Technology
May 10, 2008
An Easy Fix for a Problem You May Not Know You Have
Posted by Kevin | (1) Comments | Print This Article
Make sure that your organization’s website is called up when someone doesn’t bother to enter the “www” in front of it. I won’t bother you with the technical jargon, but suffice to say that “www.xyza.org” and “xyza.org” are two DIFFERENT addresses as far as the World Wide Web is concerned. Owning the xyza.org domain name doesn’t mean that xyza.org (sans www) will go to the right place. You have to set it up right in your DNS (talk to your IT people or web provider). (DNS is basically how web browsers find things.)
It’s easy enough to check, just type your domain name(s) in your browser without the “www.” in front of it and make sure you go to the right place. Yes, I learned this a long time ago the hard way with a “d’oh” moment. (And fyi, there are at least two association-related blogs for which this is currently a problem.)
May 6, 2008
Has PayPal Passed the Tipping Point for “Normal” Consumers?
Posted by Kevin | (1) Comments | Print This Article
Back in the dinosaur days of the early ’00s when our organization first got into online sales in a really big way, PayPal still had a bit of an air of amateur about it. Sites that offered PayPal options were those who couldn’t get their own merchant accounts or afford a “real” online shopping cart. The fact that PayPal took the customer “away” from the purchasing website gave it a semi-seedy air. There was something suspicious about it, even if that sense was completely unwarranted.
Today, I wonder if PayPal has overcome those perceived shortcomings and if associations should be offering it as a payment option as a matter of course. It’s been big for a while for eBay and niche publishers, but has it become equally big for organizations who deal with more, shall we say, “normal” consumers of product?
Personally, I buy a lot of products online — not just the usual stuff from Amazon, but various software and books from other sites. Lately I have noticed that if there is a PayPal option for payment I immediately select it. Why? Because it’s a lot easier to remember my PayPal password than it is to fish a credit card out of my wallet and then type the number and info into the order form. And I now have a level of comfort and trust with the security of the PayPal system.
I’ve had the PayPal account for a long time, but almost never used it until the past year or so. Now it’s my payment option of choice. Am I unusual? Did PayPal pass the tipping point a long time ago and I just missed it? Or does PayPal still suggest small, micro, less-than-credible?
April 23, 2008
The Foolishness of Crowds
Posted by Kevin | (2) Comments | Print This Article
So, social media lets people organize without organizations.
While it’s nice to wrap buzzwords like “social media” around things, this is nothing new; some of us have been dealing with “ad hoc” groups in our industry segments since long before anyone had heard of “blogging” let alone tried to create a whole new genre around it. Websites, listserves, message boards: none of it is quite snazzy enough to count as Web 2.0, but it’s all been pretty easy, cheap, and in some cases quite effective, for a long time now.
There are a couple things about these self-organized groups that pose both challenges for themselves, and for the associations they compete with:
PEOPLE ARE OFTEN WRONG ABOUT A WHOLE LOT OF DIFFERENT THINGS, AND LOVE SHARING THEIR ERRONEOUS ASSUMPTIONS AND JUDGMENTS WITH THEIR PEERS AS IF THEY WERE FACTS.
We’re often forwarded posts from one niche website in our industry (essentially a listserve that costs $50 a month) that have confused us because we are not sure whether to laugh or let our jaws drop. People share ideas and concepts that are outright wrong, in some cases beyond-the-borderline illegal, as if it is gospel.
Myths propagate themselves and pick up steam. Since these people are all essentially peers, working in the same industry, with access to the same communications tool (just click “send”), there is no way for credibility to be assigned. When others speak up and say “hey you’re wrong and what you’re advocating could cost people hundreds of thousands of dollars,” the dissent — if it is noticed at all — becomes a matter of disagreement, as opposed to one person being right, and one person being wrong.
On the one hand, it is frustrating to see members of an industry or profession you serve and love be led astray by (probably) well-meaning yet ill-informed (or, most likely, simply inexperienced) practitioners.
On the other hand, it is nice to be considered the place where people go for the RIGHT answers, and there is competitive advantage to be mined there. It has certainly worked well for us.
