the roadmapping process have also learned how to roadmap, and this can help them address other challenges within their companies. The Roadmap is useful to them. But the process of roadmapping is even more valuable.

2. CONSIDER INTERNAL RELATIONSHIPS

There is too often an unfortunate adversarial relationship in associations between the group that people consider the association and the group that people consider outsiders. Whether that’s staff versus board, or staff and board versus membership, it’s a dangerous way to think about your association. Embracing co-creation is a way of beginning to redefine this relationship between “the association” and “its members.” Co-creation helps bring your members inside your association and helps establish an important duality between the decision makers and the participants in a co-creation experience.

3. DEFINE ROLES FOR THOSE INVOLVED

In my association, there is one process that determines our strategic objectives, then another process that develops programs for each of those strategy areas. Both are critically important, but we have to be clear about who is responsible for each so each group succeeds. If people think they’re in charge of strategy, they’re not going to accept the design constraints that you place on their program development process. If they don’t accept that their role is to live within a particular strategic objective, it’s not going to work. Lack of clarity on this essential point creates tension in the co-creation process, and often prevents the organization from delivering the results it seeks.

4. LOOK FOR OPPORTUNITIES FOR COLLABORATION

Co-creative opportunities are practically everywhere, and can help an association address some of its most intractable problems. By way of example, my association, like a lot of manufacturing-based trade associations, is still trying to figure out what we call “the workforce challenge.” Member companies have a hard time finding the engineering talent they need to grow their businesses.

This problem is a wonderful co-creative opportunity for our association and its members. We started by experimenting with a middle school outreach program that’s branded for our technology space. We initially developed it at the association level and pilot-tested it in our local community where we’re headquartered. But very quickly, we shared it with our members and asked them to run it independently in their local communities. Now, we are regularly bringing all these folks together to share the successes and failures they’ve encountered. That keeps the co-creation practice running—slowly iterating a better product and vastly extending its reach.

5. DON’T UNDERESTIMATE YOUR ABILITIES

Finally, remember that if you’re an association, then you’re probably already doing some level of co-creation. It’s endemic to the association environment. But being more intentional about co-creation can expand on the value of member engagement tools already at your disposal.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://www.thisisinsider.com/monopoly-tips-how-to-win-2018-1

Recruiting Members Face-to-Face

I was on the road again this past week. As has become my habit, whenever I find myself going somewhere, I check our database to see if there are any members in the area and, if so, I try to reserve some time to go visit them. That worked for one of our most engaged members this week, but on this particular trip there was another kind of opportunity that presented itself.

A non-member, a company similar to many that are already in the membership, was in the same general neighborhood and was willing to meet with me to discuss the possibility of becoming a member.

I jumped at the opportunity. In examining the company and its position in the marketplace, I frankly thought the company was conspicuous by its absence from our membership. And when I found myself across a conference room table from its president, listening to him describe his company, its products and services, the markets it served, and the workforce development challenges it faced, I felt even more confident in that assessment.

All of the company's suppliers, partners, and competitors were already in the membership, and they were all using the association and its services to heighten their competitive advantages in the same spaces in which the prospect company operated. In fact, many of the people who served in our association's leadership ranks were close partners or associates with the prospect company president. Why, I wondered had he not yet decided to become a member? What was holding him back?

When the answer to that question emerged in the course of our conversation, it practically floored me. He had attended one of our conferences as a non-member two years ago, and one of the members of the association had given him the impression that he was not welcome there. This association is not for you, the member reportedly told him. That is, the kind of company you run, it is not welcome in our association.

At first, I didn't know how to react to this anecdote. Frankly, my instinct was to reject it. The prospect company was exactly the kind of company that belonged in our membership. There must have been some kind of miscommunication. Why would a member push such an obviously qualified prospect out of consideration like that?

But there was no respectable way for me to refute the prospect's reported experience, so I didn't attempt to. Rather, I did everything I could to describe and demonstrate the opposite sentiment. Look at all the other companies like yours that are already in our membership, many of them represented in our leadership. Look at the programs we offer, many of the designed with companies like yours in mind. This association is your association, and you can gain a lot of opportunity and advantage by becoming a member and getting involved.

It worked. The prospect company now plans to join our association. But in reflecting upon the experience, I don't chalk that decision up to my masterful rhetorical devices. (Truth is, I don't have any of those; the association's value proposition either sells itself or it doesn't.) In other words, I don't think I talked the prospect into anything he didn't already want to do. What I did do was show up, show interest, and respond in-person to the questions and concerns that he had.

