Education/Meetings
April 13, 2006
V Is for Vendor
Posted by Kevin | (6) Comments | Print This Article
I can be a demanding customer and an even more difficult client to land in the first place, especially since I never like being contacted by salespeople and am sometimes not very polite about it. Somewhere I know vendors in the association community get together and complain about people like me. From printing to production, programming to planning, I have fairly high standards, and I’ve been spoiled by a few vendors who exceed them regularly.
I view vendors in just about any arena as partners — I expect them to have the same commitment to whatever we’re working on that I do. They have a stake in the successful outcome and should act like it. When I get treated as just another client, with just another deliverable, nickel-and-dimed to death, I tend to get irritated.
The problem is that we’re never a vendor’s only client, and very rarely the biggest. We fall into that middle ground of business, with a lot of very specialized needs, but a very generic budget. For most projects we don’t have the bucks to make demands and expect the most qualified vendors to line up panting to cater to our every customized whim.
And while all businesses, including suppliers to associations, talk about the importance of customer service, and how “every client is our most important client,” in the real world of deadlines and budgets and limited staff resources and 24 hours in a day, every business has to make choices about how to spend those hours. Suppliers may become adept at making clients “feel” like a priority with good interpersonal skills, but the reality is that there are “levels” of output.
(And association suppliers, I know a lot of you read this blog, but please don’t send me an email filled with platitudes talking about how your company is “different,” because it really isn’t, unless you never have more than one client at a time, or you don’t know how to run a business. I know you have to keep up the marketing pretense, but the fact is that all customers are not alike and should not get treated as if they are, whether you’re a for-profit business or an association.)
Luckily for those of us without mega-budgets, there are other ways companies differentiate between clients and decide how much time to spend on them. Though we are all trained to view those budgets as the end-all be-all, and assume that we play second fiddle to those with a lot more to spend, it doesn’t always come down to dollars-and-cents. It can also come down to this:
People are proud of what they do. Designers love to design and think they are good at it. Production companies love to produce events and think they are good at it. Programmers love to program and think they are good at it. Consultants love to — well, whatever it is consultants do, and think they are good at it.*
People follow the path of least resistance. Even when they’re experts and perfectionists. How many times can you design the same kind of survey for the same kind of organization? Hell, you really only need to design it once and then tweak, right? An association needs signage for an event. Well, you know what associations mean when they say signage. An association needs a new membership brochure. Well, you know what association membership brochures look like. An association needs a new members-only area for its website. Well, you know what assocation websites are like. An association needs an insurance affinity program. Well, you know what insurance affinity programs are like.
People don’t like to be bored. And no matter how much you like whatever it is you do, the path of least resistance is boring. It’s easy. It can sometimes be a lot more profitable. But it’s boring.
People like to be challenged. Want to produce an exciting publication? An event that really sizzles? A survey that really works? A project of any kind that produces results and pushes the boundaries for your organization? But you’re not made of money? Then it’s not enough for you to be excited about it. You have to get your outside vendor excited about it. Not excited in the “woo-hoo I landed another client” kind of way. Excited in the “wow, I’ve never done this, how can I make this work” kind of way.
This means doing something more than producing a standard RFP, picking a vendor, and paying the bills. It also doesn’t mean micromanaging every last detail of every single project for every single vendor. No, it means becoming a fan of the possibilities of what it is you want to achieve. It means moving beyond describing a deliverable. It means asking questions like, “What if we did this? What if we did that? This part — how can we make it different?” (And not deciding on the answers before you ask the question.)
Get a vendor excited about doing something new in his or her chosen field and you’ll find you get a lot more of their time and better, more interesting results. In fact, working within a limited budget can be a fun challenge in and of itself if you’re engaging the supplier in something that is outside the ordinary.
Associations are a strange industry because, while we all do similar things, as a general rule few of us compete with each other. So we look at other associations and think “well, if XYZ Inc. did such a good job with Project A for the Widget Association, then he can also make Project A work for my association.” In fact, we should be looking carefully at how XYZ Inc. can do a different, bigger, better project for our associations — something beyond the norm. Something neither the Widget Association nor XYZ Inc. thought of.
Not only does this get better results from vendors. It produces better results for associations.
February 28, 2006
A Blogosphere of Lies
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Yesterday at lunch, David Gammel asked me if we were going to do a blog for our organization’s conference this year. I said, “No, I just don’t have the time right now.”
(Actually, after going through our blogging panel and then sitting in on a few other workshops, I thought, jeez, how can we not do a conference blog, particularly since our theme this year is “Break the Rules,” and what’s more rule-breaking than blogging, right? … Okay, so it’s not really all that rule-breaking anymore.)