PEOPLE HAVE BIG EGOS, AND WILL TRY TO TURN THEIR “DISORGANIZED ORGANIZATIONS” INTO “REAL” ORGANIZATIONS FOR THE PURPOSES OF THEIR OWN AGENDA.
Though I haven’t read the book mentioned by Ben and Jeff, I got a kick out of this quote from the book which Ben placed on his blog:
“The jury is still out on whether any of the current interest in reforming the US health care system will change anything, but if I had to pick between MoveOn and groups like the self-organized strangers in Dallas for having the more profound effect, I’d bet on the ad hoc groups.”
Why do I find this amusing? Because MoveOn started out as — a little email group! They were circulating a petition to try and get Congress to censure Clinton rather than impeach him. (They failed, by the way.) And it turned into — apparently a big old-fashioned evil “organization” beset by these little social media networks.
Personally, I think it’s great that people can band together using the Internet to advocate for something, whether it’s a “Passenger’s Bill of Rights” or a speed bump on their local road. More power to them. I don’t view any of these groups as a threat to associations. If there are people loosely getting together on a single issue that intersects with your interest, then, uh — join them and get to know them and work with them or against them as you see fit. Don’t really see how they are all that much different from the little advocacy groups that have been springing up since time immemorial. They’re easier to form and so there will be more of them, but dealing with them is not exactly rocket science.
If people in your profession are using Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever all those sites are to “get together” then how is it a threat to your society? You can play catchup with a similar network of your own, or else you can sponsor their happy hour and buy them all a drink. (The latter is probably a lot easier and will have a bigger pay-off.)
The problem, of course, is that people have egos and agendas and big aggrandized visions, so many of them will try to turn their little one-issue groups into something bigger that can attract corporate funding. Some of them will succeed, most will fail, and the ones that succeed, if they are in your industry or profession, will become competitors for your association.
To which, I’m afraid I must say — so what? Competition is good! Deal with them as you do any other competitors. Learn from them, steal from them, crush them, work with them if you must — though on the whole my preference is for simply keeping them in your peripheral vision while you focus on serving your market best by creating new or better things they can’t get anywhere else. As I like to say, “We’re here to learn, we’re here to grow, and we’re here to win.”
What you should not do is gnash your teeth about this new “competition” and how it will affect your association. Yes, they may use new tools — but of course, YOU CAN USE THEM, TOO. Other than that, perhaps to the chagrin of some young and eager minds, and as I learned myself when I too was young and eager — there is indeed nothing new under the sun.
January 18, 2008
Behavior, Data and Experiences
Posted by Kevin | (2) Comments | Print This Article
In a comment here, Scott Briscoe writes:
“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.”
I don’t think Scott and I are necessarily disagreeing except that we are ascribing different weights to different things. Scott seems to think (and I may be misreading) that all things are equal; I think that “experience and thought” only come into play when one has solid data around which to wrap them. Behavioral data, in my opinion, is the most important foundation for any organizational decision-making.
I’ve been focusing on online behavior in these posts because, well, I love it. It’s real-time! It’s a treasure trove of information. But it’s not the only behavioral data that counts. You should know a lot about your members’ behavior, including what programs they participate in, what products they purchase, what types of questions they ask, what meetings they attend, what training they register for, etc.
An example: In our organization, we represent small businesses. They range from 1 employee to more than 1,000 (actually, not many of those). A few months ago, for the first time, we compiled mounds of data in an effort to determine which of our programs and content areas appeal to which size segments, because there is a real difference between a company with, say, 3 employees, and a company with 30 employees, and a real difference between a company with 30 employees and a company with 125 employees.
We first broke our membership down into six “size ranges” and then figured out which percentage of our membership came from each range. Then we took everything we do that is measurable in terms of participation — from participation in online areas, to participation in partner programs, to purchases of specific products, to participation in different types of education, to types of questions asked (we have an online q&a submission system that allows us to track different categories of inquiry), to lots of other things. Then we broke the participants in each area down by size type.
And then we brought it all together and compared to overall membership percentages. The idea was to gauge which programs/services have the most appeal to differing segments based on their participation. If a particular size range was OVER-represented in a particular program relative to their percentage of our overall membership, then we learned something. If a particular size range was UNDER-represented in a particular program, then we learned something. And if a particular program saw participation fall along roughly the same percentages as our overall membership, then we learned something.
