Association Marketing Insights

It's Not Easy Going Green: Conference Promotions

2011-06-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

It feels less and less politically correct to point this out, but the pride we take in making a wholesale migration from print to electronic communications is often misplaced. It often represents more of a justification to cut costs and become more efficient at the expense of effective communications.

The conversion that began with newsletters has progressively continued into other communications. On ASAE's listservs, some associations have asked for advice on how to go with an "online-only program booklet" which meant dispensing with the traditional printed preliminary program. In recent candid discussions with associations in an ASAE Super Swap on conference marketing, it was clear that going all electronic was a mistake in terms of its impact on registration figures.

Working the math later, from what I heard at the time, it appeared that the association "saved" $20,000 on a mail campaign and saved themselves about 100 $500 registrations at their average cost. This is a negative return of -$30,000 but the impact typically doesn't stop there if the mail did for their conference what mail typically does for events—increasing legitimacy, tangibility, and awareness among individuals who are probably not in the market this year to attend—but would be in future years especially if the association can cultivate them as prospective attendees in out years.

I am probably showing my dinosaur qualities by speaking out on behalf of snail mail, but intuitively most of us know that a portion of our audience will always prefer mail. This means that moving wholesale into electronic, rather than stopping halfway through the transition to make best use of both forms of communication, can be a mistake that disenfranchises part of our audience. Associations rarely lead their audience but this is one example where it may not be serving the members, or the association bottom line, terribly well.

Even surveying the current membership a few years after making a transition and finding most members now prefer electronic doesn't validate the decision. Members who answer surveys often indicate preferences that closely reflect our current practices, as we "train" them to some extent. And those who valued the print and stopped receiving it will leave to an inordinate degree. Better to we don't

As is often the case, I don't form strong opinions without some corroborative data. We have conducted two surveys among associations regarding their marketing program and attendance levels, and we have also done case studies of specific organizations for competitive analysis.

Those who have made the all-electronic switch seem to consistently experience decreased long-term attendance (overall and relative to total membership), over and above the recent impact of the economy and its effect on business travel habits.

Many associations DO have a solid core of perennial attendees who will attend or decide not to attend consciously, early in the process because they have the knowledge and initiative to look into it. These seem to be the prospects we often have in mind when we make the switch. Unfortunately, beyond the contingent who attend with minimal contact, there is typically a large cohort of prospective attendees who are on the fence about attending, and who may stay there if the marketing program doesn't give them enough information to become completely aware of the program, speakers, and overall opportunity that is persuasive enough to convince them to spend their time and money with you.

Unfortunately, even many of us who keep some mail often undermine its effectiveness. A classic case is the short postcard format. These appear to pull poorly relative to other longer & larger print formats—they help drive some web traffic, but they don't do much to close the sale. There is still something about a program book/brochure format that makes it more effective--easier to convey the entire program at one convenient glance, easier to share with the boss to secure permission to attend and expense reimbursement, etc. For any complex product with many features (such as a conference), a catalog still plays a necessary role in the mix. A digital book is a nice addition to the marketing arsenal, but to rely on it to take up the slack of a printed item is something to test carefully and move into only if the long-term economics are positive.

Frequency of Communications

2011-06-12T16:25:00.001-07:00

Writing about communications reminds me of a study we conducted for the DMA Nonprofit Federation when I was their vice chair in 2006-07.

Many associations ask themselves a basic philosophical question regarding the appropriate frequency of member communications. We've also discussed this many times in ASAE Idea Swaps and of course there is no one right answer, but the conversations have been consistently enlightening, particularly from my dual perspectives within associations and large non-profits.

In our old study, which was not scientific—only 150 organizations participated—there were striking differences in frequency of contact.

On the donor side, we found an average of 25 contacts a year including mail, email, and phone, which can be excessive if you support a charity and then wonder if all your money goes to fund more solicitations. Never mind that charities were reporting that they promote to current donors "only" monthly, but with email frequency running about the same level, large charities rarely lose touch with active current donors, or former donors particularly if they had a reasonable giving history. Often working with an "ask forgiveness" approach, they will automatically go with this frequency but gladly respond to donor requests to cut back on the volume of contacts. This and the normal RFM segmentation strategy used by most sophisticated direct marketers means that they often achieve a hard-fought goal of contacting the right people at the right time with the right messages, and they do so with enough frequency to effectively compete with the other causes competing for their donors' attention.

On the association side, we saw a much more varied approach that has been confirmed in later Swaps and 'hand counts' at education programs. Associations communicate more often on average with their members, but the media mix is weighted far more heavily toward email. Some associations are firm believers that monthly is an appropriate frequency of contact, which feels very light to me for a membership that the decision maker pays $150 or $5,000. Often the context is very apologetic—membership associations fear that they will wear out their welcome with more frequent communication. Yet at the same time, others tell us that they increase regular e-newsletter contact to weekly or more often, they might run more than one title, and when probed their estimates often fail to include other regular communications such as conference promotions, renewals, etc.

Perhaps the biggest lesson we have taken away from the audits & reviews we have conducted—beyond reminding ourselves that measuring common practices is not=best practices, is the observation that content makes all the difference.

Some associations spend almost their entire time talking about themselves. Their e-newsletters, web site, and other regular communications always have a 'purpose'—and that purpose is focused on introducing or reminding the audience of an event, subscription product, news, etc. Even the news is focused on what will feel to the reader like internal issues—new officers, chapter activities, advocacy positions, etc.

These are all legitimate things to cover and report, but they defeat the typical association mission of serving as the voice of the field. Even a small-staffed association has, between the ears of their staff and their top volunteers, a tremendous reservoir of knowledge—and most of this doesn't reach the general member, or a prospect who can't visit anything to get a flavor for just how integral to the industry or profession the association really is. All they will see is promotional material—harkening back to the "brochureware" that usability experts always warned us to avoid as we evolved into a Web 2.0 era.

Now, one might reasonably object that being organized to deliver timely, vetted professional news is far easier said than done. I would normally agree with this, but the existence of syndication tools and semantic web services mean that a little investigation and investment will allow any association to access a stream of content they can post with or without commentary. At first, it may feel like "me too" content because it is, but adding commentary over time such as blogs to take advantage of the newfound traffic driven by your push email and search engines is a second logical step.

For now, do a basic analysis of what you currently deliver … and don't deliver… via email and online to your members. An objective review should make the benefits clear quickly, even if you can't measure a direct ROI from talking less about yourself and more about the industry you serve. Until you give members a real reason to visit your website daily, they won't—and the sheer information overload of the web today means that a large number of people in the field will visit, and they'll appreciate that you tried to consolidate the content that they need to stay on top of their environment.

How to Conduct a Communications Audit, Part I

2011-06-12T15:29:00.002-07:00

I once spoke on communications audits at an ASAE Annual Meeting and regretted it as soon as I did it. Rather than take the sensible approach and speak on very specific how-to's working with a consultant, I took the high road in that program and provided a non-profit's view of conducting them. The interesting part of our well-rehearsed panel was that I and the three association speakers all did a terrible job of explaining HOW we did what we did. Instead we shared descriptions of our program and a little about what we learned, but audience members expected something more like a recipe book and they weren't shy about expressing it.

Well, it's never too late to share what I probably SHOULD have presented back then, beginning with advice on how to conduct the qualitative aspects of an audit (in later posts, we'll share some examples). It might be odd coming from someone most people think of as a researcher, but I never rely heavily on surveys—in fact, relying solely on them can be misleading.

It's key to obtain a mix of "wide" and "deep" feedback—quantitative and qualitative that covers the cross-section of your entire audience, yet still drills down deeply with current readers/users. Although you may get conflicting findings and direction, you'll have constructive advice in specific areas from those who read and recall what you've sent them. You will also understand the general reasons that lead others to not read your communications. Both audience segments represent opportunities to increase & improve the effectiveness of your communications.

Surveys have their uses, but in general, qualitative is better for drilling down for preferences, feedback, and comparisons to competition:

* We have typically scheduled telephone interviews with a small sample of individuals, consciously choosing a mix of leaders/engaged members and less-engaged mailboxers if we can't screen for readership patterns up-front. These are often long conversations (25+ minutes) so recruit by scheduling appointments, warning them of the length, and we're flexible to accommodate members' schedules (i.e. evenings or weekends if necessary). Your initial survey can be a great vehicle for building a pool of interviewees, or to identify respondents for a followup survey that explores initial findings in greater depth or to test new concepts.

* "Mall intercept" can work well. You can send several interviewers onto an exhibit floor armed with a copy of your magazine or recent publication and a clipboard or a recorder to capture their feedback and measure aided recall.

* Direct observation can complement interviews to more accurately measure real behavior. You don't have to do full-blown hidden-camera ethnographic consumer work as retailers do to benefit: schedule a few visits with cooperative Lexington-area members so you can speak with them in person, look at their virtual & physical in-boxes, and talk about what they read quickly, slowly, or not at all using specific emails and print pubs as a prop to help spur their memory and to help them give you richer examples of what they read.

* Focus groups can effectively measure top-of-mind reactions. Exercises can be used to evaluate copy & visuals. We've used storyboards where donors can "vote" and tell us what envelopes they would or wouldn't open and why. Also helpful to have participants sit down and read a sample email or letter, then share with us what works and what doesn't, and describe the impressions they formed regarding the organization that crafted the communications piece.

All of these can yield pretty eye-opening results. I know most of us don't have time to do more than just one or two things, but these methods will generally prove to be worth the extra work.

How to Conduct a Communications Audit, Part I

2011-06-12T15:29:00.000-07:00

Surveys have their uses, but in general, qualitative is better for drilling down for preferences, feedback, and comparisons to competition:

All of these can yield pretty eye-opening results. I know most of us don't have time to do more than just one or two things, but these methods will generally prove to be worth the extra work.

Changing Gears & Entering Retirement Gracefully

2011-06-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

It's a little embarrassing to visit one's old blog and to realize that it's been a half year since I've written anything. I've always found it easier to post responses to the questions posed by peers on the ASAE listservs, but I realize that's a somewhat weak way of contributing to the community, promoting the business, or accomplishing whatever other objectives any of us has when we attempt to do something beyond just earning an income when we shift over from staff positions, or wherever we were, to become a full-time consultant.

Ironically, it's only at the time that I decide to retire that I also decide to become more diligent about this form of outreach. Mind you, I'm reasonably pragmatic regarding my prospects of reaching anyone through this vehicle. Blogs written by random strangers are like the Web's "message in a bottle"--compositions prepared in isolation on someone's computer and cast adrift with the resigned expectation that someone might see one message. But it's better than a podium (something that I find to be more and more archaic as a method of expression or knowledge transfer) and the blog can be a powerful tool for sharing knowledge as long as I think of it more as a wiki-type compilation & repository than a time-sensitive series of news items.

Even quantity of eyeballs can be a simple matter of attitude: I laugh when I think back to how I viewed the audiences I wrote for years ago. I had 7,000 readers of the newspaper I edited at ISU almost 30 years ago. I had "only" 1,000 paid subscribers to NAHB's Housing Economics 22 years ago. I had millions of people potentially reading my CRS donor solicitations 10 years ago. Today I generally have just a couple of client contacts reading my lengthy reports, and a dozen board members reading some abstract of it. At the same time, my income steadily increased in each position. My real or imagined audience size has almost zero impact on what is sadly my best lifetime performance metric ... and I know it's a poor metric.

