Forward Thinking: How to Attract and Nurture Future Leaders Within Your Association
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Association staff see the average age of members increasing. They see more and more white hair at conferences, a “sea of white”, says one, which is concerning when we think about the future of our associations. Who is going to be a member, contribute or volunteer? Long-time members want younger members to join your association as they bring in new ideas, different best practices, and a fresh outlook. But, how do we attract, and then prepare these younger members to carry on your mission? In this session we will explore a 3-step process for attracting new members to our associations. This process, adapted from IDEO’s famed innovation method, feeds strategy, innovation and marketing. We will discuss not only how to attract new members, but also how to engage these younger members who will be our association's future leaders.
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Forward Thinking: How to Attract and Nurture Future Leaders Within Your Association
- 1. How to Attract & Nurture Future Leaders Within Your Association A WebLink Webniar by Amanda Kaiser @SmoothThePath @WebLink
- 2. ABOUT • Leading SaaS AMS Company • Over 720 Association Customers; 5,500 Users; Supporting 650K Members • Established in 1996 • Based in Indianapolis, Indiana • 60 Employees • 94% Customer Retention Rate • 96% Average Daily Satisfaction Rating
- 4. Poll • Thinking of young members what is your goal? A. Attracting younger members to the association B. Attracting younger professionals to the industry C. Engaging and retaining younger members D. Helping younger members contribute their knowledge to the professional community
- 5. Attracting Young Members Photo source: www.specialforcesassociation.org
- 6. Attracting Grads to the Profession Photo source: www.rocketcontest.org
- 7. Photo source: The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) Engaging & Retaining Young Members
- 8. Photo source: www.stuffpoint.com Helping Young Members to Contribute
- 11. Human-centered design 1. Discover 2. Design 3. Test ∧ Member
- 12. DISCOVER
- 13. Model
- 15. Imagine
- 16. Ask & Listen Ask & Listen
- 17. Poll • Which discovery tactics have you used in the past? A. Modeling B. Observing C. Imagining D. Asking & Listening
- 18. DESIGN
- 19. Pick the Priorities Pick Priorities
- 20. IdeateIdeate
- 22. Test TEST
- 23. Amanda Kaiser Member Informed Strategy, Marketing and Innovation Qualitative Member Research www.SmoothThePath.net akaiser@SmoothThePath.net @SmoothThePath
Notes de l'éditeur
- Hi, I’m Amanda Kaiser and I am a member researcher. Working with associations I talk to their members. I analyze those member insights to help the association update their organizational strategy, improve their marketing plan or develop an innovation plan. Innovation is what we are going to talk about today because attracting younger members and innovation go hand in hand. Imagine a steady stream of young professionals joining our associations. Membership would rise. New energy, new faces and new ideas would become the norm. The association would be healthy and so would the membership. We would feel confident we had a pipeline of future leaders. Life would be great, right? Well, many associations are struggling with attracting and engaging younger members. This is because young professionals either do not know about the association, they don’t think it is for them or they don’t see the value for themselves. We do see some associations making headway in this area though and I’ll share 4 examples with you. These examples may spark a great idea for how you can attract younger members into your association. Or if they don’t because of your organization's size, the member audience or the strategy, don’t worry because we’ll be also be talking about a 3-step process to create the changes and innovations that match your specific association’s needs.
- When we talk about young members I find associations generally have one of these four goals in mind. Please select the goal that most closely matches your young member goal: It may be how to attract younger members to your association. It may be attracting younger professionals into the industry – some professions and industries are seeing many professionals retiring and not enough qualified college grads to take their place. You’ve got some younger members but perhaps they are the most likely to not remain members so you’ve got to figure out how to engage and retain them better. I hear this statement from long-time members a lot. The association has younger members but we are not benefiting from their knowledge. How do we help younger members to contribute? Let’s see which goal is top of mind for most of us and then I’ll share 4 association examples. One for each of these goals.
- The first goal is attracting young members. Many associations notice that their membership is aging. If you track the average age of membership you may find that in the last decade it has increased somewhat. This is exactly what happened to the Special Forces Association whose members are the Army Green Berets. They noticed they had an aging membership. Young veterans were not joining. One problem they identified was the demographics of members had changed. The membership in 1968 was largely unmarried and going to serve in Vietnam. Now many of the younger special forces are married and have kids. Understanding how their member demographics changed and understanding their new member’s needs helped them to make changes to their offerings. First they started scheduling conferences in family friendly places coupled with family friendly activities. The next conference is in Jacksonville, Florida where kids can have fun at the beautiful beaches. They also have started programs that reach out to spouses of members. I love how the SFA is using member insights to provide insight into the innovations they are creating to meet the needs of their younger members.