I’m simplifying our process here and am limited in what I can share. Once we got all this together, we had much more than a pretty table with lots of nice colors. We clearly knew which areas the very small companies (which comprise a large part of our target market base) were willing/able/interested in participating. We clearly knew which areas pulled mostly larger companies, who are a smaller segment of our market base but clearly have different interests/time/resources. And we immediately knew exactly what our “sweet spot” was in terms of a specific size business that provides both maximum participation and resources for the association.
I’m sure you can imagine how such data can be used, both in creating new products and in marketing both membership and products. There are certainly other ways one could do similar analyses for different types of organizations based on different structuring criteria. Some of what we learned from this process was exactly what we expected to learn (based on, yes, our own “experience”), but some of it was a complete surprise.
In any event, once you have access to solid behavioral data that you can keep updated on a regular basis, THAT’s when you take “experiences and thoughts” and begin figuring out how to apply what you’ve learned.
A simplistic example:
If you know a particular type of member likes to travel to events while another type of member never signs up for any event, you have some choices: figure out how to give the non-attending member type some other kind of educational service that doesn’t involve events, figure out how to give the attending member type more events they can take advantage of, or both (or neither, if you have some other agenda). Or, even better, you can use the demographics of your attending member types to go after similar people who aren’t attending because now that you know that people just like them are attending, you can target your materials much more closely. (The wrong solution, in my opinion, would be to decide that what the non-attending member type needs is better marketing. They’re not going to attend. You can kill yourself trying to “market” to them, or create new products/services they might like better — the latter is easier, though for some reason many people think it’s harder.)
Based on various data, you could even decide that a particular member type is so non-engaged that they may not be worth pursuing at all.
But I heartily agree that experiences and thoughts play a major role in deciding what your association is “going to do” once you actually know how your members react in real life to various things. If your association is going to be truly innovative (and I argue that it should) then you should be launching things that your customers would not necessarily think that they need if you asked them (which is why asking them is not necessarily a good use of your time). But I would argue with Scott that basing such risks merely on your own gut (or that of your senior staff or a committee member) is dangerous territory. How many times have associations had to respond to one influential member who complained about a particular program which led to a complete re-evaluation of said program without any attempt to determine if other people had the same opinion? How many “pet projects” have associations launched for various leaders (both staff and volunteer) that ultimately went nowhere?
Gut is good. I trust my instincts, too. But I’ve learned over the years (often the hard way) that the best instincts are well-informed instincts.
January 10, 2008
Review: GroupLoop
Posted by Kevin | (0) Comments | Print This Article
(And we pause for a post that is a bit more, shall we say, functional.)
Up until last month, my organization held an account with Grouploop for the better part of a year. I’m pretty sure I first found Grouploop through a blog comment, and I think (but am not sure now) it was a comment on Acronym.
Grouploop is essentially a simple application that functions as a message board and file sharing system for small groups. It is not a terribly sophisticated system in what it offers, but that is why it is also very easy to set up and relatively easy for users (including those who are not particularly tech-savvy) to understand.
I first set Grouploop up because I needed a quick and dirty “closed” communications vehicle for our Board and a few other committees. We wanted to get away from having to mail hard copies of documents to committee members, but emailing large PDF files is problematic. At the time we were still in the building phase of our new website and I needed a quick solution.
Grouploop served the purpose. We were able to quickly set the account up, add members to various groups, and immediately begin posting messages and documents. Having never had such an online vehicle before, and working with members who are not typically web-centric in their daily behavior, for a while the communications were pretty much staff to member, with few interactions between members. Over time, especially when a particularly interesting topic came up for discussion on the agenda last fall, participation and discussion on the site increased greatly.
For associations who might be looking for such a closed loop forum and do not have need for more sophisticated features, I can recommend Grouploop. It’s inexpensive and easy to use, though there are a few issues to be aware of. For example, when posting a message or uploading a file, the poster has to take an extra step to have the message emailed, members of a group cannot manage separate group notifications or opt-out of receiving emails when they are sent, and the emails sent by Grouploop only identify them as coming from Grouploop, not the individual group from which they originate (which can be very confusing when you have members on multiple committees).
