Times Are Tight and There Are Ways to Help Your Members

I’ve been mulling over a post by Kristin Clarke that I read on the ASAE blog, Acronym.  The post is about some of the things financial-based associations are doing to help with the current economic crisis. In particular she talks about the American Staffing Association, the Financial Planning Association, and the American Bankers Association are doing to help the general public. The actions by these associations are interesting and good things to do, but don’t forget, even if your association is not a “financial” association you can still help.

All associations can look to helping and supporting their own members during these tough economic times. Of course what can be done can vary from association to association and membership to membership, but I think if you stop and think about it for a while, you can think of some things your association can do to help members. Some examples of what a professional association (the type of assocaition I am most familiar with at this point in time) can do include:

• Wave dues for members who are out of work
• Offer free, online seminars about job hunting or financial planning (if your association has an HR expert, maybe he or she could be the speaker)
• Create a job hunters blog, wiki, or message board for members to share information on job openings

While my list is made for professional associations, some trade associations probably could adopt these ideas as well. I would love to hear more ideas–for any kind of association.

Professional associations need to be there for our members now, when (to some) things might be as tough as it gets. After all, isn’t that the heart of a professional association to serve member needs?

Going to Miss the Members

It hit me today. I only have two weeks left in my current association and I am really going to miss the members. Sure, I will miss staff too, but since most of them are local, in the same field as me, etc… keeping in touch with my staff friends is pretty easy to do. But how do I keep in touch with members who live halfway across the country and have little to do with my field?

I think my answer is I don’t.

I am terrible at that sort of thing. For example, the first job I had out of college was working as an accountant’s assistant in a machine shop. To this day, I still exchange Christmas cards with two of the shop’s customers. I don’t think I will do this with members of my current association though (there are thousands of members in my current association. At the machine shop, there were only about 20 customers). So I am not as close to the current membership as I was those 20 people—but still, there are a handful of members with whom I have a great working relationship.

I guess my liking the members is as much of a strength as a weakness. I tend to get lots of comments on my customer service (I even won a customer service award when my association used to have one—and I wasn’t in the “customer service department”). The strength is I make members happy. The weakness is I may get too close—and maybe I overdo the customer service (I tend to drop everything if a member needs something).

I guess I will do well at my new association. There are only 39 members (as opposed to the 10,400 members of my current association). And personalized customer service at my new association is the center of their mission. But I will still appreciate and miss members of my old association.

Good News and Bad News

I have good news! An association hired me as their new communications manager!

Since I earned my CAE, I’ve been job hunting (looking for a position that could offer career growth). My current association is wonderful and I love the members and staff—but with the current structure there is limited growth potential. Not only is this new management position a step up from my current role as a staff specialist, but it also offers that growth potential I need to advance my association executive career.

The new association is small—39 members and three staff. This means I will be able to my fingers into a lot of pies from meeting planning, to budgeting, to member services, to government affairs—all in addition to communications. I am excited and anxious to start (I gave my current employer four weeks notice, so I have a bit of a wait).

Now for the bad news.

I am a bit worried that my current association’s blog will stall out before it really gets started. Right now, in its infancy, this blog needs a champion and a lot of TLC. The volunteer members are great and are picking up speed as they get the hang of blogging. But I worry that there might be little staff support when I leave. When I started the blog, I was told it was a “low priority” and I don’t see that changing after I leave.

I want to see this blog succeed and grow—especially since the blog is getting more unique visitors each month than our online-only journal and the online version of our print magazine combined and is growing (according to the last two sets of web stats I ran).

I am trying to figure out what I can do to leave the blog in a healthy position before I leave. I have a few ideas, but I need to think them though a bit more.

How Much Information Should Be Free?

Recently I convinced my association to change the way we publish our magazine online. In the past, we would convert a portion of the magazine to a text file and build individual html pages for each article—reformatting as we went along.

