Professional Development & Getting the Most Out of the ASAE 2015 Conference

Conferences are great for learning new ideas from both your peers and your mentors.  The ASAE Annual Meeting is the place for all nonprofit professionals to learn more about their profession.  This year's meeting has a special place in my heart for two reasons:

1. I am lucky enough to be able to attend.  
2. It's location.  Detroit

Nonprofit professionals are used to doing things on either a shoestring or very limited budget.  This budget is also limited for their own professional development.  I consider myself lucky that my organization is allowing me to go.  An added bonus is that nonprofit professionals are really cool people.  You know these people - they are passionate, driven, and dedicated to the causes they work and volunteer for.  They will stay up late stuffing envelopes, or doing "other" duties as assigned.  The energy and excitement from the learning is nothing short of inspiring.  

Detroit - oh how I love thee.  No, I really do.  True story - a few years ago I met a great man who hails from motor city.  Throughout our relationship we have had the opportunity to visit this great city on several occasions.  The reason: NFL football.  We live in the metro Washington DC area, but my ever loyal boyfriend is a fan and season ticket holder to none other than the Detroit Lions.  This is a team that has NEVER won a SuperBowl.  They have also been to very few playoff games.  As a champion of underdogs, and underserved, I reluctantly also became a fan.

The city of Detroit, much like their football teams has seen better days.  Automobiles were made here from start to finish and were shipped across the country to dealers for sale.  The Detroit Lions are still owned by one of the great automobile families: Ford.  Ford Field is a fantastic indoor stadium with modern amenities.  In case you didn't know, Michigan is cold.  This is why it's great that this stadium is indoors because in the middle of the winter when it's frigid, it's a comfortable 70 degrees inside. When we go to a Lions games, all the fans are on their feet when the opposing team has the ball.  The crowd noise can be deafening and many fans have lost their voice in the hopes that the "12th Man" will help decided the game.  While the season has not started, Ford Field is definitely worth checking out to any and all ASAE attendees.  

Detroit dining options are nothing to sneeze at.  In no order of preference here are some of my favorites and "musts" for every visit in Motor City. 

1. Roast - it's a bit pricey but the meals here are unforgettable.  They also have a delightful craft cocktail menu.  
2. Lafayette Coney Island or American Coney Island either one of these chili dog places are affordable and a delight for your tummy. 
3. PizzaPapalis deep dish pizza that will make people from Chicago envious.  No serious, my boyfriend's brother is from Chicago and he loves this place.  Also they have great wings and other food as well. 
4. New Parthenon Restaurant - large portions and Saganaki - they light your cheese on fire and yell "OPA!" You may feel like an extra in the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" but both your belly and your tastebuds will be pleased as punch. 

I hope you're as excited as I am to experience the "D" at ASAE 2015.  Please say hi to me if you see me at the conference.  These conferences are a great way to connect with people in the same industry. 

See you tomorrow Detroit! 

Associations Going Mobile

A few weeks ago I attended the ASAE Super Swap at their headquarters in Washington, DC where they combine 6 idea swaps into one day.  The location allows for many association professionals and their trusted partners to meet up and share ideas about various topics.  While all the idea swaps were beneficial one of them truly stood out.  

Associations Going Mobile: When To Use Mobile Apps to Engage Members/Attendees was hosted by Kevin Taylor, Account Executive, AlphaGraphics; John Mills, Web Content/Analytics/On-line Community Manager, Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute.  I have heard from many articles and other content that I have read via ASAE and others that associations are about 1 year behind the technology trends of the corporate world.  The majority of the session discussed what John's experience was going mobile with their conference and expo app.  With little notice or promotion of their new conference app, they had quick adoption.  This year they expect their results to be even greater, by launching the application earlier and providing people ways to interact before they get to the show.  

After three or so weeks, I am still thinking about this session because the technology is SO cool.  Imagine a world where your conference attendees don't have to carry around a full thick brochure of all the conference sessions, the map of the exhibit floor, and more.  Of course it comes with a cost, but you can offset this cost by selling sponsorship ads to your exhibitors.  This will help you recoup some of your initial investment, drive traffic to your exhibitors booth and provide a useful tool for your members to connect.  