Cross your fingers, we may even do some podcasting on it …
February 26, 2006
Mood Music
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E-venting gets it right with a post on music selection for a conference. So many associations think of music as background, and leave it up to the AV people to select. In fact, music plays an integral role in establishing the mindset of your audience for the entire meeting. As Mike at E-venting notes:
You actually
shouldhave to create an event mix. It’s your responsibility to set the show tone. If you’re not much of a musicologist, outsource the task to someone who is. But give it the same attention as you do the design of signage or the composition of the show book. Attention to detail makes or breaks a show, and music is an important detail.
In a post I wrote last August on the importance of the walk-in, I wrote:
Music is not background noise. We take special care in creating the mix used during the walk-in. The songs are not selected because they match our locale (we didn’t play country in Texas or zydeco in New Orleans), and they are not selected because they are songs our members like (our members are probably more country and adult contemporary oriented).
January 22, 2006
Got a Match?
Posted by Kevin | (2) Comments | Print This Article
Had a freewheeling conversation with a former association colleague and current good friend over drinks the other night (and the more drinks we had, the more freewheeling we got). One of the things we laughed about was the tendency of organizations (not just associations) to jump on bandwagons — even in those cases when it only takes a few seconds to realize that a particular bandwagon is missing a wheel or two.
Case in point: “matchmaking” for meetings. These are the programs that encourage attendees to an event to list their “interests” so they can be “matched” with similar attendees to encourage networking, peer learning, etc.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the concept in and of itself is a good one. Most of us agree that the most useful outcomes of conferences or meetings are those that come from conversations with other people (the so-called “hallway track”). If we can bottle that sort of thing up and make it easier, we should have a more successful meeting for our attendees, right?
Except the way some conferences are doing it now is not necessarily making it easier. I can only go on my own experience here, and to be honest, I haven’t paid too much attention to these programs. However, it seems that the events I’ve been to that tried this all required me to go to some website and enter my interests or issues, so I could then be told what other registered attendees most closely matched. There are three things I’ve noticed about these programs.
1. Since these are all associations I’ve belonged to for quite some time, why do I have to tell them what my interests are? Why don’t they already know what my interests are?
2. What am I supposed to do with a list of attendees?
3. Just because someone may have the same interests as me doesn’t mean they have anything useful to teach me. That probably sounds harsher than I mean it. What I mean is, how useful is a list of people’s interests/issues without any context? There are lots of things I’m interested in that I don’t know anything about. There are a few other things I’m interested in that I’ve got a lot of experience in. The same is true of everybody else.
Perhaps there are organizations that have solved these problems. In which case, I’d love to hear about it.
The truth is that associations are in the matchmaking business — we make connections between members. Or so we say; are we really doing it? If so, we wouldn’t need a standalone program for a conference or tradeshow. Members would already be making connections and making plans to meet in Vegas. If we want to make it easier for them to meet up in Vegas, we should be focusing on building connections all year long.
Perhaps what each association needs is a MySpace for their members.
December 18, 2005
All Members Pay Cash
Posted by Kevin | (1) Comments | Print This Article
Jenny “The Shifted Librarian” was asked to participate in a panel for the Public Library Association, and then told that if she’s a member of the American Library Association, she has to pay a full day’s registration fee … but non-members who are speaking get a complimentary day pass. Not surprisingly, she’s a little irate. She says:
“So while I had planned to join ALA this week using the money from the ALA TechSource blog, I’ve now been officially told by ALA itself that I should wait until after March if I don’t want to have to pay them to present at their conference. Read that again and weep.”
This ties into an earlier conversation prompted by Jeff Jarvis (“Panelists, Unite!”) and I’m sure represents a bit of a “yikes!” moment for the association in question. Policies that may seem to make sense within an organization’s bubble don’t always look so smart in the light of day … and now people can complain about them in a very public manner.
December 14, 2005
Shake It Up
Posted by Kevin | (5) Comments | Print This Article
The latest issue of Association Meetings has a feature on the annual conference our association puts on, based on an interview they did with myself and Michael Honeycutt. Interestingly, the article originally came about because of my earlier posts here last August and September on meetings and the power of emotion in making them successful.
A few facts are a little off (the name of our organization, for one thing), and the article makes it seem like the whole rejuvenation of our meeting was due to me and Michael, when in fact it was very much a team effort, from our CEO on down. They also talk about a co-location effort between two organizations and do a sidebar on experiences featuring Jim Gilmore, who was a featured speaker at the ASAE conference this past summer.