8 numbers you should know for 2020
Before association industry professionals check out for the holidays, they’re making their plans for 2020 and checking them twice. And that’s all well and good, but how often are plans getting made that actually respond to the data we’ve spent so much time collecting over the course of a year? And how often are we […]
5 reasons your 2020 plan might fail
As we head into the new year, each of us has a set of organizational priorities for 2020. For your association, those priorities may be guided by a strategic plan and related formal work plan, or they may simply be a list of important deliverables you’ve jotted down based on your experience. Either way, successfully […]
Ready to grow your organization? Listen to Verne Harnish on SURGEcast
As the author of “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” and its follow-up, “Scaling Up: Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0,” few are in position to offer advice on how to grow your organization quite like Verne Harnish. The founder of the Entrepreneur’s Organization and the founder and CEO of the executive coaching company Scaling Up, Harnish sat […]
Are association chapters worth the effort?
Ask Peggy Hoffman and Peter Houstle what kind of reaction they get when they start asking about whether association chapters are still relevant, and they both start laughing. “There are a lot of people who are intimidated by that question,” Houstle said. “Sometimes, I wonder if there are people who don’t want to do (the […]
Here’s a big idea: Innovation can be small
Let’s make a bet. I bet that if you pull any association’s job posting for a leadership opening, you will find the word “innovation” at least half the time, either as a requirement of the type of person or a descriptor of where the organization is going. I also would bet that if you walk […]
Are you creating content you don’t actually need?
When Hilary Marsh was at the National Association of Realtors, she remembers taking a look at all the newsletters that went out to their members. The newsletters, which went out to about a million people, were being opened by fewer and fewer people. Why? They were sending too many. NAR’s staff of about 300 people […]
The world might change; here’s why our content strategy doesn’t
How should association communicators balance the needs of their business, the priorities of their organization’s leaders and the resources at their disposal? Who are their audiences, and what do they need in their lives as members – or prospective members? And what matters most when it comes time to measure success? Those are the types […]
Why it’s not good enough to ask what members want
When Elizabeth Weaver Engel thinks about what members want, two quotes come immediately to mind. The first is attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” And the second comes from tech giant Steve Jobs: “People don’t know what they want until you show it […]
Tools you can use to organize your content strategy
So much of what an association produces involves or revolves around content. There are learning courses, conference panels, blog posts, newsletters — both digital and on paper, case studies and white papers. That’s not even to mention all the social media: LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and whatever else is next on the horizon for how we […]
This worksheet helped 1 association trim its website by 95%
When Courtney Reyers first started working at the American Society for Microbiology nearly five years ago, she was faced with a 20,000-page website. It was untagged, unstructured and the search was, in her words, “a complete nightmare.” Something had to be done. As the senior manager for digital strategy at the American Society for Microbiology, […]