Archive for June, 2010

What if Dues Went Away?

June 30, 2010

Yesterday I wrote a post over on Get Me Jamie Notter about the idea of strategy as a “pattern of investments.” This got Scott Briscoe thinking, and he then wrote a post on Acronym taking that to the next level, suggesting five specific things association leaders could do to develop their capacity for actively changing patterns.

(On a side note, this is what I absolutely LOVE about blogging. I read one blog post, that sparked me to share a fairly brief idea, that sparked Scott to share something… So much insight is generated this way, that just didn’t happen as easily before social media. But I digress…)

I love Scott’s ideas for figuring out new patterns. My favorite was his fifth one: imagine that in 24 months your dues revenue will be down by 75%. What would you do? How would you shift to draw in revenue that was not an obligation that needed to be “renewed” every year? You know you’d need to drop programs with such a dramatic cut in revenue, so which ones would go or be transformed? For everything that is “subsidized” by dues, who are the people that really value it? Would they pay? I think these kinds of questions are excellent ones to answer and would probably prompt a lot of pattern shifting, even if your dues were increasing.

Posted in Leadership, Strategy | 1 Comment »

Making Sense of Engagement

June 9, 2010

My friend David Gammel wrote the cover story in Associations Now in May, and he did an excellent job of taking the feel-good, high-level concept of membership “engagement” and bringing it right down to the operational level. It’s a truism in association management that engagement is a good thing: engagement drives retention, engagement drives growth…but how does that really work?

David presents an “engagement acceleration curve” that clarifies the different levels of engagement and, more importantly, demonstrates a progression from less engaged to more engaged. Often, particularly in small associations, I think we just look right to the end. Who can we get on the Board? Who can we get as a major sponsor? These are very high levels of engagement, which really require a progression through other levels. We might intuitively know this, but I think it helps to be more explicit about it, so we can effectively feed the funnel, so to speak.

I look at some of the associations that I manage and I realize that we are not offering enough effective engagement opportunities at the lower end of the scale. And when we do offer them, there isn’t a clear next step, other than to join or come to an event, which are bigger steps. I also find it interesting that in one case, coming to an event (we do them monthly) one would think would be an easier step than joining (which costs between eight and twenty times the registration fee of one event), yet nearly all of our attendees are members. Hmmm.

Thanks, David, for helping me to think more clearly about these issues in concrete ways!

Posted in Membership | 1 Comment »

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