I always dreamed of being able to translate and share everything I learned over the years to benefit others like me, and I'm not sure that being immersed in consulting projects was the way to do it. I've billed more than $1.5 million in services over the past six years, and the altruist in me is actually somewhat proud that we often provided services to more than 150 association and non-profit clients at mild to sharply discounted rates. From my first job in the federal government, I've always taken the approach that work is all--grinding out many projects with a wide variety of clients would serve us and the community well. I'm probably right on the first count, but it has also meant that I've missed real opportunities to look back and provide a coherent body of knowledge from which others can benefit. As speaking invitations have declined and I haven't needed to attend events to get more work, I've consciously taken on a lower profile and I'm far less effective in serving the community than I was as a VP at NACDS, or a director at ASHP. Over the past six years, I've abused the freedom of a consulting lifestyle by being free to take on more and more work, rather than achieving a reasonable balance between meaningful outreach and churning work out for specific clients.

Starting today, I'd like to change that, or at least try.

Learning to Create a Business Inside Your Association

2011-01-08T08:46:00.000-08:00

Where have you been?

I am shocked but not surprised that it's been almost seven months since I did a blog post here. When I look back over this very eventful time, it feels a lot like how I 'grew' in my association jobs--for some reason I was aggressively intrapreneurial, but otherwise content to keep my head down and plug away at the tasks at hand.

It's helpful for the image of a business to be 'out there' yet I find, even with these social media tools, I'm still communicating in my normal voice. On Facebook I am still the smart-aleck little brother to my former classmates at New Plymouth High School in Idaho (I knew Facebook was here to stay when all my classmates magically learned to type and started living their lives there). On Twitter (another New Year's resolution) I pipe up twice a day with whatever is on my mind but it's generally professional and whatever fits in a haiku. Apparently Rebecca set me up so every post there also feeds LinkedIn so I am more careful than I would otherwise be. But bottom line, to paraphrase Popeye, I yam what I yam, so there are limits to how much I benefit or reach the outside world that I care to reach, because of who I regard myself to be and who I am comfortable being.

Why don't we do marketing well?
I say all this in part because as I use another weekend to recharge and reflect on conversations during the week, it's striking how often our group personality is also very non-marketing oriented. We want to speak in our authentic voice, which is admirable but often just doesn't get the marketing job done. I'm beginning to return to my past as marketing clients express grave doubts and conflicts when direct marketing letters "don't sound like them." We heard this over and over at Marketing General (and I'm sure they still hear it everyday). I heard it at Catholic Relief Services, when fellow division heads, even bishops on our board would express that it's a shame someone as smart as me would be in marketing--as if it's a waste of brains to focus one's effort in sending junk mail, managing telemarketing campaigns, and scheduling drops frequent enough to upset your best donors.

I have always felt this missed the point, because there was a science and art behind what we did. We had to spend well and keep it simple to raise enough money to keep the lights on. If we didn't have the active support (and relevant past experiences) on the part of our CEO, I have no idea how we could have employed the right techniques, aggressive frequency, and memorable messaging necessary to raise the $45 to $60 million we did every year in unrestricted giving.

I tolerated the attitude quietly in several positions, then chose to acknowledge it to the point that we did a regular new employee orientation program at CRS called "Fundraising--The Necessary Evil." Over the years I've been struck by how many associations don't have a systematic membership acquisition program. At NACDS, an otherwise very well functioning, large trade association, I had a bear of a time getting our Services Corporation up and running. I'm still struck when friends and periodic clients have me on their mailing list and I get cute fake Christmas Cards with a message inside saying 'wouldn't you like to join?' Each time I feel as if those associations haven't been able to carve out some space where they can be businesslike--ROI focused, clear messaging, and generally ambitious in creating the growth and programs necessary to expand their reach and to subsidize the other, nobler pursuits.

Successful direct marketing techniques and business development methods haven't changed much over the past 30ish years and yet the average association still seems very far away from using a fraction of the tools and tricks that work. I'd invite comments and questions but I know nobody is reading this .... and those who need help the most don't believe they have a problem. So I'll just treat this first return to blogging as a message in a bottle, and later we'll provide some tips on how even the message in a bottle can be found, read, remembered, and acted upon.

Data Mining: What's The Big Deal?

2010-07-23T05:20:00.000-07:00

I was participating in a meeting with a new client yesterday and we were discussing some preliminary results of a data-mining exercise. Since some of the team members were unfamiliar with me or the project, I explained the process we used, and then we brainstormed for an hour on what they would like to learn and how they would apply it immediately to their normal practices. As I told them at the end, it was a rare (and gratifying) meeting when "data" and "really excited" occur together in the same sentence.

What I found most fascinating about this meeting was the latent desire among staff to have the database tell them something—ANYTHING. This isn't an unsophsticated or small organization—without giving away state secrets, they have 3.26 million membership dues transactions over the past 17 years, for example, and the quality of their questions and thoughts regarding how they'd apply learnings fell somewhere between pretty good and truly outstanding. But their environment—waiting six months for IT to download their data, receiving only what they refer to as 'sales reports' and little else—is very typical in associations, and it neither rewards nor cultivates expertise working with data among association staff.

No wonder the "data driven decision making" approach recommended in ASAE's 7 Measures book never took off. Even in other ASAE publications, common advice regarding data seems to be "don't collect or store what you don't know how to use." This might be good advice and promote efficiency, if it wasn't so easy to actually snapshot your data—all of it—in an environment where it can facilitate ad hoc queries, periodic dashboarding, developing product purchaser profiles, measuring the migration patterns of your recent graduates into full membership, exploring the relationship between product/event purchase/attendance with membership conversion, measuring repeat customer repeat rates, doing market basket analysis, creating an RFM matrix for your fundraising, etc.

WARNING: MILDLY TECHNICAL DETAILS
The key is actually very simple—download your data just once from your AMS into a series of flat files (comma or tab delimited) and import them into a decision support tool. I use SAS, whose basic product for a single user runs $3200ish in the first year then $1600 for an annual license. John Dorman and the folks down at Texas Medical prefer to use the MS SQL that comes free with their network but he describes the cost of upgrades and training a staffer with at least some expertise in programming & analysis to be a one-time expense of maybe $8-$10,000. I find that loading and reprogramming an association's file takes me 2 to 10 hours depending on the number of modules the data is stored in and how much of the data we need to simplify or eliminate (since you don't really need to know the name of the event they registered for on July 2 2003—you just need to know it's one of ten they attended early in their membership tenure before they stopped attending but continued paying their dues). Querying it .. including re-sorts, creation of new variables, categories, etc. in new datasets might take 5 to 20 minutes, even for files with hundreds of thousands of members or millions of transactions. Of course, most consulting isn't iterative: most of our reports have to be large and episodic, rather than small and applied, because we're paid to do projects rather than programs, but if you added this capability in-house (my recommendation) any association who takes this approach could have answers literally on demand without annoying the IT staff with requests or annoying everyone by slowing down a production server.
END OF MILDLY TECHNICAL DETAILS

The sad part of this is that the technology is actually ancient. It's been this cheap at least for the almost 25 years I've worked with these systems: at first nobody believed it was possible because we were using AS400 mini-cmoputers (actually mini meant 'not a mainframe;' weighing 1000 pounds and sometimes being fed by magnetic tape reels or cartridges). But once you turn the corner on this, in 1987 or 2010, seeing is believing. It's a simple process and I promise you'll never miss your 80 page reports again, nor do you have to pay $50,000 for 'data integration' or other support to integrate Cognos, Crystal Reports, or any other tool de jour. And after doing it inside of several associations I also never ran into the program of being regarded as the nerdy 'stapler guy' once we proved the ease and power of real, daily data mining.

Exit Surveys: Let Us Know How We're Doing ... And Turn Off the Lights When You Leave

2010-07-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

I hope that most of us in associations conduct exit surveys, and we recently considered how we should increase our participation rates on the ASAE listserv.

Good objectives for exit survey include:

 Collecting valid research results
 Distinguishing between avoidable & unavoidable attrition
 Ending this stage of the member relationship on a good note, and
 Clean the database for subsequent efforts to reinstate those who will want to come "back to the fold" in the future.

Our advice in this area includes:

1) Do a multi-part contact sequence. Starting with the lowest cost-per-contact option and migrate into costlier ones with the deliverable names who are not responding. A typical sequence might be: #1 online survey, #2 mail or fax survey, and (possibly) #3 telephone.

With any online survey, we recommend using an invitation & two reminders to non-respondents over a several-week period. This constitutes a reasonable and consistent effort from which they can opt out anytime or respond, and you should suppress them from the reminders. You'll always annoy the vocal 1%, but more persistence conveys to the former member that you're serious about wanting their feedback.

2) Make sure the message comes from an high ranking executive or volunteer name as the sender and signer. The reason many of our members leave us may be tied to something big & strategic within the association or in practice in general. Rightly or wrongly, a former member may regard correspondence coming from you or the membership department in general as transactional rather than an earnest attempt to learn and take action to address the issues a former member identifies that's within their control or influence.

3) Don't worry about anonymity but rather, offer confidentiality instead. You have to know who they are for proper campaign management but you won't report any personally identifiable findings. For your own internal operations, it's often worth the time to go back through your AMS and track the history of that one lapsed member who told you an interesting story about their experience ... if you don't know who they are you can't learn nearly as much about what your association did over their membership cycle to make them feel that way or form that impression.

4) Once you're using mail, offer a response premium for the first time but make it effective. The academic literature has demonstrated for years that front-end premia always outpull back-end; in our increasingly instant gratification, Amazon two-click world, it's probably even more pronounced. Offering respondents their choice of a $25 gift certificate toward your membership/services or an AmEx gift card could appeal to some (back-end premium); it would be far more timely and appealing to provide the incentive to ALL respondents included with your survey.

It helps to guilt a response (you gave me something, okay I guess I'll tell you what I think), and it can be easy to implement through a buckslip coupon insert in your #10 survey mailing, or a perfed tab on your outbound postcard that they can redeem online.

5) Monitor deliverability through each method and include this outcome in your final metrics. For example, if you have 500 lapsed members in April, it's helpful to know that 20% are unreachable due to job changes (bounces, NCOAs, phone confirmation of moves), 45% dropped due to inadequate value, 25% due to employer no longer reimbursing for dues, 20% because other associations meet their needs better, 15% for other cost-related issues, 10% due to retirement, etc. and that 20% might seriously consider rejoining in the future. You can infer the first figure based on actual campaign performance, the remaining figures by extrapolating from your findings based on any response rate.

I think there can be far greater impact if you can link exit survey insight to your ongoing membership operation on a personal basis, by 'flagging and tagging' individuals who report specific reasons for dropping. In the long run, most former members still in the field might not actually care about their confidentiality, and some exit survey findings could lead to additional followup such as more detailed discussions with the willing.

