I wouldn’t describe myself as anti-data at all. I love data. I think it’s sorely misused, because people think it provides answers. It doesn’t. It can and should be used as one input in decision making. But in your example, you throw out the “ivory tower” committee input. Big mistake. That too should factor into any decisions.

I advocate taking a variety of inputs–data, expert opinion, nonexpert opinion, advice from whatever sources seem salient–and mixing it all together with your own experience and thought to make a decision. It’s more risky, because if it fails you don’t have the crutch to say “but the data showed…” or “but the committee recommended…” — you own the decision. You live by it. You try to make it work, you adjust based on environment and input and then you try to make that work, etc.

First, swiping at “Decision to Join” like that without any further elaboration was a bit of a cheap shot. I do find it worthless from a trade association perspective, but my friends at ASAE deserve a more thoughtful comment than that. I will take some time and explain my thoughts on it further in a future post.

Now, in response to your very good question, let me start by repeating two sentences from my original post:

“This is not exactly rocket science.”
and
“I’m not saying any of this is necessarily scientific.”

You raise some interesting questions: “Are people drawn to what we say about XX but don’t care about YY because everything we say about YY is total s***? Are people drawn to what we say about XX but simply don’t see us as the source for information about YY? Are people drawn to what we say online about XX but would rather read about YY in a magazine?” (Actually, that third question doesn’t make any sense to me, so we’ll focus on the first two.)

I have two responses to those questions, one aimed toward the substance and one aimed toward the questioner.

The first response:
There’s a very real possibility that, as you describe, an association has “crappy” info on a particular content area, or is viewed as a secondary or non-credible source about it. So — great! Now that you know your members are drawn to you about XX but think you have nothing to offer them about YY, then for god’s sake stop wasting your time talking about YY. It’s the people who insist that associations must be the source of things all XX *and* YY (and AA and BB and god knows what else) who condemn associations to consistent mediocrity.

The second response:
Since we know from many of your previous posts that you are “anti-data,” are you really questioning the use of online behavior data, or are you questioning the use of data in general? Would *your* answer to the questions you pose be to gather more data about member interests before basing decisions on online behavior? Or are you simply looking for ways to pose “buts” and “what-abouts” about any and all data in general?

Thanks for the comment!

You say that in your opinion there is not much difference between what members who go to your website find important and those that do not.

I tend to agree with you in that I think that is less of a concern. What troubles me is saying that because topic XX gets traffic on the website and topic YY does not, the membership cares more about XX than YY. It could just mean that members want information XX online, but they’d rather get YY in some other way. Or it could mean that you have really good XX content while your YY content is, well, crappy. Finally, it could mean that they come to you for XX and go someplace for YY, so then you have to decide if it’s worth it to try to get them to come to you for YY, too.

It could be that your committees are out of touch. But to take isolated data and say its so is just as limiting. Take the conflicting information and try to establish why — and then decide what you’re going to do about it.

(PS – Decision to Join’s implications to trade… what about the parts that talk about importance of participation? I’d think that would be important for any association.)