Archive for May, 2008
May 14, 2008
The Return?
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Speaking as someone who once went a year without posting myself, I can only say, welcome back, Rich.
May 13, 2008
A Question of Quality
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Associations live and die by data. Have a plan to verify and check all data entry. Quality control is not just telling someone, “Don’t screw up.”
May 12, 2008
You’re Only As Good As Your Guarantee
Posted by Kevin | (3) Comments | Print This Article
Mickie Rops asked a question on the ASAE listserve last week, and a few of the responses have left me scratching my head. She wanted to know if associations offer refunds for webinars or web conferences, in particular if someone claimed a technical difficulty.
A few of the responses have seemed near apoplectic at the idea of ever giving someone a refund.
I say — big mistake. You should be offering a 100% satisfaction guarantee on everything you do and sell (including membership). You should be offering refunds cheerfully and happily, without requiring people to jump through hoops to get them.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask questions — offer options (a free something, or a credit of some sort) — but ultimately, if someone is asking for a refund (or even if they’re just casually mentioning that they didn’t like something), that means that they are unhappy and your goal should be to make them happy. Give them a refund.
Remember, we are not in the transaction business, we are in the relationship business. Guarding over the money you’ve been given to perform a service or provide a product means that you are obsessing over a transaction and hurting the relationship. You may win the battle and lose the war.
Trust me, I know that there are people out there who will try to game the system and complain over every little thing in hopes of scraping back every nickel and dime. But they are the exception, and they can be dealt with (you should have some way of identifying repeat offenders in your system). A better plan is to identify the game players and then bar them from participating altogether. Don’t treat all your customers like the exception.
(By the way, I am assuming that what you are offering is of high enough quality that refund requests are relatively rare. If everybody’s asking for a refund — then they definitely deserve one, and you should rethink a lot of things.)
May 12, 2008
I Like Green
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New look online — still tinkering with it. Text not quite so gigantic (sorry, David). Oh, and a new e-letter starts June 12; sign up to get it. (It won’t include boring asides like this.)
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 8, 2008
6 Tips for Growing Your Association Career
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Since time immemorial (or, well, at least as far back as when I was a fresh-from-college entry-level association guy all the way back in 1992), ambitious young people have entered the association world and thought, “The world is very different from what these old fogies are used to. Things are moving faster. Communication methods are changing. People want more. Nobody’s joining associations just because they think it’s the right thing to do, they want real value. These old dusty procedures and programs and organizational structures are too rigid and irrelevant and we need to do new, innovative things that break through the false barriers.”
Yes, it’s true; some people actually thought those things before there was a “Web 2.0.” In fact, they thought those things before there was a web at all.
Even back in those pre-millenial days, the fact was that:
– Some young people entered the association world and leapfrogged to new areas of responsibility, new positions, new leadership roles, new salary rungs at a rapid pace.
– Many young people didn’t.
– The distinction between the two groups had less to do with the organizational traits of the association they worked for, and more to do with the personal traits of the individuals involved.
In short, to grow your association career, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to let your generation define you. Your success does not depend on your generation’s success. Only you can own your own career.
Based, once again, only on my own experience, here are six quick tips for building a career that you can love.
Pick the association you work for, don’t let it pick you. You may have wound up in association management by accident (as most people do) but from Day Two it’s YOUR CHOICE to work for the same association. If you know you want to work for associations, but you feel the culture in the association you are in is too stifling, then seek new ground. In my personal opinion, the best opportunities for rapid growth actually lie in smaller associations. Not TOO small and not TOO big — if there are only 2-3 staff people in your organization, you will almost never have the possibility to break free of the mere drudgery of daily work. More than 50 or 100, they may have so many strict levels in their org chart that you will be just as trapped. Seek organizations that have 5-30 employees and a solid record of black ink.
Find people who have worked in the association world for 30 or 40 years or more and listen to them. Ask them questions and then actually listen to the answers. DON’T ask them how you can get ahead. DON’T ask them for answers to specific management question. DO ask them for STORIES. Don’t just listen to their stories — ABSORB their stories. One of the best things I ever did was meet my first boss’s mentor, at that time already retired, with decades of experience in associations. Not only were his stories funny and engaging and filled with wisdom, but his willingness to share — indeed his delight in sharing — lent me a grounded education that would have taken me years to gather on my own. (If your response to this point is, “What could I possibly learn about associations from the way someone did something in the 1960s?” then you are not ready to grow. You cannot possibly advocate for CHANGE if you have only the glossiest understanding of how things got to be the way they are now.)
Become an expert generalist. Your particular professional field notwithstanding, get to know association management as a general field. Seek out someone else’s back issues of ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT magazine and read them cover to cover. Follow the pertinent ASAE listserves (perhaps even some of the association blogs). Read — absorb — listen. Avoid the impulse to respond to everything or post every thought that pops into your head. Instead, learn from the other people who are out there. BUT, that said …
Speak up! When you have ideas, speak up. Don’t sit there in a meeting and wait to be called on. You do NOT need to wait until some artificial date passes to feel like you have something interesting to say. If you’re smart, and you’ve developed a solid enough grounding to distinguish between “an interesting insight” and “restating the obvious,” then the ONLY WAY to distinguish yourself from others in the organization is to speak up. The biggest mistake is to simply show up and do your work — even if you do it really well, if you are just sitting around waiting for other people to notice it, they probably won’t except when it comes around to annual review time. Then they’ll probably give you a decent review and maybe a small raise. If that’s all you want out of your career year after year, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Take charge of your own ideas. The best way to “grow in responsibility” (and thereby leadership and position and salary) is to offer new ideas and then take charge of them. As I said in the last point, opening your mouth for its own sake and stating the obvious is not a way to endear yourself to leadership. At the same time, opening your mouth with ideas for other people to implement is even worse. It’s not enough to throw out ideas — throw out the plans. “I think we should do X — it would offer Y benefits — in fact, here’s a plan, and it won’t really cost us any money [key point there] and I can take charge of this RIGHT NOW.” Then do it.
Take charge of your boss’s ideas. Your boss muse about something that he or she thinks would be interesting? Grab it and take charge of it. Make it happen. Become the go-to person for “getting things done.” Become the person that the boss (or his or her boss) knows they can dump something on at the last minute and get outstanding results. If you think that sounds degrading or like too much work, then you may not be ready to grow an association career. Because, while nobody wants to spend ALL their time doing stuff that OTHER people feel passionate about, doing so is the only way to get approval to spend time (and maybe a little money) on the things that YOU feel passionate about.
Ultimately, if you are to grow a career in associations, “other people” make the determination as to your growth rate. But they make their decisions based on your personal credibility — not your talent, not your intelligence, not your creativity, but your CREDIBILITY. And only you can control how credible you are.
And finally, going back to my first point — you choose your workplace. It’s possible you work for a jerk, in which case none of my other tips will have much impact. And in which case, don’t bitch about it on your blog or your MySpace page or whatever. Get a new job. (BTW, the more you bitch about your job on a publicly-accessible website, the longer you are likely to stay stranded there.)