The biggest drawback is that it is a separate system, requiring you to add and manage the people in a group beyond your own management system. In fact, that is why it was never more than a stop-gap system for us and we canceled the account with the launch of our new website, which includes an e-groups system we built that is fully integrated with our database and very flexible (all I have to do is a check a flag in my database and the group now exists online for those attached to it).
But, while I like integrated features as much as the next guy, I’m a big fan of quick and dirty when it needs to be done. I can think of a million different ways a million different associations could use a simple program like Grouploop — particularly smaller local organizations, but we’re a national association and it served a good purpose for us.
The hardest part with this system, which is the same for any similar system, is getting people to use it. We discovered that the best way was simply to have something interesting for them to talk about (whodathunk?). And, like me you will probably find it amusing to find the silly name “Grouploop” quickly ingrained into your committee/board culture and enjoy overhearing members ask each other, “Did you see that thing on Grouploop?”
January 7, 2008
View from the Ivory Tower, Part 1 Subpart A
Posted by Kevin | (5) Comments | Print This Article
Before I post the next part of this (slowly evolving) series of posts, I wanted to respond to a good question Ben asked and clarify something in the earlier post. He asked:
“Where do you stand on the whole debate that looking at web and email data skews your thinking towards the wired members, and not the average members? Couldn’t you wind up believing what you think members need is actually what the geeks need?”
First, as always, I take a trade association perspective, because that’s my area of expertise, and I have always been very uncertain as to how much trade associations and professional societies really have in common. Of course, whether our members are “companies” or “individuals,” we all deal with “people,” but the reasons for their participation seem very different to me. (In case anyone from ASAE is reading — yes, I am afraid that I found “Decision to Join” worthless. I’m sure it was much more interesting to individual membership organizations.)
In my post, talking about click-thru and online traffic data, I was talking specifically about “content” even if I may not have been as specific about that as I should have been. For example, if you are an association and you have various content pieces on your site about marketing, safety, legislation, and financial management, and you find that all of your marketing and legislation content gets huge traffic but no one seems to care about safety or financial management, then you’ve learned something very important.
The question is: Should we assume that the members who come to our website (who are more “wired”) are appreciably different from the rest of the membership in terms of what their “hot buttons” are? I don’t really think so — and based on my experience of working with a trade association who focuses primarily on the web for content, I haven’t seen that to be the case, either.
For competitive reasons I can’t get too much into the specifics of what we’ve learned about our members, but I can say that when we’ve taken what we’ve learned about member interests from our website, and applied them to other things (such as seminar topics, workshops, publications for sale), the results have consistently held up. The content areas that get member interest in online content also get member interest (and higher sales) in other avenues. This is not exactly rocket science.
These days, I’m not sure that there is all that much of a difference between the members who surf association websites and those who don’t (the “wired” versus the non-wired). People are used to going to websites for content, and if you provide a steady stream of valuable information on your website (and send good newsletters out), they are going to come to your site looking for it.
But again, this is talking about content and what it can teach us. Associations for years have been somewhat isolated from their membership (hence “the ivory tower”) and depended on boards and committees to tell them what’s “important,” but of course that only tells you what the people who serve on these boards and committees think are “important.” Perhaps the rest of your members feel the same way, perhaps they don’t. (Question: If you start paying special attention to your members who “blog” are you just listening to another self-identified group who may or may not be representative of the rest of your membership?)
Online behavior data pulls from a larger number of your members, and is likely to be more representative of what your membership is actually interested in. I’m not saying any of this is necessarily scientific. I’m just saying that now that you have access to data about the actual behavior of a large percentage of your members, if you collect it and use it, you can move beyond those ivory tower limitations and start discovering what truly matters to your membership. And once you know that, you can begin to define what it is they “need” in a more meaningful way.
But, when we move beyond content and start talking about — I don’t know what to call them, features? applications? interactivity? social media? In my opinion, there is an appreciable difference (right now) between the people who are interested in such things and the people who are not. But five or six years ago, there would have probably been more of a difference between people who read articles on your website and people who wait for a magazine.
The question is, how far does an association “lead” into such things now? I have some opinions (of course!) but no answers (of course!) to share later.