Former members in general appreciate knowing that you're working on the issues that led them to drop their membership and the additional conversations could allow you to probe further, test possible solutions. You certainly wouldn't want to spend all your time doing labor-intensive things for a low-potential reinstatement prospect, but if you can focus specialized attention on the individuals with the most interesting and/or prevalent comments, or those with pertinent demographics or practice characteristics, you can incorporate this into a much stronger member retention process. –Kevin

To Be Interesting, Be Interested First: How Asking Questions Sets Up Effective Copywriting

2010-06-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

In a recent ASAE listserv, a staffer asked the basic question "What words do you use for 'networking' or 'education' in your copy?" I was glad to see it because so often we use a kind of shorthand with the outside world—members and non-customers—without really thinking them through. This often reflects the fact that if we're not careful, we can easily prepare our communications in a monklike isolation from the real voice of our customer.

There are a number of terms that we all happily plop into our copy, but we often don't realize how people in our target audience actually process these terms … or the overall message we're trying to get across. When I write copy, I always ask for permission to contact a few members and schedule phone interviews with them. For most of us in associations, it should be an easier, regular, less formal process.

Some of the actual questions I'll ask a member or customer include:
* "Do you encourage other peers to consider membership? If you have, what kinds of reactions do you get from them?:
* "Pretend that I'm a peer who doesn't hold an ___ membership. How would you describe the organization to them/me?"
* "Thank you for the description. There were a few things I didn't hear ... tell me about ______ (often networking, education, advocacy, and information)." or alternatively...
* "You mentioned networking. That's a great buzzword that seems to mean different things to different people in different fields. Tell me more about what YOU regard as networking." (Ditto for education)
* "How valuable is (networking, education) to you? Why? If you don't mind, give me an illustration of some recent (networking, etc) that you've done."
* (If necessary) "Of course, we're speaking today to help us communicate more effectively. We're talked what you think and do. How similar are you to your peers? How might they think differently about ________?"

In a few short questions this allows me to have a long conversation that helps me "get inside the market's head." The member or customer won't mind--after all, nobody has ever had a bad conversation about themselves! It can help any of us figure out how to convey the benefits we offer, far beyond just using a single word that may mean different things to different readers, and to make it more compelling and understandable with the right words or examples.

I know the answers I get through this process DO vary by field, but often 'networking' entails idea exchange, commiseration when times are tough, 'brain-picking' on very sensitive issues they won't bring up in listservs or roundtables, checking in with old friends to see how they are doing, making new friends, basic business development, gauging reactions to what a speaker/guru just said, validating their current course of action, or living vicariously through others who do things differently from that person, or who have changed their practices. Depending on the season/year/person, the focus may be on survival, success, or just human interaction with like-minded people who share similar goals and operate in the same market/environment.

In any event, I'd encourage anyone writing copy for prospects to go through the exercise of speaking directly to their audience now and again, to find out how your audience thinks about these terms: I know many of us have staff specialists who see these functions in terms of their technical training and experience who serve as our SMEs, but they provide only half the story and that half may be very different from how your audience actually thinks. Often they can have tunnel vision regarding the issue and may emphasize literal truth over the words that are more likely to truly speak to the prospect's needs, to get their attention and be memorable. (I personally think advocacy is more limited than other benefits, as the copy often reads as if it's written by lawyers!) It's not easy, but going 'straight to the horse's mouth' and using what you learn will help you pick ... and defend ... the right words, examples, or concepts that will help prospects understand what you really mean by 'networking' ... or 'education,' or 'advocacy.'
-Kevin

Facebook Turns Two for Me Today

2010-05-29T16:13:00.000-07:00

Over time Scott & I both have a somewhat spotty record in terms of posting to our blog, in part because it's so much easier to share things in other environments such as ASAE's listserv and acronym. It's certainly where all our friends and competitors in the association world hang out, so I know I haven't ever written much personal here. I do envy friends such as Shelly Alcorn being able to bring much more personality to their posts than certainly I ever do.

But for a change of pace, I thought I'd commemorate a small milestone in my own online development. As I was cleaning my email I saw my very first user greeting from Facebook. I guess that maybe made me the 100 millionth user in a community that now has more than 500 million. I know from our research that there are two predominant views of social media: as a business tool and a personal tool. I am never quite certain where I fall as I have been able to use LinkedIn un-self consciously to track 750ish of my business friends, former colleagues and clients and to post the occasional message promoting the next event I'm speaking at.

But Facebook has morphed into something so much more personal that it's hard to think of it in the same league as a "business tool." Sure, I flag myself as a fan of my friends' companies, but as I look through my list of friends I find people I haven't spoken to in person since junior high and I find myself commenting on notes from people I probably sit next to and do not speak to directly at happy hour at Hard Times Chili, just because they also know my favorite waitress. The analyst in me thinks of the classic social networking diagram that shows the web of contacts we form in any workplace--using the number of contacts we make to establish who's in the loop, who's not, who's a connector, who's influential, and who operates in relative isolation.

Sometimes it really is better to not overthink things. I would have no idea how to craft a message that "works" just as well for my cousins who are ministers in Oregon, high school friends from Idaho who kindly shoot and share images from my hometown, including the house I few up in (above, just behind the farm implement store in tiny New Plymouth Idaho), and the association execs and consultants who are my primary contacts in life today in Washington DC. I guess I'll just write what's on my mind and to enjoy a tool that shrinks the scary outside world into a place where a few hundred of the people who have touched my life over the years "live." I can hear all about their lives, their bad jokes, their children's proms and graduations, and even sometimes still play the smart-aleck teenager I used to be even after the wrinkles and bald spots serve as a constant reminder that I am no longer a puppy. As someone without a family and who primarily works alone today, I appreciate even more the luxury of being able to "speak" to people I never see in person. Even our school reunion in two weeks, the first one I've ever attended, is hard to picture without having something like this to link us together when and how we want to be linked.

Thanks, Facebook! -Kevin (NPHS Class of '82)

Why It Never Makes Sense to Lower Dues

2010-05-22T12:10:00.000-07:00

An association was recently considering lowering their dues in response to member complaints and to demonstrate empathy for members in our current economy. It was interesting, quasi-radical thinking of the kind I generally support, but not something that should actually be implemented. Dues are not like taxes: both represent revenue streams funding what are to some extent "social goods" but the resemblance ends there.

If an association's research identifies pockets of discontent defined by type of individual or organization, it's better to address these groups by developing new/refined services that deliver greater value, communicate more effectively, offering and honoring satisfaction guarantees, or when necessary extending hardship dues forgiveness to a class of members or on a case-by-basis.

The top reasons you shouldn't lower dues include:
1) As an association, we're in a great position because we "compete on non-price." Memberships are not commodities, so our customers don't immediately check out the competition and engage in switching behavior when prices change. If your dues levels haven't changed but you believe willingness to pay has, there are two logical courses of action open:
a) Conduct broad-based research or mine past research to determine if occasional complaints represent a more commonly held perception of inadequate value relative to price paid.
b) Find ways to deliver greater value.
Your association membership consists of a large body of customers (some who complain) who pay the prevailing price for a bundle of benefits that your membership comprises: to me, mass behavior speaks much louder than minority protest. Better to increase value to match the current price, than to lower price to match the lower value perception held by a portion of your membership.

2) Demand for membership is very price-inelastic, so lowering dues means fewer resources, which can undermine delivering an increasing level of value. This means that the proportionate change in volume is low, relative to the proportion change in price. On the way up, this is good news for us: increase dues by 8%, and the corresponding decrease in membership is unlikely to be more than 1%-2%. On the way down, it's more ominous: a 5% dues decrease might attract 1% growth. In these two cases, gross dues revenue increases 6%-7% or declines 4%. If resources are an issue within the association, staying put and accepting a 0% revenue change may be your best option if current economic conditions and member perceptions truly prevent you from implementing normal, low-threshold increases.

3) Decreasing dues tells a strange 'story' that affects your ongoing communications and relationship to your members and audience at large. In contrast, periodic/CPI-type increases in dues can often pass without any communication, and larger dues increases can be accompanied by statements that it's really a deferred increase because dues haven't changed in 5 years; increase dues are required to fund increasing quality and quantity of programs and/or to reflect increasing costs of doing business, reflecting your circumstances.

Decreasing dues is enough of a 'man bites dog' story that even a small change warrants some communication, but if you're not careful, it's hard to escape the sense among members that you will have to do 'less with less,' or you'll reinforce the sense that the organization had a big cushion before and now you're trimming fat. Either implication isn't terribly productive, and in my mind a small percentage decrease may still beg the question of why not just stay put. As long as our economy isn't in a true deflationary cycle, holding off increases for a few years is the same as implementing a 5% decrease today. – Kevin

Managing Your Checkoffs … Foundation Contributions via Member Renewals

2010-05-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

The degree to which people respond to a renewal form checkoff depends first and foremost on the level of awareness and positioning of your Annual Fund. If it's well understood what the Annual Fund does and it's seen as legitimate and unique, then a check-box by itself can be very successful: a service "that needs no introduction" is the only kind that tends to perform well on an automatic marketing vehicle (such as a renewal form that allows no space to provide a proper introduction). If it's not well-understood, consider testing a buckslip with one renewal effort that helps to explain what the Annual Fund has done, and what it could do with more support. Keep it to just one effort for starters and allow some time before evaluating the results.

Form clutter is the enemy of timely response; since the primary objective of your membership renewal is to renew the member, look at past donation performance and consider the tradeoffs before you decide. In the scenario at right, dues revenue is 600x greater than donor revenue. Even if the inclusion of an additional choice led to only 2% or 3% of members to think about it, delay processing, and thus not pay until the next renewal form is sent, I'd skip the check-off.

If many of your renewing members go online to close the deal, you might include an alternative checkoff there if it can be programmed in what remains a very clean, neat Member Application. But if you have to direct them to a second donor screen to complete the transaction, I wouldn't—it's again a distraction from the membership renewal. As an alternative, choose a logical time to mount a dedicated fundraising effort among renewing members, say 4 months into the new membership year for that individual. A dedicated effort will effectively cultivate and fundraise to the prospective donor.

Our fundraising work has shown quite a few charities who generate 15+% of their total direct response funds through "second asks" (i.e. gifts made in response to a solicitation included with the donor acknowledgement/confirmation form for their first gift). So we know that good donors will give frequently, but asking for a gift within seconds of the online member renewal will get a response that generates a small fraction of what you can generate with subsequent targeted efforts. It makes sense to allow sufficient space and time between efforts to cultivate, perhaps suggest and explain other successful fundraising techniques such as matching gifts, restricted fund solicitation, major/planned giving inquiries, and continuity giving through EFT or credit card.

By far the best performance achieved by associations is with forms that are prepopulated with a suggested gift that the renewing member must consciously omit if they don't want to give. Ideally a personalized gift array featuring their highest previous contribution + a small multiple to upgrade them, or a flat amount slightly higher than the historical average gift made by all donors, if you can't do that. If the vast majority of your members are relatively indifferent toward your Annual Fund as a cause, a large proportion of them who currently don’t take the active step of opting into the forms you used in the past also won't take the active step of opting out of making a reasonable donation. You could easily go from 4% of members donating with a $25 average gift to a 40% rate with a $35 average gift. This would be an impressive increase in the proportion who give, but of course it's still not much money: $50,000 with 5000 members for example.

