Archive for January, 2008
January 25, 2008
Taking Off
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A week from today I will be in the air winging my way to our organization’s annual convention. Between now and mid-February, blogging here will be either very light or frantically busy, depending on how much I find myself at odd hours needing to think about something else.
January 23, 2008
We Are Who We Pretend to Be, So Be Careful Who You Pretend to Be
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In a comment to my last post, David Gammel writes:
“I would like to make the point … that an association could choose to have a particular product or service (or set of products/services) as the driving force for their strategy, addressing any market that values them. Their customers and members would change over time as they find new markets for their core product. The CFA Institute is a good example of what this might look like in practice.
“Driving your choice of markets by a particular set of products you produce is as valid a strategy as determining your products/services by the needs of a defined market. Each would lead to very different looking associations but that’s the whole point of strategy: picking a direction and putting it into action. [emphasis in original]“
David makes a good point, I am sure that there are organizations who can develop such a strategy around a very specific product — seeking out new markets — and do it quite successfully. However, I am not convinced that they are even a significant minority, let alone common.
Far more likely (and in my opinion, more dangerous) are associations that “fall into” offering certain products over time (as opposed to developing a specific strategy) and begin to act as though they are in the business of offering those products. They have a tradeshow; they have a magazine; they “do advocacy”; they publish a standard. And so they suddenly find themselves in the tradeshow business, the magazine business, the advocacy business, the standards business. (The larger an association grows, the more pronounced this tendency becomes, as each of these departments “silo” themselves off into their own specific products, operating down the chain in their own sphere of operation.)
I am not saying there is anything wrong with these particular products — far from it! I’m merely suggesting that it’s the “thought that counts.” An association that begins to think it is in the business of offering these products can find itself trapped in industries in which it is ill-suited to compete. (The reason that for-profits have “cherry-picked” so many associations, competing in particularly profitable segments, is that those for-profits typically focus only in one particularly profitable area whereas the association must defend on several fronts, while also carrying its various non-profit governance baggage.)
I wrote my post merely as a reminder to myself, and possibly others, that associations have a larger mission and a bigger picture. We may have a set of great products right now, and we should embrace them and exploit them as much as we can; but we must also always be developing what’s next and what’s new — what will both complement what we do, and perhaps replace it. To be successful over the long term, an association should offer a never-ending cycle of innovation based on meeting the needs of our members, whatever they are and whatever they may become.
P.S. Apologies to Kurt Vonnegut for quoting him somewhat out of context in the headline.
January 18, 2008
You Are Not In the [Insert Product Here] Business
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So, you have this great product. Maybe it’s a conference, or a book, or an educational series, or a website, or a magazine. It gets great reviews. Your core members love it. It makes money. Terrific!
So, you have this great product. Other people will think it’s great, too. Certainly the other people in your industry or profession (maybe non-members, maybe non-participants who have similar demographics as participants) will think it’s great. So you come up with some smart marketing materials to promote this great product to these other people who are sure to think it’s great. Terrific!
So, you have this great product. The members and core market love it. But it’s kind of tapped out and there are people on the top floor who want to see growth. So … there are other sorts of people — outside your core market — who will think it’s great, too, right? People who work in fields that are similar but not the same, or are on the outskirts of your industry, or are customers of your core members, or are somehow someway maybe possibly interested in similar sorts of things. So you come up with some smart marketing materials to promote this great product to these other people who surely must agree that it’s great … even though you don’t really know them … and they don’t really know you … but, hey it’s a great product … so you just know they’re going to love it, right? … so, um … terrific. I think.
Wait. Let’s start again.
So, you have this great market. And you come up with this great product. Maybe it’s a conference, or a book, or an educational series, or a website, or a magazine. It gets great reviews. Your core market loves it. It makes money. And then you come up with another great product — maybe related to the first great product, maybe completely different — but also aimed at this same great market that you know so well, and which knows you. And they love it.
And then you come up with another one, and then another one, and then another one … and then maybe that first great product starts being not-so-great, maybe a little long in the tooth, maybe no longer relevant … but that’s okay, because you’ve already created so many other great products and have lots more on the way, and retiring not-so-great products is just second nature to you now …
Terrific!
Associations have a market. Not a product.
January 18, 2008
Behavior, Data and Experiences
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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 11, 2008
The “8 Things” Thing
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Since Maddie likes these things and tagged me, it would be ungentlemanly of me to decline. I was going to make up some things to make myself seem more interesting, but as always it’s been a long week so you get the boring truth. To wit, “8 things you (probably) don’t know about me”:
1. I like to cook and am pretty good at it. Nothing gourmet by any stretch, but I can whip up a decent meal.
2. Perhaps because of #1, I am a shameful addict of the Food Network.
3. I always hated driving, so I gave it up about eight years ago.
4. When I was a senior in high school I was accepted to NYU’s screenwriting program but chose not to go, mostly for financial reasons. Occasionally I still wonder how things would have turned out had I made a different choice.
5. During the summers of 1991 and 1992 I was one of the local experts on fishing in Ocean City, Maryland. My first job after college was handling PR for a marina there, and I actually wrote a weekly fishing column for a newspaper and produced a daily fishing report for a radio station. I have never fished in my life. (It turned out to be good training for association work.)
6. I am somewhat addicted to television shows on DVD and have been known to watch ten or more hours straight of shows like “The Wire” or “The Shield.”
7. Those of you who have met me may know this, but since most of you haven’t, I have an extremely loud and boisterous laugh, and I laugh a lot. I’m often told by friends that they can always find me in a crowd.
8. I’m a voracious reader (though less and less as I get older, alas), and when I was a child, a precocious reader. When I was nine years old I somehow managed to get ahold of Stephen King’s “The Shining” and it scared the living hell out of me. That “Friends” episode where Joey hides his copy of “The Shining” in the freezer has always resonated with me.
And now for my eight tags:
1. Tony Rossell
2. Cynthia D’Amour
3. David Gammel
4. Shawn Lea
5. Sue Pelletier
6. Rich Westerfield (what the hell, I miss Rich)
And two people who don’t blog, but should:
7. Vinay Kumar
8. Kevin Whorton
January 10, 2008
Review: GroupLoop
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(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?”