Insights
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What Goes on Your Homepage
What belongs on an association website's homepage? It's the most important page on your site because it's the most visited page. The challenge is determining what you should say, how much information you should provide, and what the order that information should be displayed in. It's Tetris for experience design. Your organization is unique and has unique requirements, but in this article I'll provide some guidelines on how to approach these challenges in laying out your homepage. The Homepage is The...
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Risk Sabotages Membership Offers
In behavioral psychology there's a concept called "loss aversion." Loss aversion is the tendency we have as humans to prefer avoiding losses over equivalent gains. Of course we all prefer avoiding losses, but loss aversion says that our response to potential losses is more dramatic than to gains. The potential of losing creates more avoidance than the potential of gain creates seeking. If I offered you a deal where we'd flip a coin and if it was heads you'd pay me $50 and if it was tails, I'd pay...
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Differentiating Membership Offers
"They're not the only game in town anymore," a peer recently told me, "I bet they're having to learn how to compete like most private companies do." We were discussing associations and the challenges of pitching membership. We live in a time of great abundance. The people that you'd like to become members have more options than ever. To pitch membership effectively, you must not only address their desires with a relevant offer, but you must also differentiate your association from every other...
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Relevance & Membership Offers
A common marketing mistake that association executives make is that their messages have low relevance to a member or potential member. The messages don't stick in their minds because it doesn't connect with their situation. Critically important marketing where this low relevance issue manifests is in your membership offer. Rather than being intrigued by a highly relevant offer, potential members see an offer that leaves them guessing to whether membership is worth the cost? To fix this, you...
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We're In Progress
"It's odd that what the board recommended was different from what the focus group wanted," one of our clients told me in a meeting. We're in the final stages of development for their website and discovered that the content of several pages needed to be tweaked after a focus group review. "It makes sense," I told her, "There is a generational gap between your board and who this website is designed to serve." By generational gap, I didn't mean the difference between Millennials and Boomers. I...
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The Mirror Fallacy
Many associations struggle with communicating the value of membership. The staff know that membership is valuable, but they can't seem to put it into words in a way that potential members "get it." This is a symptom of what I call the Mirror Fallacy, where fixating on our perspective impairs our ability to communicate effectively with others. These People Are Nuts Have you ever noticed someone else's behavior and thought, "That's crazy, I would never do that." I would never take a vacation on a...
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Leadership, Miserable Marines, and The Pond
I attended a Rotary dinner last night and sat next to someone who once served as district governor. I asked her how governors are chosen. She explained the requirements and nominating process. The final step is to present yourself before a committee and answer questions. She said, "Some people are wonderful on paper, but they have no microphone presence. As district governor you have to be able to command the attention of an audience." When we think about leadership, we often think about this...
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Pay Attention to Me
Everyone wants more attention. I've yet to come across a client who didn't say that their website needed, "greater visibility." When I ask clients what greater visibility would do for them, they say that it would help them grow. While this isn't entirely false, pursuing visibility is not a goal that leads to growth. Instead, seeking to understand the reason that people join is what charts the path to expanding membership. Attention, in itself, doesn't have much value beyond reinforcing your...
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Chat GPT Will Supply Your Competition With a Million Monkeys
I had beers with a couple of friends last Thursday. One of them just launched a redesign of their business website. His last major obstacle was that he needed to write his "about us" page. Rather than actually write it though, he recorded a short audio file where he talked about his company's history. Then he uploaded it to Otter.ai, a transcription software to convert it to text. He fed the text into Chat GPT and told it to organize it and re-write it with a more professional tone. He tweaked...
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Nicole Hodson On Changing to a Virtual Conference
Download the Audio to Listen to Later "We did see a big drop-off in sponsors and exhibitors saying, 'Well, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do a virtual thing.' Now they're actually calling us back." Nicole Hodson is the executive director of the National Association of Nutrition Professionals. In this interview, she shares how her team has made a rapid transition from putting on a physical conference to running a remote one. Connect with Nicole on LinkedInHealConThe National...
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Carl Smith - The Opportunities in Remote Events
Download the Audio to Listen to Later "In a lot of ways, I think anybody who's a tinkerer has got this opportunity right now to just change everything..." Carl Smith is the owner of the Bureau of Digital, an education and community organization that serves digital agencies. He launched his first online summit 3 years ago and in the time since has experimented with a variety of remote event tactics. Connect with Carl on LinkedIn The Bureau of Digital Key Takeaways Approaching a remote event as...
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Charles Max Wood On Running Virtual Conferences
Download the Audio to Listen to Later "The hard part is actually doing everything else. So there's the marketing as far as getting the word out, letting people know... And then just getting speakers lined up is also a bunch of work." Charles Max Wood has been running remote conferences targeting software engineers for the past six years and shares the lessons he's learned in this video interview. Connect with Charles on LinkedIn This email address is being protected from spambots. You need...