It would be key to go any of these option prepared to address the occasional member complaint. As your members are fundraisers themselves, they should understand the techniques and not be terribly resistant to them. So many good marketing programs are killed in response to kneejerk reactions of just a few individuals; if you address those complaints quickly and in-person, you have an opportunity to turn them around (or at worst, agree to disagree but show good business courtesy) while accepting those few contacts as a cost of doing business and a slight deduction from the otherwise positives of higher participation, more revenue & awareness for your Annual Fund.

Bottom line, effective association foundation fundraising often begins with managing your checkoffs (not your Checkovs!), consciously and effectively.

-Kevin

Member Value is Something You Talk About ... AND Measure

2010-05-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

It's becoming far more common to think about our value proposition in associations, yet these discussions often seem to debate qualitative issues. To me member value is primarily an empirical thing—something we can measure.

Certainly, guiding the activities that generate member value requires a strategic mindset, and tactics drive the success of the activities that 'feed' value, but measurement is not tough to do or to interpret. Data analysis is a nice way to disarm some of the ambiguities and unnecessary level of navel-gazing that often seems to accompany these discussions. ('Values' on the other hand are relative, and the basis of one's perceived value varies by person, but this is irrelevant to our ultimate goal.)

Thinking very directly and simply, I summarize and understand value with very simple premises:
- You use things you need and like.
- If you like the experience, you'll like and probably need the thing more.
- If you don't like it, you won't use it.
- If you don't use it, you won't value it very much.
- If you don't like or use it, you probably won't tell people unless they ask (since it's not polite to complain).
- If you don't know what something is, you can't use it.
- If you don't know much about it, you're unlikely to use it.
- To figure out what it is, people talk to each other before they'll ask you. Then they will complain.

This isn't much of a framework, but it gives a very practical and easy to understand way to process your member/customer experience metrics regarding awareness, satisfaction, importance, and usage. So often I see research done to collecting data that collects new findings, compiles data that's been collected previously, then reports them in a 'sports story' format without actually guiding the analysis creatively to help us understand and influence our value chain.

If we do ask our audience these basic questions and really work with the resulting data, we shouldn't have to worry much whether we're serving the profession/industry at large or our members; defining success only by membership and/or revenue, operating more like a non-profit or a business, or if we're measuring success by inputs and outcomes. Either way it's key to collect and work with this data; if we're not, that's just bad management, period. - Kevin

Advice on Optimal Email Frequency (Part #3 of 3)

2010-05-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

It's easy to critique email programs and to philosophize. To end this series, we suggest the following approaches …

Continually test your messages for the best approach, relying on both clickthroughs and open rates as testing criteria. For promotions, often the former; for general interest communications, the latter (even though it is an increasingly flawed measure due to mobile devices, etc.).
Experiment with truly new formats periodically, giving each of them several chances to catch on and outperform the current formats you use. For example when we launched an e-newsletters with our donor base at CRS, we tested the basics (length/tone of subject line, acronym vs. organization name), content (which lead story to feature first, second, third and so on), content format (full article in text, headline only, x lines ending with ellipses leading to the web article). As I recall my staff didn't like it, since this alone entailed perhaps 45 unique combinations, but it was more easily done over several issues, testing the combinations, choosing winners, ties and losers, then testing again to ensure the content didn't drive the findings. (It's interesting as I dug through my own emails to see that the format we tested in has continued to change, so that it looks far more like a personal letter than before ... I hope this also reflects testing more so than personal preferences.)
Pending test results, I'd also seek to maintain a frequency of regular communications focused on industry news and information to be weekly at minimum, then delivered at a regular, consistent time that's convenient for the members.
Rely as much as possible on using your newsletter formats to carry promotional messages for events and products with navigation bars, banner ads, and advertorial copy—i.e. use frequent contact, but put the promotions in their place, a little less important than the content that members tend to value and not see as self-serving to the organization. As with print media, most of us notice ads better when we're reading editorial content than when we're given a purely promotional insert. Standalone promotional emails will seem to perform better, but to use a traditional mailbox analogy, if you're presented with a magazine and a pile of flyers, chances are you will discard the latter and at least glance at the former.

Of course, one might object that, as associations, you have a different relationship with your constituency than traditional advertisers. This is true as long as you avoid engaging in a long term practice of carpet bombing them with email. -Kevin

Optimal Email Frequency Also Depends on What You're Saying (Part 2)

2010-05-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

Through client work, and "show of hands" exercises at several recent presentations, I know many associations apply very conservative limits to their regular all-member communications. Monthly appears to be a common, acceptable frequency. Unfortunately, math is not in our favor. This means for someone receiving 100 emails per weekday, they have a 0.05% chance of seeing your carefully-constructed e-newsletter, all other things being equal.

In this context, it was interesting to contrast this under-communication scenario with listserv feedback from vendors/experts regarding "How many emails do you send for each event?" To quote two: "sending reminders one week, one day and one hour in advance .." and "for Associations with engaged members: 10 'marketing' messages per event Associations with wider, less engaged audience: up to 20 'marketing' messages per event."

This is great to maximize participation in a single event, but it might mean sending more emails for that event than you do all year for the association at large! And if you have multiple events, your 'regular' communications might dwindle to only 5% or 10% of the total messages you send. On the bright side, your odds of being read by the typical member/customer might rise as high to 1 in 100. On the down side, the content map for your e-communications might show a mix that's 5-10% substantive industry news, 5-10% housekeeping/transactional stuff, and 80-90% promotional content ... probably not the mix you had in mind. Depending on how you monitor member communications, you may not even be aware of it and the signal it sends to your audience.

The core messages you want to convey and the value you need to impart through your e-newsletter may be swamped by other, simpler messages that may collectively convey the impression that the organization 'exists primarily to sell you stuff' (to quote Scott) rather than provide pertinent information, educate, and support them and their industry/profession. -Kevin

Optimal Email Frequency: How Much is Too Much, and When Don't You Do Enough?

2010-05-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

Recently there have been questions on the ASAE listservs regarding optimal email frequency. It's hard to determine, overall and by specific goal: product, event or activity. Frequently the specific and overall objectives are in direct conflict with each other.

Many of us prefer empirical evidence over anecdotal, but we also have to ensure that our metrics show the big picture—impact on overall association performance—rather than metrics for a single campaign or a product (event, publication, etc.). It's very common in our associations to have motivated managers or outsourced service providers who can inadvertently abuse the email list and undermine member satisfaction, leading to unsubscribes, lower open rates, even lower renewals and overall participation.

Thinking back to presentations I've heard and/or given over the past couple months at Great Ideas and DigitalNow! regarding e-communications management, there are a few instructive points to consider:
* Ian Ayres (author of Supercrunchers) made a compelling case for associations that, if you're not conducting randomized tests/trials at least part of the time, you're not really doing your job of maximizing member value and satisfaction.
* In a GI session, none of my panelists and very few attendees had EVER done a randomized, A/B split test of their emails to determine what email approaches (frequency or format) work best for them.
* Another popular GI session featured speakers who were proudly explaining how well they boosted attendance for a single event through a systematic process of carpet-bombing with emails. (Judging from audience reaction/note-taking, they really liked the idea!)

These points embody "the fallacy of composition" reasoning that often applies in managing email:
* Ian is right: the best and perhaps only way to determine what works for your audience is to test alternative options head-to-head, pick statistically valid winners. Then test again, repeatedly against other options to ensure that your overall communications and programs are optimal.
* Without this process, our formats are determined by personal taste, past habits and convenience rather than what leads the audience to read & act. In the short term at least, this may mean being less efficient, but the long-term payoff comes from being more effective with the right format, frequency, messages, and segmentation.
* We also need to manage the process top-down and to avoid letting the 'tail wag the dog.' This means balancing the tactics used for specific events, products, advocacy issues etc. in a manner that doesn't swamp the organization-wide communications.

-Kevin

Learning From, If Not Using, the World of Mailing Lists

2010-05-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

Many of us don't make good use of the infrastructure of mailing lists that have developed around us over the past 35 or so years—since the days of the punch cards.

As associations we are often not attractive customers for them, as we might need only one, comprehensive list for a membership or conference promotion, if that. However, proactively engaging one who can filter various list providers is a sensible approach.

When you work with one, be sure to request the full datacards from them and check out the optional selects that the list includes. They will always be eager to rent a large file to you, but generalizing from many past campaigns, I can say that you rarely benefit from mailing outside the 1 or 2 segments that are most appropriate, within a much larger list or masterfile.

A good datacard typically provides one or two pages of description regarding profile and source of names: a box on the upper left will show your incremental CPM for using specific selects. For a sample, visit MGI or InFocus, two of the two major managers working in the association space.

Of course I'm assuming that you deal with smaller volumes of rental names and much narrower selects than do our peers in philanthropic and commercial marketing. If so we are less profitable customers-it takes more to make us happy and we generate less gross revenue for the list brokers & managers. If not, consider subscribing to SRDS for a year—it's a sensible investment that will give you some very large catalogs of lists that, at least in my case, are resources I have used for years. Counts may change, sometimes list managers will, but enough lists stay on the market in the same place to give you a good starting point when shopping for prospect lists.

-Kevin

Two Kinds of Premiums (Post #2 of 2)

2010-05-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

While we discuss the value of premiums in association marketing, it's important to keep in mind that there are actually two kinds. Many of us who think of premiums think purely in terms of back-end premiums, items that are probably in a $3 to $5 per item production range: thank-you gifts for joining or registering for $160 memberships or $495 conferences.

It's also worthwhile to consider front-end premium: items that fall in a very low-cost price range, such as the Habitat for Humanity version at the right. Front-end premia almost always outpull back-end premia, and by a wide margin. This is because they help with the first part of the direct marketing equation (get opened) rather than the second part (read me/take action).

Since there is always a delay in fulfillment and we live in an instant gratification world, the back end item is also less effective because it's only peripherally related to the offer. It helps, but probably won't contribute that much to put prospects over the edge (i.e. 'I'm thinking about joining, but the bag closed the deal').

For these kinds of items, consider items such as a custom-struck token or cling window sticker—a test cell of these items affixed to the reply or inserted in your standard approach might boost open rates sufficiently to generate enough lift in response compared to the control package, and enough to offset the probable 5- to 7-cent incremental cost you incur at rollout quantities.

At CRS I know the former lifted our donor acquisition response rates about 30% when we first tested and remained at that level at rollout, although we continued to test token designs and metal colors/finishes to be sure we had the right one. We also found the lift in response was offset by smaller gifts and somewhat lower renewal rates, but of course in your association, you can determine this through your own testing.

-Kevin

Using Promotional Items in Membership and Other Association Marketing

2010-05-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

(Note: this is the first of many posts repurposing some of our contributions to the ASAE, AFP, and DMA listservs. Sorry if this feels like "Deja Vu All Over Again" but it seems like a sensible approach to take what we've learned and shared specific to an association or non-profit's problem, and to put it in what we hope is a more permanent setting!)

Associations generally make little or no use of premiums in their marketing programs, which is unfortunate. When SHRM staff recently asked what's working (tote bags have worked well but they were looking for alternatives), my take was that any association program, particularly large ones, might consider emulating similar- or larger-scale programs on the philanthropic side, and to consider/test items with similar per-unit costs.

