It's Not Easy Going Green: Conference Promotions

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

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

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

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.

Changing Gears & Entering Retirement Gracefully

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

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?

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.