They did a very cool animation (that started with a Prezi) for one of our client’s “Unconference.” Check it out. Way to go Penny Willocks, Julie Hill, and Jon Benjamin!

So what does this have to do with associations? Last week we were meeting with a client who was discussing a very successful annual meeting that they have. The client was recounting the history of that meeting and said, basically:

“Everyone was happy with the event. So I figured, it’s time for a re-birth.”

Things were going well, so the client figured that was a good time to change things (selling high). I find that attitude refreshing, and unfortunately too rare in the association world. It’s not an absolute rule, of course. The most important insights are rarely THAT simple. But I think our community has a problem with skewing towards repeating what worked before, rather than staying ahead of what our members really need. One way to keep your focus on what they need is to at least start with the operating hypothesis that if people are happy with it, then it might be time for a change.

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Last night we held a public workshop, where we released the results and then heard from a panel of senior leaders at four organizations, who talked about how their organizations have been integrating social into their cultures and–more importantly–how they have made significant changes to their internal management processes in order to adapt to today’s more social world. Bob Rich from the American Chemical Society talked about how they transformed their strategy process to make it more agile and real to the employees–but were able to do it through a series of smaller (and easier to swallow) process changes. Reggie Henry from ASAE talked about how had staff and members working side by side in creating some new communication infrastructures for the organization–which meant letting go of some control and being okay with failure. Crystal Williams from the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association zeroed right in on failure. She said it was the proudest moment she had all year of her staff–when they failed and learned from it (they’ve been named a “greatest place to work in DC” by the way). And Sunayna Tuteja talked about the challenges of “going social” at TD Bank, where they have 85,000 employees and LOTS of restrictive government regulations.

More details about our survey report, including instructions on how to obtain a copy, are posted over at the Humanize Book site.

Then Shelly Alcorn did a follow up post about whether associations are about professions or needs, citing a Young Entrepreneur Council as a new idea to support young entrepreneurs (rather than an industry). Maybe associations could collaborate to support entrepreneurs, she suggests, since it’s not about a single industry?

There’s nothing particularly “wrong” about either post (Joe and Shelly are smart cookies and write good stuff), but I find that I’m reacting to both posts in a similar way. I must be missing something. Because there is a certain amount of drama implied in these posts, with Joe’s reference to “end of the world” movies and Shelly’s suggestion that this “both/and” idea is potentially “game changing.”

Maybe I’m incorrectly inferring the drama, but I really don’t get it. This looks like some simple business decisions to me: who are you going to serve and how are you going to serve them. Every business on the planet is constantly making that decision (and then re-making it as things change). There may not be easy answers (which is one reason why many businesses fail), but the basic need to answer these questions, I would think, is a given for any organization. Why is it such a big deal for associations that we are faced with these decisions?

And that’s when I realized why I was reacting to the articles. It sounds too much like these arguments start from the place of “Associations are in and of themselves important so it is critical we figure out what the mission is, for fear of losing this critically important institution.” That bugs me. I fear we have believed our own spin for so long, that we have developed a sense of entitlement. We are a part of democracy. We are a pathway to human community. We associations MUST to exist, because if we didn’t, things like democracy and human community would be threatened.

No, dear associations, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not that big of a deal.

Sorry, but you’re just not. Democracy and human community are wonderful things, but let’s be clear: they are much, much bigger than our associations. Don’t get me wrong: I love it when associations actually do advance things like democracy and human community. That’s awesome. Keep at it! But democracy and human community are going to be just fine if your association can’t figure out how to stay alive. Don’t confuse our need for democracy and human community with a need for associations.

We don’t need associations. What we need are people to come together and create endeavors that advance our communities. Hey, are you finding that connecting people around a need rather than an industry has some energy behind it? Sweet, go ahead and run with that idea. Are you finding that bringing people together inside a niche in your industry is helping to solve problems, advance interests, and improve lives? Awesome, forge ahead and let us know how it goes. Are you noticing that parts of our model, like engaging members in the governance of the organization, is helping to create deeper meaning for people who are the customers of the association? Yay! It’s nice to hear that we’re doing things that work. But none of that proves (to me anyway) that we need associations. It just proves that advancing our species is a group effort.