Where is the future of association events? Maybe it's in mobile, but it just might be something that we have never heard of.  Either way, I am excited for the innovation ahead and seeing what other association professionals are up to, today, tomorrow and in the future. 

What Has Your Membership Done for Me Lately?

This question is something that comes up with nearly ever association or chamber partner we talk with.  Measuring the true value of what you are providing to your members is a difficult and sometimes daunting task.  The key to uncovering the answer to these questions is to:

Understand Your Unique Value Proposition

What do you provide that your competitors don’t? Don’t reach for the standard answers such as networking, education.  Are you sure they can’t get that information someplace else? With the creation of social media, there is a lot of “free” information out there.  You can uncover this via surveying your members and not just going to the usual suspects such as networking, lobbying, etc.  Your hunch might come true, but it’s great to back those hunches up with data.  Electronic surveys are the way to go, they eliminate paper, and survey tabulation.  Does your Association Management Software (AMS) provide you with the opportunity to survey your members? Use the tools you have available to find the data you need to back up those hunches.

Show Your Members The Value Your Organization Brings

Depending upon your AMS provider this can be accomplished by understanding what you should be asking your database.  With the Weblink Solution this can be accomplished at the click of a few buttons with reports on Member Activity, Member Referrals, just to name a few of our standard 230 reports we provide to our association and chamber partners.  Being able to uncover this information can help you prepare for those difficult conversations when it comes time for their dues renewal. 

Listen to Your Members

Listen to your members, because they are the reason that your organization exists.  Sure, it seems basic but listening to a member who has a concern, no matter how big or small will go a long way in retaining them for more than your initial term.  This listening doesn’t just have to happen at conferences, you can uncover what they think about your educational programs, and other services by participating in the various social media such ask:  LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.  By doing a quick search on topics that relate to your organization whether it be a chamber or an association allows you to know what the “chatter” is in these arenas.  It can be accomplished by spending 1 -2 hours per week, or even more if you have an intern or staff member managing this aspect of your chamber or association.  Understanding what’s out there will help you engage members and spark them into action.   

Stay Relevant

In the book, Race for Relevance- 5 Radical Changes for Associations written by Harrison Coerver and Mary Byers, CAE they point out what has changed about associations.  They talk about targeting your membership so that you can really understand what is important to them, along with fighting the status quo.  It’s a great read, and Sarah Sladek writes more about how membership is changing in her book The End of Membership As We Know It: Building the Fortune-Flipping, Must-Have Association of the Next Century.  She was also a recent keynote speaker at the ASAE’s Marketing Membership & Communications Conference where she talked about the changes that our society as a whole have weathered including but not limited to: the .com bust, the 911 attacks, and the Baby Boomer’s impending daily retirement numbers.   Her presentation was thoughtful and gave the audience a lot to think about.  What is your association or chamber doing to stay relevant?

Make sure that you have the right tools in place for managing the relationship with your members.  If your association didn’t exist what would happen? You might be surprised at the answer.  Keep your finger on the pulse of your members with your Association Management Software (AMS) system.  It can provide numerous ways to measure engagement and help you demonstrate what YOUR association or chamber has done for their members. 

I'll Be There For You!

These five words you swear to your members.  When they breathe, you want to be the air for them - or at the very least the one place they go when they need to know about your association's industry.  Did you just head bang? I thought about it when I was writing it, if that makes you feel better. 

Our members are our life blood, but what if we can't be there for them when they need us.  Is this a failure upon our part? As a communications scholar/student we frequently say that it's actually healthy for a couple in a romantic relationship to maintain other relationships outside of that couple.  So where I am going with this? Members are looking for diverse information that may not be your area of expertise.  How can you keep them from going to other places?