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The Magic Moment to Identify What Members Value
Imagine a member’s entire experience with your organization as a timeline. At the start of the line, they hear about your association for the first time from a coworker. In the middle, they’re active members, perhaps attending your annual conference. At the end of the line, they mention to a peer that they were a member several years ago. What is the specific second on that timeline where you can find out the most about what they value? I sat in on a conference session for association...
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How RFP's Work Against Associations
On the surface, a request for proposal (RFP), seems like a methodical and rational method to find a vendor to work on your project. You create criteria, assemble a pool of possible solutions, and choose the best one. But there are three serious problems that occur when you apply this approach that make its effectiveness mediocre at best.
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Turning Around a Declining Association
We Totally Appreciate You Being Our Voice “We totally appreciate you being our voice,” a member and laboratory leader told Michelle Hoad as she stood in the lobby of their hospital. She was on her way home after visiting the government and had found a couple of minutes to swing by and personally update the member while she was in the area. Three years into her tenure as CEO of MLPAO she had built a network of leaders like that one, increased membership by 35%, and delivered on her promise to...
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AMCOMP Teardown
In this teardown, we review the website of the American Society of Workers Compensation Professionals and discuss how to make it more effective.
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Genghis Khan, Recessions, and Member Growth
Many historians argue that Genghis Khan changed the world for the better. Under the Khan’s control, all of Asia was united, crime was non-existent, trade flourished, technologies were exchanged, and citizens were able to freely practice whatever religion they wanted. Historians call it the Pax Mongolica- the Mongolian peace. However, his conquest of Asia was arguably the most cruel and bloody period in history.
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The Member Magnet Framework
Why does one person sign up with your association and another doesn’t? One person says, “Yes, I want that,” and another says, “No thanks.” Not everyone is a good fit for your association. But it would be a mistake to assume that all those potential members that don’t join are in this category. What’s happening most of the time is that the offer you’re making isn’t valuable. A potential members looks at it and: Isn’t interested. Nothing you’re offering is particularly compelling to them. Thinks...
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Membership Offer Redesign Case Study
Leadership in the Endourological Society approached us about a website redesign. After a few conversations, it became clear that they were facing similar challenges to most societies and associations around engaging members and communicating value.
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Members Don't Join for Dollar Value
There has been an idea rolling around the association space that members sign up for economic reasons. The gist of it is that you need to look at all your benefits and calculate a market price for each to present as the value of membership in your offer.
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5 Minute Fixes for Your Member Benefits Page
If you’re like most association staff, you don’t have enough hours in the day and you’re almost hamstrung with a lack of budget. But you know you could be doing a better job selling the value of your association... If only you had more time and money! Catch-22! Darn it! Here’s the thing: You don’t need hours of effort and you don’t have to break open your piggy bank. If you’ve got just five minutes to spend boosting recruitment, I’ll reveal five easy changes to transform your current member...
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A Membership Director Transformed Their Offer Into a Compelling Pitch
Pam Williams is the VP of Membership for AMA Triangle, a large chapter of the American Marketing Association based out of North Carolina. She consulted with us as part of a membership drive, looking for ways to make their digital strategy more effective. Her membership offer was a point of leverage in her campaign because it was the pitch she was giving to all the potential members they were marketing too. However, it had some issues that were common to associations. The association's old pitch from...
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''How Do We Prove ROI'' is the Wrong Question
The 2019 Marketing General Membership Marketing & Benchmarking report has a section on internal challenges to membership. The #3 largest internal challenge is “Difficulty in proving ROI.” “How do we prove return on investment,” is not a great question for improving retention. It takes a position that the value in membership is transactional: they get $x return for $y cost. The assumption is that if you can provide more economic value than you cost, people will renew. If the value of membership was...
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What Bakers Can Teach You About Members Only Content
After a presentation, an executive approached me with an internal argument her staff was having. She said that they were going back and forth over whether they should make all of the content on their website freely available or whether they should put it behind a membership "wall" so that only members could access it? She wanted to know which option I advocated? I gave her that hated answer, “It depends.” However, I love to help execs out and so I didn’t leave it there and spent a couple...
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Avoid the El Camino Trap of Targeting Your Members’ Customers
Should your association website have content speaking to your member’s customers? As an example, if you’re an association of landscape professionals, should you write articles on lawn management or have a big button, “Find a Landscape Professional?” After all, if you could create leads for your members in the form of customers it would be a powerful benefit of membership. Additionally, it would cement your authority with members as the spokesperson of your industry. In some cases it may even...