As the person who did this, I can tell you it was a time consuming nightmare of drudgery (I know the graphic artist on staff who use to cut and paste each magazine page into the text file had just about as much fun with it as I did). Plus members complained that it was hard to search for articles, it didn’t print out well,  and not all the information in the print magazine was online.

Now we have a PDF of the full magazine in a type of flash file that downloads (relatively) quickly (the magazine is about a 35 meg PDF after all). It takes me less than 15 minutes to put it online. In the flash format a reader can see the magazine exactly as he or she would the print version—you can even flip pages. Plus the reader can search and print out articles just like they appear in the magazine. Our international members only get the online version of the magazine, so they now have access to all the information—not just a few articles. And as added bonuses, I get statistics on what articles people are reading and the association gets about 10 hours of staff time back a month. Despite the $100 a month price tag, in the long run, the assocation  saves money.

Sounds great right?

Some of my members are concerned (So far four members out of 10,600). Those four want to distribute the articles freely to anyone they want. The way the new online magazine is set up, they can’t without asking permission (and the association making and e-mailing a PDF to them). In the past they easily got around the members only login by cutting and pasting the html magazine articles. Now the best they can do is print out a hard copy and hand the article to someone—just like they would if they handed the magazine out. This is intentional as we really didn’t like members reprinting magazine articles without permission. But those four vocal members don’t like it and say we should share the information.

This has me thinking. One of the best assets an association has is information; but in this digital age where you can get newspapers such as The Washington Post online for free, should associations follow suit? Our for profit competition isn’t free online, why should we be? And if we do allow better access for free distribution, is it even worth the magazine being a members only benefit? How much information should an association give away for free?

Help Me to Help My Bloggers

Instead of sharing my thoughts, I need your suggestions.

My association’s blog is in its infancy and the bloggers who are participating are doing great and really working hard to make the new blog a success. The problem I am having is that a few of them really don’t understand what a blog is and what it should be–despite my attempts at explaining.  For example, a few bloggers have asked if I could republish articles from our association magazine–some of which were written a few years ago and were easily dated. I’ve also had other unusal suggestions, but I don’t want to get into too many details as I don’t want to single people out.

Almost all of my bloggers lament on the lack of comments (although I personally think the number of comments they get is in line with what might appear on a new blog). I offered suggestions I read in a recent edition of Associations Now as well as created a list of my own based on that and other lists.

I found a great video about blogs in plain English on YouTube, but I don’t think it will really help my bloggers understand what to write.

Does anyone have any suggestions or does anyone know any great resources to help people understand the nature of blogs? Or maybe I am in the wrong from trying to explain to them what is “acceptable” to write.

CAE Study Tip: Form a Study Group

Overall I think a CAE study group is a good thing. My study group only had three people in it and we met weekly in a Starbucks mainly to review what read. We found sitting for a few hours and talking about things worked great. And knowing that I had other people to “report to” at the end of the week gave me even more accountability. What helped make our small group successful was that each of us had different strengths: Finance, membership, and communications/leadership. And to top it off I met two wonderful people who share my interest in association management.
 
There are downsides to study groups as well. Sometimes the focus isn’t on what you need to learn, but what the group needs to learn. This means you might sit thought a study session and pick up nothing new.  It’s also easy for an informal group to go off on a tangent or get into a level of detail that isn’t really going to help you prepare for the exam. Another downside was that I spent way too much in grande skim lattes.
 
Finding a study group is probably the hardest part. Some suggestions for finding a stuffy group include:

• Find co-workers who might also be taking the exam
• Meet people and exchange information at CAE prep course such as the ASAE CAE Immersion Course.
• Use the ASAE Listservs to form a group
• Ask around in your association management network to find out who might be interested or forming a group.

Don’t Hand Your Your Members a Rake When They Need a Hammer

“There are so many things to do in social media and such little time to do it because if you don’t do it someone else will and you’ll lose members and…” (okay, take a breath).

