Mary Byers, CAE opened the 2013 Avectra Users and Developers Conference with a keynote about the competition that challenges associations and what you can do in response. Her talk was based upon a book she co-authored with Harrison Coerver, Road to Relevance: 5 Strategies for Competitive Associations.

First, she discussed six challenges facing associations:

• Use technology to deliver the association to your members, because they don’t have time to come to you.

• Members are increasingly concerned with the ROI of their dues investment. However, anything you do to demonstrate value has to get through the barrage of information hitting their inboxes and online platforms. Figure out what you do better than anyone else and focus on getting that across.

• If the average age of your members is 50 or above, how are you going to replace those retiring members? How are you meeting the needs of younger members?

• Is your market undergoing specialization or consolidation? The American Medical Association’s membership used to include 75 percent of the market; today they have less than 25 percent because doctors are joining specialty associations. The National Association of Home Builders has seen its industry consolidate as small local builders were bought out by large national production builders.

• People have access to online resources and relationship-building opportunities without having to belong to an association.

Most of Mary’s keynote focused on competition, the new normal. Associations must identify their competitors and the challenges they present. She talked about five types of competition.

1. Members have limited dollars for association memberships and will ask themselves: where do I get the best ROI? A specialty or industry association? A state or national association?
2. Media companies now own 23 percent of trade shows as part of their line extensions. How can you extend your strengths into new products and services? Associations worry about cannibalizing their meetings with virtual offerings, but what if someone else beats you there? Don’t be locked into one way of doing things; offer options. Focus on content creation and curation.
3. Buying groups are entering what was once association territory.
4. Associations must have an active, strong Web presence. Where do people go first for information? Google. Does Google take them to you? Say hello to SEO. As for social media, Mary said, “Having an account is not a strategy.” She predicts the rise of young professional groups offering ad hoc, informal meet-ups without requiring dues. In Raleigh, a 1,500-member SEO Meetup group meets monthly. Do these people really need an association?
5. Members are often the competition, for example, law firms providing continuing education, Avectra offering education and CAE credits at AUDC, or consultants offering webinars.

The new competitive environment means:

• You have to think differently and use data to make decisions. Competition has changed our landscape. You need to identify competitors and their strengths. Ask yourself, “Can members get this (program) from somewhere else at a better price?” She recommends abandonment as a strategy so you can focus on your strengths.
•  You have to ask different questions and have inter-departmental conversations. How can we save time or help members save time? Is there a better way to do this? What can we automate or systematize? What don’t we know that we need to know? How can we help members work less stressfully, more profitably and more productively?
• We have to budget differently and have a technology plan. How much does your association spend on technology? Is it more or less than what you spend on meetings? What would happen if you doubled your IT spending over the next five years?

Mary talked about a few association clients that broke through resistance and came out ahead. The board of the Carolinas AGC didn’t want to use reserves to develop IBuild, a members-only online portal for construction project leads. Mary said, “Reserves give you time to die more slowly. Use it to invest in the future.” In the end, Carolina AGC did borrow from reserves and paid it back in just two years because IBuild delivered 1.6 million dollars in revenue. It’s worth asking the tough questions.

Deirdre Reid, CAE is a freelance writer who thinks the Avectra clients she met at AUDC13 are well ahead on the road to relevance.

 “Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.” – Morpheus

In the 1999 film, The Matrix, Morpheus has a revolutionary agenda – to pull Neo out of the Matrix and into the real world in order to overthrow the world of the machines. Like Morpheus and Neo, we too have a revolutionary opportunity to change the world of associations.

Jamie Notter, co-author with Maddie Grant of Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, explained in today’s keynote at the Avectra Users and Developers Conference, why our conversations about social media are not going far enough. Social media has the power to transform our organizations beyond marketing. We use social media to create, share and learn, and we do this on our own without the help of third-party organizations, like associations. Social media taps into what makes us human. And that’s why, he asserts, social business is important.

Social business is about applying social technology and the ideas behind them and bringing them into our organizational culture for applications beyond marketing. For example, IBM does social recruiting, and Dell and Starbucks have long had online communities where customers provide ideas for new products.

However, there’s a basic conflict between social business and association management. Our management practices are based on a model developed by Frederick Taylor more than 100 years ago. Someone from the era of Mad Men could drop into your executive office today and easily lead a strategic planning exercise, hire people, and do performance reviews because our management principles, based on machine thinking, are essentially unchanged since then. We demand innovation everywhere except in management.