And sometimes, that is the only way to give a prospect what he is looking for. If someone had been unwelcoming in the past, I had to correct that impression by being as welcoming as possible.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1998396,00.html

Trade Associations Really Have Organizational Memberships

I have to take issue with Amanda Kaiser of the Smooth the Path blog, who said in a recent post that trade associations don't really have organizational memberships.

Your key contact member understands that some of their colleagues at their organization can be members. But, most often when they think about the value of the association, they are not thinking about the value to their colleagues, or even the value of the membership to their organization, they are thinking about the value of the membership for themselves. This single individual makes the determination to renew based on the value they, themselves get from the association.

It's a decent point -- that an association doesn't first have a relationship with an organization, it first has a relationship with an individual. And if it wants to have a relationship with the organization it had better deliver needed services to that individual.

Because as the CEO of a trade association, I'd have to say that Kaiser is not seeing the whole picture.

In my experience, we are certainly careful to nurture a relationship with one particular person at each of our member companies. That's the person we call the decision-maker, the one who has the authority to decide if the company in question will or will not be a member of our association. It's usually the company president: the person who signs the checks. Whoever it is, we definitely work to ensure that this person sees and receives value for his or her membership in our organization.

But a big part of that value proposition is how other people in the company can grow and develop, or find more business, as part of their engagement with the association. This, in fact, is one of the key pain points we recently identified as part of our membership recruitment strategy. Our members, embodied by that person with check-signing authority, want to develop not just themselves but their team for greater success.

The company president comes to our Annual Conference, for example, where she can network with other executives in our industry, and learn about the trends and challenges facing organizations like hers. But her product manager probably goes to our Economic Conference, where he can get forecasts and analyses on our industry's customer markets so he can set his sales forecasts for the year and try to grab some more market share. And her engineering manager probably serves on one of our standards committees, where he can help set the technical specifications around which the next generation of our industry's products will be based.

My association is by no means unique in this regard. Trade associations of every stripe and kind work hard to offer service packages like these, providing value for multiple individuals across the hierarchy of their member companies. In many ways they have to. It is what makes them successful and keeps that decision-maker signing that dues check year after year.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://blog.synergita.com/2013/06/organization-culture-and-performance-managemen/

Adopting the Point of View of Your Members

Kudos to Amanda Kaiser and her Smooth the Path blog for her post, "Our Point of View is Not Our Members’ Point of View." In it, she reminds all of us association staff that what we think about the value of our membership benefits is often not what our members think of it. And maybe it was the coincidence that my association's last Annual Conference was in Orlando that made the following passage from her post really jump out at me:

Everyone will want to come to Orlando to see our great speakers and enjoy the new reception, we think. Members see three precious days out of the office, away from their families.

Ouch. That one hits a little too close to home. Take a look at all the marketing copy from our last conference and you will find a lot of words about speakers and receptions and very few words about the problems that our members may be looking to solve by attending the conference.

And, as I'm sure Kaiser would agree, at the end of the day it needs to be about the association solving the member's problem, or at least providing the venue in which the problem can be solved.

To help us better adopt the point of view of our members we recently tried to recast the way we talk about our association and what it offers so that it better connects with what we have come to call our members' "pain points" -- the problems they are trying to solve. After a fair amount of brainstorming and then sorting, we boiled things down to the following six primary pain points:

• Enhance my brand
• Understand the market
• Increase my sales
• Reduce my costs
• Find technical or engineering staff
• Educate me and my team

We're a trade association, remember, and our members are companies generally looking to grow and expand. Undoubtedly, they have other problems that they are trying to solve (i.e., other pain points), but what's special about this list is that these are all problems that our programs can provide solutions to. Our association, you could say, is therefore biased towards these six problems.

But, we realized, we almost never talk about them with our members. We always, always talk about our programs and their features (the speakers and the receptions) but never, never (it seems) about the problems that those programs could solve.

And we need to. If we're going to connect with our members in a way that is meaningful we need to adopt their point of view and speak their language. Don't come to our conference to hear our speakers. Come to our conference better understand the market, or to educate you and your leadership team, or to enhance your brand (we have sponsorship packages for that last one).

The marketing copy is already more compelling.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/point-view-grades-3-6

Who Is In and Who Is Out of Your Association?

I participated in a SURGE Spring 2018 session on co-creation. Don't know what SURGE Spring 2018 is? It's an online, virtual conference put on by Association Success. Sessions were recorded and were broadcast May 2-4, 2018. While each session was being broadcast, the speakers were present in the chatroom to interact with participants and answer their questions. Go here for more info.