This is the subtle message I hear about social media and associations when I attend conferences, go to workshops, read articles, etc. I don’t think the message is intended, but it’s there and it says, “look at all this cool tools you can have” instead of “how to find the right tool for the job.”

There is a lot of information out there on the next 35 trends, the 50 top new things in social media, or the 20 ways to use emerging technologies, etc. We are drowning in possibilities and ideas on how to reach members using Web 2.0 technology. It’s like we get so entranced by the “media” part of social media, we forget the “social” end of the equation (which, I might add, comes first).

The result of this overwhelming information is that many associations either try nothing due to over load while others try anything/random things in an effort to find something that works. It’s like trying to help your members create an addition to a house by giving them random tools you bought at the hardware store (and hoping those garden tools will help members hang the drywall).

Stop! You don’t need to do everything just because it’s out there. Pick the right tools for the job.

You should be smart about what social media options you pursue. Be sure to spend a good amount of time finding out what tools your members actually want. Learn what do your members want or need to accomplish in an online community. Ask them questions, do a focus group, survey their social media habits, or just check out what your members are already doing online (find them in the blogosphere, FaceBook, etc).

Start with what they know they know and want and then look at all those trends to figure out where they will want to go next (before they do). Sure you might hand them the wrong tool now and again, but if pay attention to the community they are trying to build, you can minimize wasted time, stay ahead of the competition, and exceed your membership’s web 2.0 needs.

What Do They Call Bloggers Block Anyway?

For the past few days I just couldn’t come up with anything to write. It was driving me crazy. The funny thing is, I noticed the bloggers on my association’s website must be having the same problem (there are zero new threads for the past week). 

We all must be suffering from bloggers block.

To combat what’s happening with my association’s blog, I plan on putting together a list of topics and asking questions. I will e-mail those topics and questionsto all the volunteer bloggers and see if it gets the juices flowing. I am also going to talk to the customer service folks and see if any interesting questions have come across their desks.

As for me, there’s an article in Associations Now that I’ve been meaning to read. I think it’s more on commenting to blogs–but I think it will help. If nothing else, after I finish the article, I can blog about it!

CAE Study Tip: Write, Wiki, Whatever

Write out what you learn while studying for the CAE exam. Like talking out loud, this also helps cement the ideas in your head.  I guess it opens up another part of your brain to the information.

I made flashcards for myself with key concepts on them. I never actually went back and studied what I wrote on those cards (there must have been at least 300 cards) but I remembered what I wrote.

The best writing project I did while studying was wiki writing. In the middle of my CAE study period (February-December 2007), I was contacted by ASAE and asked if I would help write some of the initial entries for Associapedia wiki. I used this opportunity to help ASAE and help my studying by writing about CAE topics I wasn’t familiar with. It was almost like writing a report for college in that respect.

Find a writing project you like and use it to help you study: write out notes, make flashcards, write “reports” for yourself (or for another project as well). The key is to study while firing every neuron in your head.

Back From the Abyss (Was I Ever Really There?)

I might be a web communications specialist, but surprising, I can be digitally out-of-touch at times (unplugged). I have a cell phone, but I am too cheap to pay the $1.50 per or so it costs to connect to the Internet and I don’t have a laptop (never really needed one as my job doesn’t require a lot of travel).  So when I went to the beach this weekend, I had no contact with the cyber world.

You know what, I still found out all the good information though. I knew about Gustov and where he’s headed, I still saw Obama’s speech, and I knew the name of McCain’s running mate only a few minutes after it was announced (despite being on the sand–it spread by word of mouth from umbrella to umbrella). After that I made friends with the people on either side of me and chatted about the dolphins, the weather, the wave sets, and who we thought the lifeguard was blowing a whistle at (it was like Twitter sans typing).

My point is, it’s good to be connected but it doesn’t alway have to be digital. I think sometimes it’s easy to forget that it’s not the technology, it’s the human-to-human communication that’s the key.