The DMA Nonprofit Conferences are a great resource here. I don't attend many after completing my succession ladder as chair of things, then the exec committee and my vice-chair role, but they share comparative results of tests, including response rates and average gifts for tests and programs.

It IS 'TMI' for those of us in associations who have fixed dues levels/offers, but they can inspire many creative ideas regarding back-end premium items for not only membership but also conferences and subscriptions that are often more expensive than the membership.

Some items that have stuck out in my mind over time include umbrellas, tote bags, t-shirts, and more professional-tone items such as personalized mugs and desk paperweights.

As associations we often have to balance 'tasteful' with 'effective,' and these two can have an inverse relationship. You might find yourself choosing items that make sense but don't perform as well as another more tacky option.

In SHRM's case, bags tested well, but they're not sure why... most of the successful premiums I tested into at CRS program didn’t make intuitive sense to me, either. In fact, while searching for an example of my past work, I found this hilarious, very public critique of my work! For any of you doing association marketing and who live in fear of complaints, nothing will help cure you of this like developing the thick hides we often need in the charity world.

-Kevin

How do You Hide Your Weak Spots?

2010-04-27T06:04:00.001-07:00

As the coach of my 10 year old son’s baseball team and my 12 year old daughter’s soccer team I have the good fortune of trying to teach both athletic and life skills to 25 girls and boys. I really enjoy it and try to make it really fun for the kids.

One of the biggest challenges I face is how to manage the desire of many of the kids to do well and win with the fact that some of the kids are simply not as athletically gifted as others. This is a constant struggle and I think it directly correlates to the business world. I have worked with, and worked at, many organizations, and I typically find there are weak spots on any team. Some times these weak spots are caused by lack of desire to give 100% but many times it is because a team member simply does not have the knowledge or the skills to do their job.

When I am arranging lineups for baseball and soccer I do my best to cover up for the weaknesses that some of the players have. This is my way of making sure that the kids who want to win have the best chance of doing so while not ruining the confidence and morale of the players who are not as strong. I also try to teach every player as much as I can so they have the tools to play well but unfortunately there is only one of me and I often do not have the time to give every player exactly what the need. I do not think this is the best strategy in the business world but I do believe it happens. How do you address weak spots on your team?

-Scott

What is a "Membership Model" Anyway?

2010-04-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

On the ASAE Membership Section Council we have been working on "identifying, cataloging, and developing a framework so that leaders can understand how associations are addressing a new world of membership and affiliation in the 21st century." (Well, that's verbatim from our list of Strategic Initiatives for 2009/2010 as any association exec or consultant recognizes the lingo.)

What has it meant in practicality? One of our early efforts in this area was a poll that we conducted online in November to collect potential case studies. We're only now following up with interviewees, but we have also developed some draft white papers regarding what those models could or should be. Not surprisingly, many of them don't look like most associations do today; I think of it as a corollary to Kevin Holland's key question "Why we all do the same stuff?" We are all shaped by the same forces and we react in similar ways, as individuals and organizations. I liken it to the same primeval factors that account for, say, why hills look pretty much the same all around the world—plate tectonics, volcanic activity, erosion, man's presence—all work the same, so why should they look any different?

One could argue that people have free will, and we're free to cast out to find and implement truly innovative membership models, but something always seems to holds us back. The actual report we're developing is much more interesting and constructive, but anyway I'd choose to slice it, our empirical review of membership organization structures in terms of their economics, the kind/degree of bundles of services, the number of tiers, the conscious structural relationships between members & customers, all might be described as falling within 'plus or minus 20%' of each other. You rarely see radical mutations, or structures that appear to be truly unique adaptations to the industry or profession that they serve.

Perhaps it's because we are (as staff and volunteers) risk-averse and we're more willing to act to fill holes in our existing slate of programs that we are to tinker with the fundamentals of what we've done that's gotten us through the first 25 or 50 years of our existence, but I know most of the innovative structures we describe in this project will be very different than what most of us have today. For inspiration we'll be looking to churches, retailers, online communities—a mix of traditional and new entities who have found ways to succeed relative to their mission, which hasn't necessarily equated to being profitable.

I think back to how we initially introduced this project to our peers in the association community: "Given the unprecedented economic downturn and ever-expanding technology landscape that is widening the range of choices that individuals and organizations have, we are seeking to identify associations who have or are in the midst of revitalizing, revamping, or resetting their business/association and membership models to steer a new course in advancing their mission." We have had some fascinating discussions, but to describe true innovation, we will be relying more on our imaginations than on current practice.

-Kevin

Are we Educating, Engaging and Satisfying ... or Overwhelming and Stressing Out Our Members?

2010-03-08T05:57:00.000-08:00

Here is what I have to read right now—

A bloglines reader with 371 unread blog posts
Tweetdeck filled with 734 unread tweets
The latest issue of Associations Now which is still in its polybag
The latest issue of Folio which has not even been touched
The last Membership Developments quarterly e-newsletter still unopened in my outlook inbox
Almost all of this is work related as I don’t really use blogs or twitter for a lot of personal stuff.

It is stressful to look at this list let alone think about the amount of content that is hiding behind the list. I have been working incredibly hard to manage the constant deluge of information but I have to admit that there are not enough hours in a day to read everything I want to. That is part of the reason why this list is so long.

I am writing about this because I assume that members of our associations are having the same challenge that I am having. Is providing content through social media, and all of the new media distribution channels in addition to the traditional methods a positive or a negative? Are our members having to decide what content is most important or most pertinent so they can prioritize all of the different content streams they receive from us as associations? Are we stressing out our members because they feel guilty about not being able to read everything associations are putting out there? Are we really providing valuable content or just repeating ourselves over and over again through different media and formats?

I am still trying to figure out the answer to many of those questions. I do have to tell you I am getting slightly burned out on social media. I know this sounds like blasphemy since I do think that social media can be a very valuable and effective tool. I just think there is so much content out there and that most of the social media outlets I participate in do not have much difference in thought or topic. Maybe I am doing something wrong but those days I am not able to get to all of the blog posts, tweets or facebook, LinkedIn or plaxo updates are no less satisfying or educational than the days that I somehow find time to read all of these things. Are you feeling this way, too? Any tips, suggestions or thoughts you have to share would be greatly appreciated.

Scott

Auto-renewal—Holy Grail or Holy Fail?

2010-02-10T13:25:00.000-08:00

During my career working for and in associations I have heard regular conversation about how to get members onto an auto-renewal program. Fortunately I have worked at a few large associations (AARP, National Geographic and American Association for the Advancement of Science) where we tried really hard to make auto-renewals work. We knew there were obvious benefits in that you could better project membership numbers, save money by cutting down the number of renewals notices being sent and better project cash flow to name just a few. My experience showed it was a very tough thing to make work. Here is a little about why I am curious to know if you think automatic renewal is the Holy Grail or the Holy Fail.

There are two types of auto-renewal: 1) credit card auto-renewal where are member gives you their credit card number and allows you to hit it at some agreed upon time and 2) what I like to call bill-me auto-renewal where a member basically agrees they are going to renew so you then bill them for their membership instead of sending them a renewal notice.

I know that bill-me auto renewal might sound like you are just changing the name of what you already send from a renewal notice to an invoice but it is not. For whatever reason, getting people to commit and then sending them more of a "you committed to renewing" notice instead of a "please renew" letter has shown to increase response rates. There is a lot to think about as you implement auto renewal. Some of the biggest things include:

1) How obvious are you going to make what they are signing up for? For some time, orgs were basically hiding the details of their auto-renew program .Personally I think it is better to disclose to members that they are signing up for auto-renew so you lessen the number of complaints/questions you receive.

2) What sources are you going use to implement auto-renewal? From my experience it is much easier to introduce auto-renewal in retention activities as opposed to acquisition. Members seem to be more comfortable giving a credit card number to an organization they are already involved with and know and trust.

3) Are you going to use a link-letter? A link-letter is basically a short letter that reminds people they have signed up for auto-renewal and that you are getting ready to hit their credit card.

4) Is your system set up and ready for auto-renewal? Most systems can handle this these days but before you jump into it make sure your system is ready.

Most of us now pay our cable bill, our newspaper subscription, our cell phone bill, our ISP and more by auto renewal yet getting people to agree to auto renewal for their membership seems to be a challenge. So do what you think? Is auto-renewal the Holy Grail or Holy Fail?

-Scott

What is more important? What I say or what I do?

2010-02-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

Test, test, test. That is the mantra of many traditional direct marketers. People like me believe that if you are not testing then you are not pushing the envelope in a way that allows you to make data based marketing decisions. Basically you are marketing in the dark and that is not beneficial for any organization.

Testing is a way to determine what will make your audience response. It is a way of listening to your audience so you can utilize that knowledge to attract more people in as cost effective manner as possible. Direct response tests, where the recipient is actually purchasing something whether it be a membership or a book or a meeting registration, provide the sender with actual potential purchasing behavior. This is great information to have because the sender can actually see what a recipient is willing to actually put money down to purchase.

In contradiction to this is trying to understand your audience through market research. Market research is very valuable so please do not think I am saying it does not have its place in any strategic marketing program. Ask my colleague Kevin Whorton if I know the value of market research, and I know we will agree. One of the shortcomings of testing potential purchasing behavior through market research methods such as surveys and focus groups is that it is primarily theoretical and there can be inherent biases. Participants are not asked to literally plop down a credit card, check or cash, so their actual purchasing decision may be different than if they were to literally "feel the pain" in their pocketbook or wallet. Participants may also be biased in that they want to provide a "strategic response"—they will try to tell you what they think you want to hear, not what they would actually do. This could be due to peer pressure, personality traits, or many other things that could lead to their not being 100% accurate in their response in the research study.

I will never forget an example from one of our CAM groups at a focus group the client association sponsored a few years back. The focus group was designed to help a publisher better understand what type of magazine participants were most interested in purchasing. The facilitator put out a wide range of magazines for attendees to review, ranging from “trashy” to “intellectual” magazines. During the focus group almost all participants said they would most likely read the more intellectual publications. At face value this could be very valuable information and a good predictor of future purchasing behavior. Before attendees left, they were told they could take any magazines home with them that they wanted to read later. Almost every person took the “trashy” magazines they just said they were not interested in reading. This is a great example of the bias inherent in some research that you should be aware of.

To me both ways of getting at customer/member/purchaser preferences are valuable. As long as we understand the type of information we are receiving, and know how to combine them to get a complete picture of current and potential purchasers, then we are headed in the right direction. Do you agree?

-Scott

What Do You Mean: "Ugly" Marketing Cuts Through the Clutter Best?

2010-01-24T14:19:00.000-08:00

During my life and my career I have seen a lot (some would say too much) direct mail. I have actually flooded many mailboxes with quite a bit of paper while I worked at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), National Geographic and AARP.

One phenomenon that always amazed me is the degree to which 2-color, relatively plain, targeted direct mail pieces perform better than comparable 4-color, fancy direct mail pieces with the same audience. Kevin has also attested through his fundraising work, membership work at Marketing General, and through attending many DMA conferences, that this is true across the association and philanthropic worlds. Yet, any marketer knows that more than half the battle in direct mail is getting your piece noticed and opened--so how can a bright, colorful package with lots of eye candy not accomplish that?