In top-down machine management, everyone does their job like cogs in a machine. We run our organizations like machines. In social businesses, we can be truly human.

Jamie believes we now have a relatively small (3-5 years) window of opportunity when you can start taking steps to become a more social business. But, how do you become a more social business? You’ll have to make changes in your organization’s culture, processes and behavior, one step at a time. Yes, that might freak people out.

Humanize is a guide that will help you break down what’s going on around you so you can make the changes in culture, processes and behavior that will make your organization more social and human.

Culture:

• Embrace decentralization.
• Share more information – transparency.
• Welcome difference – inclusion.
• Encourage learning.

Processes:

• Adopt systems thinking.
• Truth.
• Encourage collaboration across department lines.
• Be willing to take risks, experiment, and fail.

Behavior:

• Give employees ownership.
• Be authentic – bring your whole self to work.
• Focus on relationship building.
• Emphasize personal development.

Feeling overwhelmed? No worries Mate! Jamie recommends you pick one process where change will make an impact. He suggests picking one that everyone already hates, like staff meetings. One of Jamie’s clients, Fitness Australia, started with performance reviews. They rewrote their performance criteria to include behavior-based descriptions of the twelve areas above (culture, process and behavior), for example, what does it look like to support transparency.

 You can let staff define their own success metrics if you make sure their perception of their own success aligns with the organization’s. Are your employees behaving in ways that create the culture you want and that drives the success of your association?

We need to create organizations that are compatible with social business. Associations that change in the next few years will be ahead of the pack; those that don’t will wish they had figured it out earlier.

The Matrix is a story of a reluctant hero, Neo. He got brave, took the red pill and embarked on his heroic journey. It’s the classic and universal hero story – he had it in him all along. Jamie says you are the heroes, everyone reading this. You have the opportunity to do things differently, to create an organization that will attract skilled, valuable and learning-oriented people who get excited to show up on Monday morning.

We can all help to create an association industry that makes us proud. Instead of stumbling into their first association job, people will say, “I want to work for an association.”

Deirdre Reid, CAE is a freelance writer who is waiting for a Quentin Tarantino-influenced book about association management.

“You’ve come a long way, baby.” Five minutes into the session — How to Apply Social to Membership & Marketing – and several attendees had already shared social media lessons and tips. Imagine sitting in this same session three years ago: I bet the only one sharing would have been the session leader, Maddie Grant, CAE, Chief Social Media Strategist at Socialfish. But today at the Avectra Users & Developers Conference, many association professionals had social media stories and advice to share.

First steps

 Some associations are at the beginning of their social media journey. One person asked, “Where do we start?”

• Assess your situation. Find out which platforms your members use.
• Use a social discovery tool, like Small Act, to upload your email list and find out where your members have profiles.
• Start by listening and learning.
• Create a cross-departmental task force that develops social media strategy, guidelines, messaging style and content. Or, one person can be solely in charge of social efforts, monitor member conversations, and get content from other departments that meets member needs.
• Remember, your number of followers is not as important as the quality of your engagement and the value you provide.
• Maddie suggested building your Twitter audience by following the right types of people: people who are on the same lists as you, people your followers follow, people using industry hashtags and participating in industry chats, and trade press.

LinkedIn

Many associations start with LinkedIn because their members are there. Apply to LinkedIn to get admin rights to your company page. People who follow your page will get your updates in their LinkedIn newsfeed – a good way to reach members who don’t use other social platforms.

• Brand your page.
• List your services.
• Add staff to the page.
• Update with blog posts, videos, webinar and conference news.

Social CRM and workflow

Social CRM is “applying social data to member management.”  Build social media into your workflow.

• Include fields in your CRM for member (and prospect) Twitter handles, LinkedIn profiles, etc. Ask for that information in membership applications, renewal forms and event registrations.
• Launch a campaign to update member profiles. Make those social fields “required” even if that means members selecting “don’t have” or “don’t want to share” as an option.
• Pre-build shortened URLs for social media use so you can track incoming traffic. Encourage staff to build the discipline to grab the correct shortened link.
• Use tracking codes to identify the source of event registrations — social platforms or email marketing.
• Segment your email marketing lists to send targeted content based on member interests and demographics.

Content considerations

• Social media requires a conversational voice. Keep it short and include calls to action.
• Find the right balance between promotional and educational content.
• Don’t ignore one generation’s content needs in favor of another’s.
• Having a hard time getting staff to write blog posts? Turn it into a competition with teams and prizes.
• Twitter chats and video interviews are good educational tools. Use YouTube for educational, informational and “soft-sell” marketing content. Ask members to be the face and voice of your association.