Don't know what co-creation is? You're not alone. In planning for our session my fellow speakers and I decided that we needed to start with a definition of the term -- and then discovered that we all had a slightly different one.

Here's mine. Co-creation is when an association and its members work together to create something that has value to both the association and its members.

The session was a fairly free-wheeling discussion of that topic. I think it was a good one, but I won't try to recap it here. What I'm doing instead over a series of posts is highlighting some the the new thoughts that occurred to me as I listened to the comments of my fellow speakers.

I already talked about two:
The Process is the Product
Design Constraints Make Innovation Happen

Here's another. Who is in and who is out of your association?

I have to phrase this one as a question because, frankly, I don't know how to resolve it. It was left unanswered during our session recording and it was asked and left unanswered again during the live chat that we engaged in during the session's broadcast.

Here's how I would break it down. Co-creation itself implies a separation between two entities that I don't think actually exists in the association space. There is the company and the customer, some with a more for-profit mindset may say, and the best companies are the ones that figure out how to co-create its products with their customers.

The natural parallel for associations is that the association co-creates its programs and services with its members. But the members are not outside the association in the way that customers are outside the company whose products they buy. At its very foundation the members, in fact, ARE THE ASSOCIATION. The staff, the Board, the committees -- the things that we sometimes think of as the association, in fact, are only bodies and structures that the members have put in place to represent their interests.

And so, co-creation becomes a meaningless term. Associations don't co-create programs with their members. Associations are members, and the members create their own programs.

Some people push back against this phraseology and, I'll admit, the terms implicit in our traditional jargon are insufficient to describe the distinctions that need to be drawn in order to understand the point. That's probably why the question winds up going unanswered. We have the words necessary to ask the question, but we don't have the words necessary to answer it.

But frequently, the people pushing back seem to be intent on preserving some separation between their association and the members it was formed (by the members) to serve. Like many in the association space the separation seems natural because the people running the association (i.e., the staff) have no idea what the people belonging to the association (i.e., the members) want or need.

If that's the case, then maybe co-creation is a concept that really should embraced, despite its conceptual redundancy with the association model. In other words, any association worth the name is already "co-creating" its programs with its "members." If it's not, then I would suggest that it isn't, in fact, an association. Instead, it's a business with tax-exempt status, and the only way to become a true association is to start "co-creating" with its members.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://gpuzzles.com/optical-illusion/in-or-out-famous/

Design Constraints Make Innovation Happen

I participated in a SURGE Spring 2018 session on co-creation. Don't know what SURGE Spring 2018 is? It's an online, virtual conference put on by Association Success. Sessions have been recorded and are being posted this week (May 2-4, 2018). Mine will be posted on May 4. Go here for more info.

Don't know what co-creation is? You're not alone. In planning for our session my fellow panelists and I decided that we needed to start with a definition of the term -- and then discovered that we all had a slightly different one.

Here's mine. Co-creation is when an association and its members work together to create something that has value to both the association and its members.

The session was a fairly free-wheeling discussion of that topic. I think it was a good one, but I won't try to recap it here. What I'm doing instead over a series of posts is highlighting some the the new thoughts that occurred to me as I listened to the comments of my fellow panelists.

I already talked about one: The Process is the Product.

Here's another. Design constraints make innovation happen.

"Design constraints" was actually a new term for me. But once I heard it, I realized I had been describing them using different words when I've talked about the need for staff to keep the keys to the resource closet in their possession in any co-creation activity.

One perceived danger of associations co-creating with their members is the idea that members, if given the chance, will gobble up all of the association's resources for their pet projects. By resources I mean money, yes, but I also mean staff time. How, someone may ask, are we supposed to support a hundred different projects for a hundred different members?

I think the people asking those kind of questions are missing the point. Hopefully, when you apply the principle of design constraints the point of this exercise will make itself more clear. Just because most associations are not in a position to allow co-creation to take place at whatever level their members would define, that doesn't mean that those same associations can't allow co-creation to take place at levels that they themselves define.

In other words, an association might invite its members to come in and co-create a program or a service with it but, in doing so, that association can legitimately place limits on the amount of resources that will be applied to the project.

Our members, the association might say, tell us they need a program that serves a particular need, and we want a group of members who feel that need to work collaboratively with us to build that program. But in doing so, know that the association has only so much to spend on the program, and only so many staff hours will be dedicated to its development and delivery.