The reasons why 2-color performs better will vary across associations, but the reasons include:

1. 2-color is marginally less expensive to produce than 4-color, so the total responses and revenue generated mean higher return on investment, with the same response rates with 2- and 4-color.

2. Our prospective consumers are more knowledgeable than we may think; they know that companies are using colorful pieces to get their attention ... and their hard earned dollars.

3. A large part of why recipients respond to your direct mail is because they know at least a little about you, what you do and provide. These prospects know that money is required to perform your mission, and they may believe that 4-color, fancy packages are much more expensive. If they believe this, they can easily assume that you are spending too much money on your marketing at the expense of your core mission.

Of course, it is important to test 2-color versus 4-color, but I wanted to point out that what many of your peers or even you might describe as “ugly” packages work just as well if not better than 4-color packages. In your next campaign, try something that is 2-color in your next package, and let us know how it works for you!

-Scott

Social Media: Best When Done by the Young?

2010-01-12T04:11:00.001-08:00

I attended the 1st ever ASAE Super Swap last week and heard from a lot of great people with a ton of knowledge and really learned a lot. I also hope I contributed to what other attendees got out of the event since the key to a successful Idea Swap is each attendee sharing their own successes and failures to help other attendees solve their unique challenges.

During the afternoon session on meetings marketing the topic of using social media to drive attendance was brought up. There was quite a bit of good conversation about how social media is being used to drive attendance which led to some people in the room wondering how associations with limited staff resources are able to do social media in addition to everything else they are already doing. The unanimous response seemed to be to simply find a young person to do it.

Personally I think that social media needs to be used strategically and must fit into an organization’s multimedia marketing plan so a younger person may not be the solution to maximizing your success with social media. Am I off base?

-Scott

Communications Reviews: Look at Your Organization As an Outsider Does

2010-01-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

When we review our marketing/communications—call it an "audit" or "review" or whatever you like, there's an incredibly simple approach I recommend that I don't see used very often, even though it takes maybe 30 minutes to do. I started to "tell" a lot as I began writing this, but I thought, better to "show" instead.

1. Home Sweet Homepage--At a Glance
It's such a truism that the website remains your entrée to those who don't know you that it almost goes without saying. But in turn, what are the impressions that these folks form? I decided to visit ASME because it's big, very successful and professional, and I don't know anyone there anymore. There is nothing special about my random choice, just an illustration of an association website that I bet will look at lot like yours when you look at it closely.

Before you scroll lower, it's very easy to wonder "what's the big deal?" The homepage, like the overall site, has lots of content. ASME is being very transparent, the Strategic Roadmap is front and center. Visit the site and you'll see that it makes very good use of its CMS so there is new content on the upper left that clearly rotates to keep the content fresh.

2. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Landing Page for Strangers
Key to my point, there is an "About ASME" banner at the top of this page. It basically takes the first-time visitor by the hand and leads them to a less-crowded but still very content-packed page that summarizes the organization, albeit with the same right navigation banner featuring the Calendar of Events, Codes & Standards, Courses, Distance Learning, Books, Conference Papers, and Periodicals.

The Get More button at the lower right (not a joke, these are after all engineers) goes into another visually complex page that presents the ASME Product Catalog with titles presented in order of sales. Not a bad sequence although of course I realize I'm trying to look at the organization as an outside when I'm approaching it as someone who knows little about engineering and I'm sure a real engineer would have clicked somewhere by now and happily immersed themselves in pertinent data.

3. But How DID You Find Me?
With an audience-centric site review, figuring out how people find you is just as important as what they find when they get there. Not being an engineer or conversant with the hottest topics in the field, I used the generic term "mechanical engineering resources" and looked to see ASME in the search results in Yahoo (call me a traditionalist...)

I suspect the fine print is a bit difficult, but when you do this exercise you can see there is a lot of competition: paid ads in the right column, universities that seem to do a very good job of search engine optimization in he search results and career sites and content-aggregator sites that also do pretty well.

Now, it may be that this term is too generic to paint a true picture of ASME's search engine performance but the key point of this exposition is for you to plug in the terms used most often to find you--and perhaps to think of search terms that are being used commonly and aren't finding you.

4. I Found Myself Pretty Easily, Though
I don't know how often many associations "try to find themselves" among the trillions of potential hits, but I think it's common for us to use our association name. In this exercise, I simply searched for the association name and the world looks quite a bit different. There are only three sponsored results and paid ads cluttering the results, and these are for ASME products (Standards and Codes). ASME hits appear first and then there's the Wikipedia entry, a strand of student chapters, coverage of ASME events on other sites--enough to 1) drive traffic to the site, 2) direct product-focused customer traffic to other sites where presumably ASME generates revenue and demonstrates relevance, and 3) demonstrate to a key audience that ASME is a network of local communities where they can interact.

5. In Conclusion ....
The point of this post is to remind you to look at the basics of your web presence, because tweaking there will yield by far the greatest results in your marketing. This review includes content & design, and search results.

I find with my clients (and in fairness, to my own rudimentary site!) that we often don't do the basics of reviewing our site as it must look to others, and to ask if we have at least a trapdoor to a simpler introduction to those who don't know us.

I know from my own association positions how siloed we can become even with the best of intentions, so it can be hard to perpetually manage a site to keep it relevant to your core constituency and sticky enough to reward and promote frequent visits. But the good news about your presence to the outside world is that it IS simpler to do and maintain--it should be visually less complex and most of the content can remain static for longer periods of time. But the most important step is to try to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and to consider how your site is helping them form or reconfirm their impressions, self-promted, driven by a conversation, or a reference in the trade press. Ideally you should interact with first-time visitors but the 80/20 rule says you can learn the most by periodically auditing your own site and search results, and tweaking to accommodate.

Kevin

Why are Associations Not Using Social Media for Direct Response?

2009-12-31T14:31:00.000-08:00

Associations love looking at case studies from for-profit companies that have been successful in growing their business using social media. The technology that many associations have been really looking at lately is twitter and when doing so they point to companies like Dell and California Tortilla as companies that are doing it right. To me what these companies, and many others, are doing is using a new medium to implement traditional direct response marketing.

I follow both of these companies on twitter and the majority of what I receive from them is reminders about special limited time offers and/or reminders about ways I can use their "membership" program to my advantage. I do not see how this is any different than using a direct mail package, an email or even a phone call or fax to get people to purchase something yet I get the feeling that many marketers feel like these companies are truly breaking new ground.

Am I missing something? I thought that part of the value of social media is creating community. Are these companies doing that? Or are they forming a community of people that are simply looking for a good price or a discount from a certain corporate entity? To me it seems like the second option but I would love to hear your thoughts. Regardless of whether what companies like Dell and CalTort are doing is actually building community and building engagement they are successfully growing revenues using special limited time offers in social media. Association professionals are watching this and seeing the method achieve results yet I do not see many associations doing what they are doing. Many associations are now using twitter and Facebook and other technologies to start conversations and inform their audiences.

What I don't see them doing is using social media to truly drive response. I have only heard of a few organizations that have used limited time discounts or special benefits in tweets and Facebook postings. I think it would be great if like California Tortilla an association had double rewards Tuesday where members would get 2 books for the price of 1. Or if, like Dell, they would tweet out special discounts on products and services that the membership would value. These types of things need to be done strategically but they are easy to implement with the technology we have today. Why are associations not doing more of this? I can't figure it out. Can you?

-Scott

Addressing Convenience: When What Works for You Doesn't Work for Me

2009-12-30T06:29:00.000-08:00

One of the things we will cover here on the blog periodically is a series of terms that we—in "the association world" and the outside world—don't define well or think about very clearly. Concepts such as convenience, networking, and value mean different things to different people and often each person has a nuanced way of thinking about things. These terms are easy for us to use in project and marketing plans as shorthand code for something much more complex, which helps us write the document, but doesn’t help when we do have to review our operations. Basically, shorter sentences can come at the expense of true understanding of our challenges and opportunities to improve.

"Convenience" is something our members & customers will often cite as a reason for preferring something—typically formats for publications, membership materials, educational/learning opportunities, etc.

In a magazine circulation study we conducted this summer, a large trade association was trying to boost magazine paid subscription and find a way to integrate its relatively new electronic version into the mix. To some degree, these two objectives could be cross-purposes. For example, if you make electronic use easy, it facilitates pass-on, and reduces paid circulation as a result. Or conversely, if you push paid readership far higher through aggressive circulation marketing, you take market attention away from the relatively new electronic version and may be fighting a losing battle long-term if preferences are naturally migrating toward electronic. We all knew going into the engagement that it might be a lose-lose situation: we might study market needs, demand drivers, and historical trends, but reasonably conclude that no amount of effort might help the association accomplish its goals. Then again, not doing something is a decision, too, and purposeful inertia is a valid mode of operation, sometimes.

When we measured satisfaction with the print/electronic formats and stated media preferences, then cross-tabulated them, we found some interesting things:
• People who prefer electronic publications and information (phrased in the abstract) were less likely to be satisfied with the electronic publication.
• More importantly, this group was a minority of the membership.
• Regardless of their preference, when asked why they prefer print or electronic, overwhelmingly members indicated "convenience" in their open-ended comments.

In essence, members were telling us that they were wedded to one format or the other because they fit their lives very well. We drilled down into these findings with personal interviews to learn more. Those who prefer paper wanted something they could take home or keep at home and read in the living room or the bathroom. Those who preferred electronic wanted something they could read on the job, that would be easier to search, and wouldn't pile up in their office. Media preferences and convenience didn't fluctuate widely by employee job function, age cohort, size of firm, or any other of the usual suspects that one uses to help explain findings in terms of audience segments.

We concluded the engagement with recommendations on messaging, database-driven circulation efforts, better pricing, etc. However, understanding "convenience" did serve an important function: it told us not to make electronic a focal point of the campaigns, and to recognize that it's a complement rather than a replacement for the print vehicle.

In your associations, how have you dealt with publication format preferences over time? Have you replaced print titles with electronic to "lead" the profession into the future? Did you do it for a single title or your entire array of communications vehicles? If so, how did you measure success of the conversion—total complaints, satisfaction with the new vehicles, exit surveys?

The iconoclast in me says that most mature consumers, including you and me, form preferences that are so personal and intrinsic that we rarely self-examine them, and we certainly don't articulate them well to others when they try to measure or describe them. As a result, research efforts can fail to accurate measure member/customer attitudes, and even if they do, the findings may feel inconclusive to us.

I would contend that it's important to ask the questions, and to probe below surface level concepts such as it is "convenient." Or you "did fine." You'll understand your readers and non-readers far better, and you'll probably find that the best choice between print & electronic remains "both."

It may be more efficient to use only one format to deliver your content, but it's less effective. In an environment where perhaps 60% prefer e- and 40% prefer print/mail, is it a good business decision to bravely disenfranchise a large proportion of your audience? You might have made the move, resurvey five years later and find the preference is now 80%/20%, but this doesn't validate the decision. The apparent shift could reflect a change in preferences vs. a steady loss of former members who continue to prefer the format you eliminated? Other research we've conducted shows that format preferences migrate very slowly, if at all, depending on the industry or profession. It's not the stampede toward electronic that we all probably expected 10-12 years ago.