- The second goal is attracting recent graduates and new professionals into the profession. Many professions and industries are noticing a widening gap between the volume of retires compared to the qualified grads ready to take their place. The Aerospace Industry has that challenge. As older employees retire there are not enough graduates with the right skills, including those with technical STEM degrees, to replace them. The Aerospace Industries Association knew someone had to attract more young people into STEM college programs and also enhance their interest in the aerospace industry. One of AIA’s offerings is the Team America Rocketry Challenge. College teams build rockets and compete in a national contest. An interesting way to get more college students knowing about and excited about this career path.
- The third goal is focused on how we attract, engage and retain young members in the association. This gets to the value equation. The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), is the association for broadcast journalists and others in this industry. The association is tackling the younger member issue with a newly developed incubator group. The incubator group is called the NextJ Program for next generation of journalists. The group met in mid-October (some of the members are pictured above) to talk with RTDNA’s staff and board. By design the participants all worked in non-traditional jobs and they don’t have journalism degrees, which is the trend for this industry but which is also not typical of RTDNA’s core members who are more traditional. During the incubator group meeting, young members talked about what their jobs were like, the group exchanged thoughts about the industry, the work environment and what young people need in the industry. The plan is to bring at least one big idea forward and innovate on it. This group will provide input for one year and if this test goes well it will be repeated next year. Another great example of using young member insights as input for innovation.
- Finally, goal number 4: How can we help younger members contribute. We are not hearing from young members and the membership at large does not benefit from their knowledge. In member interviews I often hear comments like this from long-time members: “The meetings are boring. We’re talking about the same old issues. And I think too many of us usual presenters are tired old goats. There are young tigers out there that need to be heard.” Or “The board or committee leadership is stale. We need a diversity of new ideas. There’s got to be other members or younger members who are doing amazing things and we’re not talking to them.” There many ways to tackle this goal. In AssociationsNow articles I hear about associations holding one spot open on the board for a fast-track younger member. I think they call it a wild card member. When it usually takes 10 years of volunteering to make it to a primer national board spot, the fast-track path is only 2-3 years. In this way, associations are hearing from new voices during critical strategic board meetings. In addition to leadership there’s also the speaker side. The problem here is identifying new quality speakers with innovative and hopefully successfully tested ideas. I’ve heard about associations using roundtables as a way to identify those who are experimenting with new ideas and asking them if they would become speakers. Associations could also ask mentors what innovative experiments their mentees are trying. And there must be other ways for those connected in the membership to identify great work and help bring those members forward. Speaking may not be on a younger member’s radar but their ideas can trickle up as long-term members advocate for them. As you can see the young member problem takes many forms. We talked about at least 4 different goals here and perhaps that’s the first real hurdle – figuring out what the goal of the association is when we talk about younger members.
- Clarifying goals. It is very important we understand what our challenge really is and articulate our goal. As you look at your association what problem do you need to solve regarding young members? Usually we say we need to add, attract, or grow young members to the membership. But is it about retaining and engaging instead? Or finding those willing to lead or contribute? Or maybe our goals for younger members are different than the 4 we’ve been talking about. We need to use our data and clarify that goal before we get stared. Once we clarify our goal we can set about solving it.
- Enter IDEO. IDEO is an innovation company. A consultancy really, they help others be more innovative. They have worked with many big brands and the largest, most innovative consumer products companies have all hired them. Think Apple, IKEA and even non-consumer organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where they’ve worked to solve some social problems. Next I’ll be introducing IDEO’s 3 step process for solving problems. IDEO is a great company to learn from because they have been very publically successful – we know the process works. But they’ve also been very public talking about how they do what they do. So I can share how they do what they do with you! This younger member problem, I suspect, is exactly the kind of juicy problem they would like to solve.
- IDEO calls what they do human centered design. Starting with the customer, or user, in mind first. This is important because many innovations don’t start with the customer first. We can design a cool widget and then go searching for an audience or we can cultivate a community and ask them what they need. That’s why human-centered design, or as I call it member-centered design, is so perfect for associations. We already have the community. We just need to talk much more to those members who love us the most. There are 3 parts to the member-centered design process: First we discover – determine what the problem is from our member’s point of view We design – try a bunch of solutions We test – see which solution may solve the problem the best Those steps don’t sound groundbreaking but done right they can result in magic! Now let’s get into the details…
- Discover is the first and most important phase. It is also the most overlooked phase by many organizations. In this step of the process we place ourselves in our members’ shoes and take a long look at members’ challenges and the industry, profession, as well as back at our association through their eyes. This is hard and messy work because we are not our members but there are important tools we can use to help us think like them.