• Partner with associations in your space.  They aren't the enemy and you will both be better for an event, a seminar or whatever type of program you can agree on. 
• Invite guest speakers on topics that aren't your association's niche that are relevant to your membership's diverse needs. 
• Read blogs of professionals in the for-profit and non profit industry where your association was born from.

Keeping up with the trends for your members is just one part of your day-to-day job duties.   You do this so your members don't have to look elsewhere for this type of information.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Only you and your members can decide. 

Like it, Tweet It, Pin it -- You decide

Facebook®,  Twitter®, Pinterest® and LinkedIn® are just a few places that you can engage with your members in the social media space.  The true value of being present in these spaces is hard to measure their true return on investment.  Check out a few ways that your association can start tracking your ROI today:

Google Analytics this provides you tools to track how members engage with your association’s website. When you set up your account, you indicate what page you’d like to track.  You can track items like: paid, organic, local, social, etc.  One of my former association clients did a “heat map” showing where they received the most traffic, thereby justifying their premium home page real estate.  In fact, the heat map, showed that their section of the website (career center) was the most viewed and visited page.  This built the business case for both a redesign of this section as well as increasing the prominence on other highly viewed pages. 

bitly makes your link both trackable and searchable.  This allows you to tweet shorter statuses on your association’s twitter account, as well as determine, who is out there listening to you.  This feature also allows you to customize your shortened URL so you can include keywords that you want to appear in search results.  The more you can track the more you can show the value of time(hopefully) well spent. 

Tweet Deck the largest advantage of this feature is the ability to schedule your tweets.  I usually open this up in the morning and after I check email I start crawling the web for stories about things I find interesting.  This could be anything from membership growth strategies, database best practices, interesting stories in the business world, as well as other things.  I spend about 30 minutes every morning finding these stories and then sharing them with the world via twitter. 

Klout helps you understand what the association’s sphere of influence is and how it’s changed.  The interesting thing is you can see who influences you, if you weren’t aware before.  I have a few go to’s in terms of blogs that I follow.  They are:

•  Katya’s Non-Profit Blog
•  Kindergarten Mind
•  Beth’s Blog
• ASAE’s Acronym
•  Harvard Business Review Blogs

With so many different ways to engage with your members out there, I think it’s important for someone to share what they’ve learned.  There may be easier ways to do it, but this is what I have learned.  Hope you find it helpful!

Experience, Curiosity & Questions

I recently read a post by Joe Rominiecki discussing his 5 years experience as an association executive at ASAE.  Coincidentally, I have double the experience of Joe and I have to tell you, I too have many unanswered questions.  For the sake of brevity, I won't dump them all here, instead I will chunk them into five questions.

1. How many people in marketing actually majored in business and or marketing? I spent 10 years doing marketing with or for non-profits, and my education had little to do with marketing.  My B.A is in American Studies, while my M.A is in Communications.  American Studies is based in history and likes to flirt with many other disciplines, it was heavy on reading and writing, which did serve me well.  Communications and marketing seem like they are closely related but if you had asked me 5 years ago which disciple I preferred, I would have told you marketing.  Today, professionals have to have more of a hybrid approach in the non-profit arena because you're dealing with limited resources and if you don't have a skill set you learn it.  Which leads me to my next question...
   
2. Experience or education? It's a follow up question to the one above, but what's more valuable your experience as a non-profit professional or a certificate in non-profit management? Here are some things that I learned on the job but not in school: managing vendors (designers, printers), understanding how to talk to those vendors so that it didn't cost you an arm and leg, politics (make nice with everyone, it makes your life easier, seriously), and try to make your boss look good no matter what.
    
3. Does anyone feel secure in their job? With the great recession, I can tell you I was not immune to being laid-off.  I worked for a small 6 staff association, and I was the last to be hired and the first to go when times got tough.  The association had never had someone do marketing for them, and the board didn't see the value in continuing it.  I spent three months of poorly paid government vacation being laid-off before I found my next gig.  What did it teach me? I shouldn't take my job for granted and I should do the best job that I can each and everyday.  Even with that, their are no guarantees. 
   