Even if research may lead to "analysis paralysis" in cases such as this, I think that would have been a better outcome for some of our association than to make wholesale changes that carry a huge opportunity cost in the form of lost members and others who feel less connected without seeing your logo in their mailbox from time to time.

-Kevin 45 years old, ASAE member for 19 years, prefers print and electronic

Our Goals Are to Gather, Learn and Share

2009-12-27T16:26:00.000-08:00

As I am looking back on all of the educational experiences I have heard about, paid to attend, participated in for free and facilitated through College of Marketing in 2009 I am amazed at all of the great education that is out there that is relevant to what I do for my clients and my colleagues in the association community. There are so many people out there helping to educate the association community with all of the latest strategies and tactics that an association marketer might want to take advantage of.

In order to provide top-notch, expert information for the association marketing community at an affordable price we have big plans for 2010. Some of the activities we have already confirmed are as follows:

1. An even more robust schedule of face-to-face seminars that includes presentations from some of the true experts of the association industry.

2. A growing number of webinars that are held both live and are pre-recorded. Our plan for early 2010 is to be able to strategically package webinars together so you can receive access to a large amount of expertise at a fair price.

3. Keep the conversation on the College of Association Marketing LinkedIn community lively and educational so it is increasingly valuable to our community members.

4. Continue to share knowledge, resources and expertise through this blog which will allow you an opportunity to comment, critique and share your thoughts as well.

5. Emails sent out after an event that include some highlights of the event and also a snippet or two of video so that if you are unable to attend you can still gain some value from the event.

6. We are also moving ahead in other key areas including several white papers and more presentations outside the DC area including state society of association events.

As we reach the end of 2009 we want to thank you for your support throughout the year. If you have any ideas you would like to share and have suggestions on topics, activities or other things we should consider doing do not hesitate to comment here or email us at any time.

Happy Holidays and here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2010.

-S

How to Maintain a Solid Commitment to Mediocrity

2009-12-25T20:11:00.000-08:00

As I was reading Scott Briscoe’s recent post on Acronym titled Is Mediocrity Really The Worst Option, Scott’s comments that “you should never expend resources on something you know is mediocre” really caught my attention.

For quite some time I have been hearing about how workers, both for-profit and non-profit, are struggling with too much to do and therefore a lack of work-life balance. In many ways I believe this is due to a lack of data to effectively drive decision making in combination with a severe lack of prioritization. I have noticed that many staffers spend quite a bit of time on projects that do not have a positive ROI (ROI not necessarily meaning money, but any sort of result) and this worries me.

It worries me because many times this focus on activities that do not move the association forward in some way detracts from a staffer’s ability to focus on activities that would have a more positive outcome and/or detracts from their ability to work reasonable hours, have a personal life, and avoid burnout and stress. I am sure there are other reasons why association staff are focusing on projects and activities that do not have the impact as others they could be working on. If you have experienced any yourself, please share them here.

-Scott

Finding Resources for Membership and Associations in General

2009-12-23T02:29:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I'm impressed by the fact that NOT reinventing the wheel is both efficient and helpful. As we launch this blog, I am well aware that there are so many others out there, all offering great advice for associations--we are maybe the 150th in line in terms of chronology and value for now. In a recent communications survey I conducted with CalSAE, one of the evocative comments when we asked about blog reading & posting behavior was "Seriously, who has time for this??" and I can relate. The key is to become a "go-to" source of information you can actually use, which means sometimes directing you to overlooked information sources that are pertinent to your work.

In the interests of repurposing content, I found these articles in my digital "paper trail" in the Avectra Academy newsletter. I'm including a link to our articles regarding non-member data collection and retention. Of course it's a bit selfish to tout only our contributions: you should sign up for this newsletter and others like it to tap into a great stream of resources and how-tos, courtesy of the largest firms serving our association industry. Along with RSS feeds and the ASAE listservs, these newsletters are great ways to ensure that content flows to you. Some things you may notice it in real time becuase it's fascinating today, but other content is nice to have in your email archives for easy search--to address those information needs that pop up next month but until then weren't even on your radar screen.

I am often surprised by how many of my friends are like the CalSAE member, who may inadvertently cut themselves off from resources that really can be assets in the workplace to avoid information overload. For example, a suprisingly small proportion of ASAE members subscribe to their listservs (where I practically live, and which their surveys still document as the #1 or #2 service for many). Some don't get it and don't subscribe; others use them and then unsubscribe becuase the volume of real-time emails IS a lot like "drinking from the firehose." I personally use it on a digest basis because I don't need 120 extra emails a day; I'd rather get 12 emails at midnight compiling everything by functional area and then keyword search later in my email archives. Ditto for e-newsletters. It's a bit of a paradox, but I think the ubiquity of the Web has made us complacent and somewhat inefficient when it comes to identifying and using resources. If you don't believe me, think back to when the last time was that you spent less than 1 minute searching for relevant, substantive content on the Web and actually found the exact professional resource you were looking for? (With the help of Boolean search techniques [and/or, " "] great for finding song lyrics, but certainly not case studies of effective association web strategies.)

Bottom line, you can look forward to future posts here that share more resources through links and/or footnotes on key topics. We feel your pain and appreciate the need for accessible information since we have certainly been there ourselves!

Members are Much More Than a Checkbook

2009-12-21T05:54:00.000-08:00

I recently wrote about how critical it is for associations to continuously evaluate how they are communicating to members and make sure to change things that are not effective. To add on to that I think it is critical that associations talk to their members on a consistent basis, not just when they want them to purchase something. Over time the typical member communication strategy has become something like this:

1. Member joins or renews—thank you for joining or renewing package goes out
2. Annual Meeting comes up so members receive numerous promos asking them to pay to attend the Annual Meeting
3. A new publication or video or webinar gets released so members receive numerous promos asking them to purchase whatever it is you are selling
4. Your foundation has a critical issue it wants to focus on so members receive a number of communications asking them to support your foundation
5. It is now 90 days before their membership expires so they start to receive renewal notices asking them to renew their membership

Since they have joined/renewed the only communication members have received that is not asking them to pay for something is probably the print and electronic publications that the association produces. Associations have come to treat their members as checkbooks, not people or organizations. This has to change and even though it takes more time and effort to talk to your members on a consistent basis while not asking for money your members will respect your more and therefore their loyalty to the association will increase and their likelihood of renewal will as well. Is the time and effort you need to figure out a more member centric communications plan important? I think so.

-Scott

Member Communications—The same ol’ same ol’ does not work!

2009-12-20T19:04:00.000-08:00

As I have had the good luck to work with more and more associations I have had the opportunity to view member communications from small associations, large associations, trade associations and individual societies.

I am regularly amazed at how the member communications of so many associations have not changed in years. The same number of communications are being sent, the same media are being used, the same timing is being adhered to, the same messages are being used, etc, etc. There is no way that what any association did 10, 5 or even 2 years ago is effective being done in the exact same way that it was at that time.

There are so many new needs of our members and so many more ways to communicate with members now than there was even last year. Why are we not spending as much time as possible on member communications which has a huge impact on our organization?

-Scott

"Everybody Loves the Smell of His Own Brand"

2009-12-18T06:49:00.000-08:00

As I read the sports pages AND the business pages regarding the Amazing Tiger Woods Implosion, it makes me think about how as associations we manage our own brand (BTW sorry for the bad Austin Powers reference in the title!)

I think Tiger will be okay—they do project a loss of 2/3 of his endorsement income so he'll only make $30 million a year, by one estimate—which financially makes him the size of a larger association if one includes his tour earnings once he returns. This is of course a spurious comparison, but I do think about the parallels between image management and branding for the big guy, the small guy, and the association, and how we might consider the parallels when we assess our brand awareness and/or go about "rebranding." A few of the things that strike me, because I love numbered lists:
1) There is ALWAYS a personification that shapes our association brand images. Whether it's a college or sports team with an anthropomorphic mascot, a Kardashian, or each of us dutifully following career counseling advice to manage our lives as if we were "Kevin Inc." we are recognizing that as people we embody a brand. In associations, as in life, our audiences form strong connections with the acronym, organization name, the mission/vision, and the person/people who lead us. I know none of us really misses the symbolism and importance of having the right companies, agencies, or expert represented on our Board, but sometimes we miss the negative impact and opportunity costs generated by our volunteer recognition practices. In some associations I've worked for, you'd have a hard time telling who the Executive Director is. Instead the association appears to be led every year by a different guy who serves as spokesperson and top individual in the hierarchy. The result is a bit of jarring discontinuity and a general fuzzy sense within the marketplace of "Who are those guys?"

2) People are naturally looking for more authenticity from companies, just as members and donors do from their associations, but I believe authenticity can actually conflict with the power of our brand. I enjoyed hearing James Gilmore at ASAE Annual speak on the topic, but I fear that the structure that tends to bake in authenticity—a representative democracy-type structure, servant leaders, and a pluralistic nature—all inhibit us from consciously changing our brand to be something more evocative and compelling. Unlike political campaigns and parties or corporate leaders who put a premium on "staying on message," we will always have staff and leaders who "prefer the way things were" and will act and speak in ways that don't stick to the new script. Especially when they serve as de facto faces of the association with specific audience segments or rotate into serving as the spokesman that also spells trouble for continuity in the brand image — even conflict in what the human voices expressing the brand say it is for some period of time.

3) Associations should do a better job of assessing brand value and positioning. Interbrand and AC Nielsen measure and publicize the annual brand equity of top firms. It's a commonly-accepted business axiom that the brand is a valued asset, perhaps the single most valuable one. Since it can convert a plastic tube or glass container filled with colored liquid into a $1.75 lower-shelf shampoo OR a $280 per ounce fragrance behind a locked perfumerie counter, the brand is a powerful thing for manufacturers and products that drive profitability and also define the business model, public perception and positioning of the firm. But I do wonder why as associations we don't attempt to measure ours—at least what we stand for and what our members and customers believe about is, if not necessarily the value of the brand itself. In a less-competitive environment, that may be a lower-priority information need … to paraphrase Baz Luhrmann "The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself." But it's still something we should try to understand, shape and improve.

To bring it back to Tiger, we have far longer "careers," our defined market is a lot smaller, and we tend to embody far greater stability. A mega-celebrity in our culture is like the candle the burns one-fourth as long and fifty times brighter across society. But it doesn’t mean we can't learn from what their publicity and marketing arms do best and adapt what we can, particularly when it comes to maximizing the benefit of the personal aspect that is baked into all of our organizations.

-Kevin Inc.

"Amazing Grace": How Sweet Thou Aren't

2009-12-17T05:25:00.000-08:00

Free months of membership? Thanks! I'll take it!

I recently became aware that my membership in an organization of which I am member had expired over 3 months ago. I had no idea that my membership had expired because for some reason I never received notification and I also never stopped receiving benefits. The entire time that I was expired I continued to receive access to the member’s only sections of their website, copies of their print publication, members-only pricing on events I signed up for as well as being able to continue to serve in any volunteer roles which I was serving. My question to that organization is why? Why would any organization allow a member to continue to receive benefits after they are in effect no longer paying for access to these benefits as their membership term has expired?