- The first technique in the Discovery phase is to Model. Modeling is trying something on for size. Pretend to be a member and try to purchase a webinar. How hard or easy is it? When fielding a benchmark survey we can first take it ourselves and think critically about how we feel about the experience. Have you ever tried to join online? How was it? And we can do this for every part of our association from networking events to registering online, on the phone or by mail. Modeling is trying something on for size and then reflecting on the experience. It’s important to note people may not remember every tangible benefit we provide but they are more likely to remember the experience. How did we make them feel?
- A second discovery technique is to observe. This is the holy grail of consumer research. Place cameras in a store and watch how consumers behave. Are the aisles to narrow? Are there too many products? This works great for some industries but it is harder for associations because we normally can’t observe members doing their regular duties. Instead we observe them by looking through a lens of data. Member data is great and it can help us understand how to optimize our association but data measures the past so I recommend using this in addition to other discovery methods.
- A third discovery method is imagining. It’s about acting, behaving or imagining you are someone else in a situation that may be foreign to you. A few weeks ago we tried this exercise on Association Chat the association industry’s tweet chat. I called it imaginative empathy. Participants imagined, thought about and shared what it was like to be a new member for the first time walking down the concourse toward registration. How does that feel? How about being a new member, who knows no one, and who is walking into a reception. Everyone is in a conversation except you. How does that feel? Isolating? Scary? We can learn a lot about the member experience by imagining. This method is particularly good for fixing member service problems and improving our members’ experience.
- The fourth and my favorite discovery technique for associations is to ask & listen: Association members are willing to give feedback to the association. They want the association to improve. They think our association is important. The issue becomes how do we do this the best? Most organizations rely on data and member surveys and they can be helpful. But they report on what has happened in the past and we can make mistakes applying past behaviors and preferences and needs to the future. We often over look another way of getting member insight that is perfect for associations I suggest we literally ask our best members questions that will help us inform the future of the association. Like what are your biggest professional challenges? Thinking about the profession or industry what worries you the most as you look 3 or 5 years into the future? We can also ask questions about value. Is your membership valuable to you? When did you first understand the value of the association. These types of questions will give us the building blocks we need to understand our members’ challenges and their opinions of the industry, the future and the association. There are many ways to ask questions like these like in focus groups or in person but phone interviews are far more objective. Even though this process takes longer the results are more accurate. We’ve talked about 4 key ways to discover what our members’ problems are: Model, Observe, Imagine and my favorite Ask & Listen. I’d love to know which of these techniques you rely on.
- Take a minute to think about which tactics you’ve used in the past. While you are at it you may want to think about what techniques you may want to try in the future. While you are doing that… Here’s a bit more detail about the asking & listening technique. As I’ve said it is one of my favorites for associations because when designed right it gives you deep, contextual data about members. The exact type of data that can be used to inform marketing, strategy and innovation. I recommend focusing first on the members who love us the most, try to get about 12-15 of them on the phone and watch carefully for the key topics that keep coming up. I find the most interesting insights come in the follow up questions. Someone will talk about an often mentioned topic and this is the que for me to ask for more detail. It’s super helpful to understand the how’s and why’s of each member issue – something that’s really difficult to do in a survey. Analysis is harder to do on this type of research but we will see patterns emerge and that’s exactly where we need to focus.
- The second step in the process is design. We’ve done the discovery. We know what the problem is. Now it is time to create the solution. We are now going to run through 3 sequential tasks to get us to a new association offering. First we pick the priorities, then we ideate, finally we prototype.
- If we spend long enough in the design phase really understanding our members’ needs, challenges, fears, worries, opinions, thought process we will have a very large and very messy pile of insights. It is necessary to sort through all of this and start pulling forward what is most important to them and what is doable and on mission for us. Here we ask ourselves, with our limited resources, which problem do we really want to solve? What problem is hurting our members the most? What problem is the most painful if left unsolved? What problem can we solve with our strengths and resources? Perhaps to start we only pick one problem. We always can loop back around and pick another later. Member problems can range from little issues like not understanding a new technology coming to the industry to big problems like pending government regulations that will change everything. Pick the one problem, for now, that best suits the association and the members.