We don’t need associations, we need awesomeness. So let’s stop choosing sides in the “are associations under threat” debate and let’s simply get focused on being awesome, recognizing that the definition of being awesome will constantly be changing, morphing, and evolving with the times.

If you love something, set it free. I love the association community, so I hereby let go of my need for it to exist. That frees me up to actually do the work better, and that’s what we need right now.

P.S. If this rant sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote something very similar a year ago, which makes the whole picture even more disappointing.

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Here’s some more evidence. The Ford Foundation recently made a rather large grant ($500,000) to an organization to help that organization disseminate knowledge and information related to government accountability. An important issue indeed, so what nonprofit received this grant?

None. It was the Washington Post, a for-profit newspaper. Earlier the Ford Foundation gave $1 million to the LA Times to support expanding its coverage of local immigration and ethnic communities.

Now, that story may be more about the huge transformation in print media that’s happening today, rather than the line between nonprofit and for-profit blurring, but I think the point is still valid. There used to be an established “game” with grants. If you wanted the grant money, you had to jump through the hoops to become a 501c3. Period. That game is changing now. And I don’t see why other games (like a 501c6 tax-exempt status?) might be changing soon as well. I’m not predicting that particular change, but I think the smart associations are going to start thinking about changes like that when they do their strategic thinking and start building the capacity they need to deal with that level of change, rather than only focusing on how to increase their attendance by 2%.

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The association I work with, the Association of Water Technologies, has had the good fortune of having strong and growing reserves, even in a weak economy.  Fears about a stagnant economy had the Board nervous using funds in the reserve.  And, because of a very conservative investment policy, like many groups, we were seeing very little return on our investments. Our conservative approach, which made sense when we were solely focused on growing the reserve, was outdated as we began to look at the reserve as a way to fund big projects.

With some research through ASAE and with the advice of our investment advisor, we developed a comprehensive reserve and investment strategy.  The policy is aimed at safeguarding funds, providing funding for big projects, and allowing us more aggressive investment options for a limited amount of the reserve.

At our last Board meeting, we approved the policy, which designates funds into four categories – operating funds (2 months of expenses), intermediate funds (4 months of expenses), program development funds and long-term funds. Each fund has its own objective, maximum target amount and investment options, and some require a replenishment plan if money is used from the fund.

This new policy has allowed us to be very strategic in how we manage our reserve and how we re-invest in the Association through new projects.

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I didn’t have a magic wand to give her, unfortunately, but I did point out that there are opportunities to make small shifts (for free) in the way we do things that can go a long way to building internal capacity. The example I gave her was staff meetings. How many of us do long, boring staff meetings that everyone hates? (Be honest…) We typically use staff meetings to report out, but we rarely use them as opportunities to actually learn.

Figure out ways to do the reporting online or via email, and then re-design your meeting structure so that you can help people to learn at every staff meeting. Assign homework to people. Have people other than the boss actually lead the meeting. Tackle complex strategic topics. You may not have the budget to send all your staff to go get advanced degrees, but you can certainly help them learn and grow if you give it just a bit of attention.

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Recently, more and more, we have found ourselves responding to various new standards within our industry.  Some of them we agreed with and supported, others we disagreed with, and others, still, we couldn’t take a stand because there wasn’t consensus among the members.  This rash of activity raised our awareness, though.  Initially, we had members and past leaders asking AWT to develop standards of our own to respond to, or counter, these new initiatives.

In analyzing how many resources it would take, both in human and financial capital, to develop a standard of our own, it seemed out of our budget.  Wanting to be strategic in our decision, we created a Task Force to do two things; to do a gap analysis and determine if/where there was a need for a standard that AWT could fill, and to determine if AWT had the human capital available to develop standards in a timely manner.  In the end, the Task Force recommended to the Board that instead of developing our own standards, we partner with a group that already does, as they have the organizational capacity in place.