4.  Is change that hard? Perhaps it's my age, which isn't very old, but I don't find change to be that hard.  Just because you have always done something a certain way doesn't mean you should keep doing it that way.  However, when I find myself at the crossroads of making a change I am often lingering with doubt.  Is this the right decision? Should I choose this new vendor over the one I already know? What if this change doesn't go the way I want it to? So many follow up questions, and a lot here. 
   
5. How do we stay relevant with our members (customers)?  As former non-profit professional, keeping the association on the top of our member's minds was something that I spent a lot of time working on.  Emails, print, social media, I tried it all.  What did I find, people have so much information, that they rarely engaged with the association, or me.  I keep wondering, what do we as association professionals have to do to provide a service to members that they can't live without.  For your association the answer might be different.  

Basically, I think we all learn from our experience, in the end, my quest for additional knowledge always wins out.  How can I do better? What did I learn today? If I were my member, what would I think? 

Change is good...

In the non-profit world we're often slower to adopt to changes, and the most recent example of this is in social media.  Depending on the size of your association, your membership numbers and overall leadership associations are still thinking about dipping their toes into the social media water. 

Association members are using social media, regardless of the membership type, and believe it or not it is a way for them to engage.  Baby boomers engaged with their association by volunteering and becoming very active in the membership.  However the new generation, is engaging by sitting at their computers and updating their friends one status at a time.  If associations aren't at least listening to the conversation then they are missing out in engaging their future generation of members.  

One of the associations that I worked for is just getting in the social media mix, and when I spoke with my old supervisor over there, I told him that he was very late in the game.  He agreed and knew that the organization needed to supply a full time staff member to engage with their members in the social media stratosphere.  They have done as most associations do, hire a consultant to tell them what they don't know.  I offered my free advice, which was, get into the mix and don't do it "half-hearted." 

In order to be successful in the social media realm you must keep up your engagement.  With so many tools out there to engage members, what are you waiting for? 

Downsizing and Decluttering!

Each move that I make I seem to accumulate more and more stuff. But does it all have a purpose or a meaning? Some days I truly wonder. This move marks the 14th in the last nine years. No, you did not read that incorrectly. Over the years, I have lived in any number of combinations of roommates (1, 2, 3, 5). I have to say that I am very excited about the prospect of sharing space with my new roommate.

A few months ago, I lost my beloved dog Spike. Now that he's not around I find myself with a lot of down time and I notice how very empty the house is. Having someone or something to come home to definitely is a good thing and it's a new exciting change that I welcome into my life.

It is only a matter of time before I will have another animal in my home, but I am still going through the greiving process. It's proving more difficult than I ever imagined. With my new gig, I have become a SmartBrief reader. It might be something to check out if you are in the Association space. I find I get a lot of these communications, but I tuck them into a folder and read them when I have spare moments.

My client list at work is growing and so is the requests for additional marketing support from yours truly. I find learning InDesign and other programs to be a challenge that I am up for.

Because I will probably not blog tomorrow, a special and warm thanks to those who have and do continue to serve our country. I thank you for fighting for our freedom each and everyday!

It's about that time...

To break forth the rhythm and the rhyme! I kid, I kid. I haven't posted for a while for many reasons. Some of them good and others of them sad.

First the sad. I had to put down my beloved dog on labor day weekend. It was quite possibly the most difficult thing I have had to do. This is the first time I am writing and reading these words and not crying. The circumstances are/were awful and I don't wish to discuss them at great length. I have been grieving, to say the least.

Now for the good. I have landed a new job! I am working for a technology company that markets their products and services to non-profits. It's kind of like an ideal fit, if you ask me. I have a number of clients, some of whom I have worked with in the past. The Greater Washington DC area is not that large, and the Association world is even smaller. I am excited to build my network and gain some new skills. Not only am I a strategy woman, I am also dipping my hand into the design world. While I am at this job I am learning InDesign through a community education class.

Happy Fall All!