- Next we ideate. There are many ways to solve every problem so I’ll share a couple of methods for ideating: Brainstorming: Get 5-8 of the most creative thinkers into the room. Set some ground rules: no idea is bad, first build on other’s ideas before offering your own. Think about the environment and how you facilitate a brainstorm like, revealing a lot about the exercises and topics in advance so the introverts among us have time to mull it over. Role-playing: pretend you are your members. Act out a moment in their lives. Role-play a contentious event at work or learn what it is like to attend one of the receptions at the conference. IDEO also talks about a variation of role-playing called body storming. They put themselves in the users shoes literally. When they have a hospital client they lay in a hospital bed. When they have a school district they go buy school lunch and eat in the cafeteria. Living it and then ideating can help you connect even more with the needs of your members You will find during this ideation process that you may have a ton of ideas. Some will be fantastic and most just won’t work. That’s fine. Here’s where you prioritize again and let the great ideas, the most doable ideas, the ideas that solve your members’ problem filter to the top.
- Here’s a key step that associations tend to forget. It’s prototyping and this is a critical part of IDEO’s process. You can’t get a sense of the thing unless there’s a prototype. For many companies this is a physical thing but for most associations a prototype may be an outline of this idea on paper, a diagram, a wireframe or a blueprint. It can be a video of staff acting it out. The format of how we render this idea is limitless but we do want to capture it in some way so we can try the idea on for size. I do a lot of pubic speaking and when I write out a speech it sounds great. And then I practice giving it and then I can hear weak transitions and identify all of changes I need to make. The same is true in the design phase, it’s hard to see what will work and what won’t until you have a prototype of some sort. A key thing to keep in mind for this step: is to make your prototype fast and cheap. You want it nearly immediately so you can vet the idea. You also don’t want to spend much money on it. People get wed to expensive prototypes and a bad idea can move forward just because so many resources got used in the making of the prototype. IDEO prototyped the first Apple mouse with a ball from a roll on deodorant bottle and a cardboard box. They find themselves using legos, and coat hangers and whatever is laying around their conference rooms to prototype. We association professionals should too. We’ve talked about the 3 step design process: Pick priorities – which member problem will we work on first Ideate – how do we solve the problem? Prototype – quickly and cheaply develop this idea so we can demonstrate it and talk about it
- The last step in our 3 step innovation process is testing. Associations don’t have enough risk free ways to test new offering. We tend to come up with an idea and if there’s enough momentum we get budget approval from the board and move toward launch. Testing though can help us reduce a significant amount of risk. In this phase of the process we want to try out our solutions in a less risky way before spending too much time and money on a bigger idea. Here are some examples that might help you think about testing your ideas: Take the idea for this webinar as an example. It started as a online community discussion by an event professional Joan Eisenstodt when she posted an article about IDEO’s method for reinventing school lunch and wondered if the same method could be applied to events. I then wrote a blog post applying the same concept to associations; that post had a far more than my average number of readers. Since I knew there was interest I turned it into a webinar. This can be a great process for an association too. Try a tweet, then an article, then a course. In research perhaps we could move from a simple 2 question poll, to a small survey, and finally to a large complex piece of research if there’s interest all along the way. Or thinking about professional development, we can film a simple 3 minute video to gauge interest in a topic, then try an online course and finally if there is a ton of interest then host a in-person symposium. The key is to test the idea in a small way and if that is a success put more resources into it and try it again in an iterative fashion until we’ve proved the bigger idea. No matter the key problem you are trying to solve – how to attract more younger members, engaging new members, growing membership or finding ways for members to contribute, IDEO’s 3 step process can get you there. Today we’ve unpacked how they do what they do, starting with: DISCOVERY – understanding our members better, not only how they interact with us but also what unmet challenges they are experiencing in their jobs. We also talked about DESIGN – once we understand our members’ problems in detail we have a process to come with solutions Finally we want to TEST our solutions before we spend too much time and money launching them. This process harnesses member-centered design. It is about putting members at the center each time we think about an organizational goal. That’s the IDEO magic and the same process used by the most innovative organizations around the world.
- It was a pleasure talking about this member-centric process for attracting new members AND, by the way, this same process can be used to help you meet your other association goals. I am a qualitative member researcher and I write about 3 posts a week for my blog about member informed innovation, strategy and marketing and you can find it at SmoothThePath.net. You can also reach me directly at my email address listed above. Having heard all this what questions are top of mind for you?