Late adopters

Social media is a challenge when “the majority of our members don’t even have desks.” Soon the sons and daughters of those members will inherit the business. They and their parents have completely different ways of consuming information and interacting with the association. But, in the interim, you have to figure out how to please both generations at once.

Many associations still have trouble getting members to visit their website and read emails, never mind social media. Some members are afraid of using social media, seeing it as an environment laden with risk.

What to do? Educate them. Show them a model to emulate — a person or company in their industry using social media effectively. If they’re used to reading for news, information and education, they may adapt to reading a blog for the same purposes.

A final message from several people in the room: integrate social media campaigns with other departmental campaigns. Social media cannot live in a silo; you must have inter-departmental communication and coordination. For example, you can’t just start tweeting about an event two weeks before it starts. Social media must be part of the conversation and planning from the beginning.

Deirdre Reid, CAE is a freelance writer who is enjoying the food and discussions at #audc13.

Since Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Meyer told her teleworking staff to head back to the office, pundits have both defended and questioned her decision. Teleworking isn’t yet prevalent in the association world because many associations don’t want to change how their staff works. But they are changing what they work on.

Member Concierge

A few months ago, Associations Now wrote about the California Dental Association’s member concierge. In this new position, Terry Fong makes a welcome call to each new member, gathers background information and sends them information about relevant member services. She checks back six months later and then again at their one-year anniversary.

Fong also sends a weekly email to CDA staff highlighting one new member’s story. Staff learns more about members, while members receive guidance and value from CDA.

Data Analyst

Another Associations Now article urged associations to get to know their data analyst. But how many associations have someone on staff who can extract actionable meaning from accumulated data? In the article, Avectra’s vice president of marketing, Patrick Dorsey, said, “I don’t think you’d have a lot of people disagree that finding an individual—a business analyst or someone who is focused on analytics—is critical to running the business.”

Chief Digital Officer

In yet another Associations Now article, Thad Lurie, CIO of the American Wind Energy Association, “recommend(s) making room for IT at the executive level.” According to David Willis, vice president and analyst at Gartner, “The chief digital officer plays in the place where the enterprise meets the customer, where the revenue is generated, and the mission accomplished. They’re in charge of the digital business strategy.” Technology isn’t merely a tool; it can help your organization become leaner, smarter and more capable of achieving your goals and living your mission.

Strategy Guide

How can your association make sure it’s using the best emerging technologies to fulfill its mission, while helping members learn about technology that can help them achieve their goals? You need someone like the American Library Association’s strategy guide, Jenny Levine. As strategy guide, Levine runs ALA’s online member community, “helps to improve the ALA conference experience, leads emerging technologies initiatives (particularly with social media), does internal training for staff, runs ALA’s national gaming initiatives, helps libraries join the current DIY/Maker movement, and more.” Who does this at your association?

Digital Marketing Director

I can’t imagine an association hiring a marketing professional without digital skills. Most marketing job descriptions today require experience with digital, mobile and social channels, SEO, live events, and marketing automation and CRM solutions.

CRM is becoming part of job descriptions too. Although it may already be filled by the time you click the link, a recent job posting for a marketing and CRM director sought someone who can develop segmented communications, create innovative approaches for reaching customers and members, and “assure that we are getting our message out and meeting the needs of our members.”

Digital Content Strategist

Associations are major players in the online content competition. They’re hiring staff to oversee digital content creation, curation, distribution and management. A recent job posting for an online content manager required a person who would “collaborate with publishing, marketing, and communications staff to assure integration of online content with overall communications plans and effective promotion of website and enewsletters.”

Online Education Specialist

Members are turning to online learning as a convenient, affordable education option. Someone on staff needs to develop online learning programs, manage eLearning platforms and their integration with online communities, and keep up with eLearning technology.

Social is everyone’s job.

Many associations now have social media specialists to oversee their digital, social and mobile activities. However, associations on the leading edge, like Scott Becker’s Association of Public Health Laboratories, encourage all staff to be social. Employees who participate in social media learn more about their members and industry, act as brand advocates, and put a human face on the association.

What other new association positions do you see or anticipate seeing in the next few years?

Deirdre Reid, CAE is a freelance writer who did a lot of “other duties as assigned” when working for associations.