When I ask associations why they “grace” members months of membership the answers I tend to hear are as follows:
1. This is the way it has always been done
2. Lots of our members end up coming back at some point any way so why would we shut them off
3. Our processes are not set up to get a renewal notice until real close to their expiration date so it would not be fair to shut them off at expiration.

To me, unless you can guarantee that 100% of the members that you give free months of membership end up coming back I see no legitimate reason to enact this practice. I feel this way for a few reasons as follows:

1. You are rewarding your members for renewing late in the hopes that they will come back. Reality is that they will not all come back so those folks that do not come back get a period of membership for free.
2. You are losing money because you are not getting dues for this free period yet you continue to pay to serve these soon-to-be lost members.
3. You are training your members to renew late and unless you maintain their original renewal date you will end up giving even current members months of membership for free.

I don’t understand why many associations are so hesitant to start the renewal process earlier and then shut off members who have not paid when they expire? To me losing access to the things you are no longer paying for is the definition of expire. Shutting folks off when they expire allows you to use it as the stick to make people renew on time. For example, what if the association I described above had locked me out of the members-only sections of the website the minute after I didn’t pay my dues when my membership expired. I use the website regularly so the next time I would have gone the website and tried to log in I would have realized my membership had expired and I would have renewed right then and there instead of waiting the 3 months after I had officially expired to renew my membership. I did renew eventually but a lot could have happened during the 90 days I was expired and still receiving benefits that could have led to my not renewing. Is this something that associations can risk? As a membership professional, I think not.

-Scott

"Data Mining for Dummies"

2009-12-15T05:27:00.000-08:00

Today as I work through a data-mining proposal, I am going down "memory lane" as I rethink of my own experiences managing & doing these projects, and in turn to the varying approaches and degrees of success that association membership, marketing, and conference departments take with this critical function. I'd like to share with you a few case studies and lessons learned.

I am somewhat odd, in that I actually started my professional career as a computer programmer/analyst in the Consumer Price Index. The old personnel line in the federal government was "we can't afford techies, so we train them." Apparently my background as a failed PhD candidate in economics and editor of my college newspaper gave me a nice combination of left-brain/right-brain aptitude to make me worth training and quickly promoting: I have to say that I learned and did more in database analytics in two short years than I ever did again in many years of association-related work.

What does this have to do with associations? Plenty, I should think. The CPI gave me a great tool set and a perspective that works to some extent with every association I worked with as staff.

At CPI, infrastructure, mission, and support network all contributed to and benefited from data mining. Our explicit mission was to collect and data on product characteristics and their prices to develop and report a series of monthly indices, so our small army trooped around retail outlets to collect 200,000 price quotes a month; forty of my colleagues would review their work through exception reports; a smaller team of us were engaged in ongoing quality initiatives to ensure that we were measuring inflation properly. On any given day there would be 3 or 4 staff accessing the central database running simulations of alternative methodologies or writing academic-quality papers, and many more reviewing the individual data points to question odd changes or to accept/reject new models and other substitutes in our sample.
At NAHB I/we did large dataset analysis in support of their Housing Economics journal as we monitored patterns in housing sales, design trends, etc. but the thought of applying this brainpower to marketing didn’t really work for our very large annual meeting or our grassroots/federated structure of membership.
At ASHP, I worked with many pharmacists on staff who grew up reading the professional literature and many were editors for our AHFS drug information product—a several thousand page annual subscription service that served as a guide for drug use in most hospitals in the world. Yet I was the first person to convert their aging AS/400 database into something we could use to segment the audience to drive marketing plans, budgeting, results and penetration analysis. With a database of 180,000 names but only 30,000 members and maybe 15,000 other customers, we needed this service—we just didn't have it.
At CRS, we used Pledgemaker to manage a database with 350,000 active donors; another 700,000 former donors; millions of historical donations; and 40 million contact records created by our acquisition program. Unlike membership organizations, in disaster relief operations, there are donors who lie dormant for years but when a tsunami or earthquake or colossal famine strikes, these donors are assets who don't find it strange to be contacted and who generously give again if you're among the first to contact them. Once we hired staff, purchased FirstLogic and SAS, created a duplicate donor file for analysis, we were able to do far more, saving $250,000 a year on data processing bills, spending some of that money to collaborate with an outside firm to create scoring models for each acquisition campaign to save several million more and improve performance.

When ASAE released 7 Measures of Success and rightly named data driven decision-making as one of the 7 Measures, I was glad to read it and not surprised at all to see it not have much of an effect at all. I still vividly remember being asked to speak for the Texas Medical Association at Digital Now! a few years ago, as they couldn't travel that year to tell their own story. In my case I have simply been a marketer and association exec who brought his toolkit of aptitudes with him to each new position, just as you do. I often meet and work with staff who quickly identify themselves as "not numbers people" and I totally understand.

However, today there is almost no excuse to NOT have this capability, somewhere inside or outside your organization. We already invest so much in expensive AMS and in the maintenance of our data. In case studies such as TMA, ASHP or CRS there is an incredible return on investment from analyzing and leveraging this data, even if it only occurs occasionally, through data exports and using outside analysts to do the queries, reports, and analysis. Your stored knowledge of your customer base is such an incredible asset waiting to be harvested, it seems a shame that so many of the success stories reflect the contributions of odd staff with "extra skills" in their background rather than a conscious, purposeful effort to harvest the past and thereby predict future behavior.

In future posts I will do much more to explain our methods, philosophies, and illustrate key examples to help others do their own in-house data mining, but for now I wanted to begin with a history lesson...

-Kevin

Successful Non-Dues Revenue/Association Sales & Marketing Program

2009-12-13T07:48:00.000-08:00

We conducted our most recent College of Association Marketing program on Association Sales and Marketing in mid November and we wanted to share some of what we presented during that program. (I am a little late in posting this, but then again starting a blog was one of my New Year's resolutions for 2009 so being a month behind is better than my normal track record!)

Scott presented on creating a sales culture within your association, I spoke about marketing for non-dues revenue generating programs within your association, and Lewis Flax now a consultant and formerly with IEG, the big sponsorship consulting firm, addressed overall strategies and concepts for maximizing revenue working with firms who want to sponsor, advertise or exhibit. This program was the second time we delivered it in 2009; I jumped in this time to provide more of a DM & marketing perspective on things, as I have seen many and fee-based webinars on "non-dues revenue" but most of it has skewed toward sales and away from the may ways we need to promote our own products to our members and significant others who read our publications or live on our email and mail lists.

Here are a few of the key points that Lewis, Scott & I made in the program:
1) Work in partnership with your corporate supporters. Take into account their strategic goals and how you can help achieve them.
2) Build sponsorship programs that aren’t afraid to grant exclusivity and other features that sponsors want. Your goal is to be fair in extending opportunities to your community of suppliers, vendors, etc. then be free to confer the advantages to the firms that decide to participate at your stated price and within your conditions.
3) Creating a true sales culture requires ongoing, sustained effort. As with membership, to some extent sales is “everybody’s job” even when one department or person is responsible for closing the deal and maintaining the ongoing relationship. The sponsor, exhibitor, advertiser, or content provider signs a deal with the association; the association needs to honor the deal, cooperatively and enthusiastically.
4) Non-dues revenue marketing requires effective use of all 4P’s to members and other potential customers: good pricing, placement, promotion, and product development.
5) Many of our associations underperform in these areas: often it’s hard to “sell to our friends” and we err on the side of under-pricing, soft-pedaling our messaging, and properly enlisting partners such as chapters and influential members to spread good word of mouth and serve as effective distribution channels.
6) Designing and delivering effective services is critical to non-dues revenue: assessing and improving quality is critical. So is assessing user experience and audience perceptions to know which “sales objections” need to be acknowledged, addressed, and overcome wherever possible through our pricing policies and promotion.
7) This is just as true for subscription products, catalog merchandize items, or certification programs as it is for conference attendance; our challenge is to master marketing across a very diverse product line and leverage our core strength—deep knowledge and strong affinity with the industry and/or profession that we serve.

Of course, this was just the tip of the iceberg of what we discussed in the program, but "stay tuned" over time and we will share more as we begin to use this blog as a tool for sharing what we learn from the roundtable discussions and lectures at COA, through our normal client and volunteer work, and what I hope will be pertinent observations gathered from the news and the outside world in general.

-Kevin

Helping Make Business Development Work for Our Members: Insights from BNI

2009-12-06T02:33:00.000-08:00

I just attended a BNI event in McLean Virginia Thursday morning. Now, I probably lead a somewhat sheltered life as a consultant, focused primarily on my own business and the association sector, but each time I attend one of these (three so far the past two years) I am impressed by the fervor people have for the organization.

If you're unfamiliar, BNI is "Business Networking International." They have quite a few chapters around the U.S. The typical meeting features a round-robin introduction from everyone, a similar sharing of leads and introductions from everyone, a "dog and pony" from one of the members, quick reports from various officers, and a preassigned someone stands up and shares some thoughts on effective networking and business development. Someone manages the clock with a timer & a bell, and every meeting seems to draw about 30-35 people.

Now, I am probably never going to join a local BNI group, as my work lies within a very well defined community where the national and statewide associations serving it are where I spend a lot of my volunteer time and meet many people just like me. But here are a few things that I think associations, especially trades, could learn from BNI:
1) Practice effective chapter management. There is NOTHING innovative about BNI's program or its meetings. They just work and attendance is strong on a weekly basis.
2) Be demanding when you have something that works. They take attendance, and they require regular attendance. In effect, if you don't plan to come, don't bother joining.
3) Facilitate extroversion. I feel very shy when I come to these meetings, but they know they have quite a few visitors every time. So members are trained (or predisposed) to tackle you as soon as the meeting breaks.
4) Ensure business development is an integral part of your mission. BNI is very "over the top" when it comes to networking, but that's because it's their sole mission, but it's particularly critical in trade associations (or IMOs, over a longer timeframe. Professionals look for your help particularly when it's time to find a new job. Fewer transactions, same principle).

#4 is my ultimate point. So often in associations we provide a litany of services: professional development, print/online publications, advocacy, training, etc. But where I see associations frequently fall short (in the eyes of their members, through the research we conduct) is in delivering "real bottom line benefits" or serving as a "source of new customers or clients." But how often do we gloss over this last point, and fail to build actual lead generation into our trade promotion and outreach campaigns? There are some associations that do run 1-800-FIND-A___ lines, and who collect online leads and redistribute them to their members. No matter how flawed the program (or how onerous it feels to manage) THESE programs are easily understood and well-appreciated.

In the associations I've worked for this business development lead generation occurred through local programs, networking and the random personal exchanges that constitute everyday life, but I'm not even sure the chapter staff and volunteers fully appreciate the value of what they deliver. Networking can feel like an end unto itself, and we all feel more comfortable--impartial and fair--by not getting in between our members competing for business.

I have always felt that's a well-intentioned but mistaken philosophy. Being impartial and transparent is critical, but as associations, the more we do to be visible places that end-users would logically contact to find a florist, or a business valuation expert, or a demolition company, the better we fulfill our entire mission... only as long as we immediately share that lead with our members. In baseball every closer needs a good setup man or two. So do our members--especially in this economy. -K