The other way in which AWT is playing an advocacy role is in promoting our members and industry to our members’ customers.   So, we are working to educate facility managers on how our members can help them be successful.  And we are providing those facility managers with useful tips and information on various aspects of water treatment.

We are also developing educational material for building owners, operators and engineers on how to save money and resources in their operations.  Ours is a niche market that is complex to explain.  Many building operators believe the best and only way to save water (and thus money) is to install low-flow equipment (toilets, sinks).  In fact, there is greater savings to be had with the cooling systems – that’s a harder sell!  Thankfully, we have great members who are helping us develop educational training material that easily explains the technicalities.

So, while we’re a small organization financially, we have found successful methods to give us a bigger voice for our members and industry.

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The downside of sharing this example, however, is that it gives people an out: “Well, sure, they can do that because they are Google and they have effectively unlimited resources.” This out is particularly true in nonprofits and associations, who often feel that the resource-rich corporate world cannot provide us with lessons we can apply in our world.

So at a recent conference (Blogworld Expo), Maddie Grant and I spoke about Humanize, and instead of only giving corporate examples, we actually brought a nonprofit membership organization in to serve as our case study. The organization is NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network. They only have a dozen staff. They are not big and corporate and oozing with money and resources. They are a struggling nonprofit like the rest of us.

Yet they are not like the rest of us. They are crystal clear about their values and very consciously live them in the way they do their work every day. They give program coordinators the power to jump in and tell a webinar presenter to up the energy if they hear on the twitter stream that it’s boring the participants. They write publicly about the parts of their annual meeting that failed. They are not afraid to experiment with programs and learn from them. They let their staff express themselves authentically on social media. They share internal data with members when asked, even if they aren’t sure it will paint a pretty picture.

NTEN is one of the most human organizations we’ve come across. They truly embrace the idea of being open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous (the four human elements we identify in the book). And they did it without a big corporate budget. They did it while still delivering value to their members. They did it while still successfully implementing things like education, networking, and community building. They did all the stuff we other nonprofits and associations are doing…but they built a powerful and innovative culture at the same time.

Strong cultures are not created based on access to lots of resources or a large budget. Strong cultures are created based on disciplined clarity and commitment. First you get really clear on what is valued in your culture. And I don’t mean just high-level, mission-statement clear, with lofty talk of integrity, honesty, and excellence. I mean the discipline to get clear on why being transparent or decentralized, or focused on learning truly matters to the results you seek. And after the clarity, you get serious about the commitment to make it happen. You walk the talk. You do it and live with the consequences. I think that’s what NTEN did. What are you waiting for?

Here are the slides from our presentation with NTEN staffer Amy Sample Ward, at the Blogworld Conference in New York.

We started out with just the educational programming at the Annual Convention.  From there, we added a Technical Training Seminar, and shortly after, a Sales Training Seminar.  This past year we expanded our basic training from one day to three days.  In between we added online training, as well as complimentary webinars.  Now, we are in the process of developing a certificate program and the training associated with that.  At the same time, new trends in the industry and emerging technologies are having us consider three additional courses.  It’s a lot!  But, since we are currently developing new curriculum, it gave us the perfect opportunity to look at all of our offerings.

Our first consideration is the purpose of each educational course.  What is the best way to deliver the content?  Then we think about the content itself.  Is this something that is fairly static information that won’t change often or is it an evolving subject that will need to be updated frequently?  Then we consider our target audience.  Are these people who can be away from the office or do their jobs not allow them to travel?

One of the other aspects we are considering is the fact that everyone learns differently.  Also, since we already have a certification program, we have a need for various methods of earning CEUs so those certified individuals have many recertification options.

The Board will have a strategic conversation on this topic at their next Board meeting.  It will be exciting to then develop our new educational offerings within this well thought-out framework.

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