Those limits on available resources are the design constraints (or the keys to the resource closet). And here's the best part. They are what makes actual innovation happen.

Anyone can design and deliver a program with unlimited resources. Doing it with constraints on those resources forces fresh ideas and creativity into the process. Not only is the association co-creating needed programs with its members, it is doing it in a way that fosters new ways of thinking and new ways of getting the work done.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://locksmithracine.co/house-key-stuck-door-lock/

The Process Is the Product

I participated in a SURGE Spring 2018 session on co-creation. Don't know what SURGE Spring 2018 is? It's an online, virtual conference put on by Association Success. Sessions have been recorded and are being posted the week of April 30. Mine will be posted on May 4. Go here for more info.

Don't know what co-creation is? You're not alone. In planning for our session my fellow panelists and I decided that we needed to start with a definition of the term -- and then discovered that we all had a slightly different one.

Here's mine. Co-creation is when an association and one of its members work together to create something that has value to both the association and the member.

The session was a fairly free-wheeling discussion of that topic. I think it was a good one, but I won't try to recap it here. What I'll do instead (now and over a few more posts) is highlight some of the new thoughts that occurred to me as I listened to the comments of my fellow panelists.

Here's one. The process is the product.

It might be best to explain by way of example. In my association we do something called technology roadmapping. It is a process by which we identify the needs of the customers that our member companies serve, and then identify improvements to the technologies our member companies produce that are necessary if they are to better serve those customer needs. It is a process that requires the involvement of a broad cross-section of our membership, hence the co-creative element to it. It is something the association and its members work on together, and it has value to both.

But there is another value point in this relationship. The end product, the technology roadmap that we create, has value. But the process by which we developed the roadmap may have even more value. We use the process to develop an industry-wide roadmap, but the same process can be used by an individual member to create a roadmap for their own company. Relying on the industry-wide roadmap to benchmark and position their company's technology is important. But using the same process to identify the specific needs of their own customers and then identify the technology development objectives that will help them better meet them may be even more important.

I do not believe that these dual value points -- the product and the process -- are unique to our roadmap. The same dynamic exists in many co-creative exercises between associations and their members. But, too frequently, the value of the process is not recognized and promoted by the association. They tell their members all about the products that they create, but hardly ever stress the value associated with the co-creation process itself.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://www.co-society.com/start-forget-product-focus-processes/

Membership Sales Is About More Than Just Increasing Membership Numbers

We focus a lot on membership sales in my association. This year perhaps more than at any time in recent memory because we have identified increasing our membership numbers as our Wildly Important Goal for the year. In true 4DX fashion, we're trying to engage the whole organization in a concentrated effort on identifying membership leads and recruiting them in as members.

In one of our recent meetings and discussions on the topic, something important occurred to me. As important as increasing membership numbers is in my association, the efforts that we're putting into that objective are, ultimately, about something more than just increasing membership numbers. They are also very much about defining and shaping the value proposition that our association offers its members.

Too often, it seems, our recruitment efforts are framed around our own perceptions of value. How we talk about networking is a good example. We sometimes talk as if networking was a commodity that we were selling. Why should you join our association and come to our conference? Because of the networking! The networking is just fantastic. Exactly what a busy professional like you is looking for.

But from the prospective member's point of view, they are probably less interested in the networking and more interested in what the networking can do for them. They want to learn from other professionals in the industry, or open up new business opportunities, or benchmark their companies against others in their competitive space. Descriptions of this nature are more likely to resonate with a prospect than any generic statement about the value of our networking. Join our association and come to our conference, where you can learn from other professionals in our industry, open up new business opportunities, and benchmark your company against your competition.

Here's the point. Statements of value like the example I provided above get written, revised, and become most effective when they are tested and developed in discussion with real members and membership prospects. Crafting all your marketing copy in the office and launching it untested on the world is one of the best ways to get it wrong.

A sales discussion is an opportunity to sell something, yes, but it is also an opportunity for market research and education. Maybe what we're saying isn't resonating with our prospects. But we shouldn't assume that means they don't want what we're selling. Perhaps what we're offering has no value, but perhaps we're just not describing the value in terms that are meaningful to the prospect.

Either way, a missed sale should always be viewed as a teaching moment for the organization. Whether the disconnect came from a true lack of value or from a perceived lack of value, there is work that the organization needs to do. In simple terms, it may need to change its programs or change their marketing copy.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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https://www.brafton.com/blog/use-content-analytics-steer-marketing-strategy-winning-numbers-game/