Archive for December, 2009
December 30, 2009
Expand Engagement Before and After Membership
As a follow-up to my definition of member engagement for associations, I’d like to discuss the idea of broadening your engagement strategy beyond membership.
If you accept that engagement occurs when someone invests time or money with the organization in exchange for value, you can then consider opportunities to do so before becoming a member as well as after. In fact, membership could be just another station along an engagement progression path, rather than the ultimate destination.
Examples of pre-membership engagement could include:
- Viewing content on your website, blog, twitter account, etc.;
- Paying attention to a PSA or press coverage;
- Sharing content from your website or other publication;
- Buying a product;
- Attending a conference or event;
- Applying for a job via a career center.
Examples of post-membership engagement could include all of the above, plus:
- Writing or speaking;
- Volunteering for a committee or task force;
- Serving in a leadership role;
- Awarded Fellowship or other achievement status;
- Spending significant money on sponsorship, advertising, exhibit space, etc.
The important concept here from a strategy perspective is to plot out what lower value engagement activities and options will feed into higher levels and how you can progress people through them.
Imagine professional baseball without the minor leagues. Moving from high school to pro teams for all players (not just the rare exceptional talents) would be very hard to do well from both the player and team points-of-view. The minors provide an important talent channel for the majors. While I’m not suggesting you develop a minor league association, you do need to consider how people will progress through your organization as their relationship with you matures.
Organizations with an efficient flow from low to high value engagement will tend to be healthier from both revenue and mission fulfillment perspectives.
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December 28, 2009
Definition of Member Engagement for Associations
The term ‘member engagement’ is often bandied about in the association world. More of it is considered better yet we rarely state what that actually means. I thought I would put a stake in the ground with my definition of it in the work I do with clients.
Member engagement is the result of a member investing time and/or money with the association in exchange for value. The more of these precious resources they invest, the more engaged they are.
A member who speaks at a lot of conferences and writes many articles for association publications is highly engaged.
A member who invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorship money is also highly engaged, even if they do absolutely nothing else.
Engagement is about value. The value for the person doing the engaging as well as the value of that engagement for the association.
Healthy associations create more engagement opportunities in areas that create strategic value for the organization. Having a surfeit of articles to publish is nice but doesn’t really matter if the budget has been in the red for the last three years.
Create engagement where it matters.
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December 22, 2009
CIO.com Survey: CIOs Discover Other Departments in Organization!
The white paper I posted yesterday was timed well, given the results of CIO.com survey of CIOs. They came out with similar survey results a few years ago but it still boggles my mind:
Today’s Focus for IT Departments: Business Opportunities
This year, nearly one third—30 percent—of the 594 IT leaders we polled say meeting or beating business goals is a personal leadership competency critically needed by their organizations, up significantly from the 18 percent who said so last year. Eighteen percent also named "external customer focus" as a critical skill, double last year's 9 percent. Double.
Meanwhile, 22 percent cited "identifying and seizing on commercial opportunities"—more than triple last year's 6 percent. Yes, triple.
Sadly, the same is probably true for a lot of other departments that serve, in theory, the rest of the organization (HR, Accounting, etc.).
It’s not hard to be a rock star within an organization in any of these functions. A simple focus on outcomes and value that is relevant to the whole enterprise will do it.
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December 21, 2009
Transformation or Travails: The imperative for IT’s shift from support function to strategic asset
For my snow-bound East Coast colleagues (and everyone else!), here is a white paper I co-authored with three other management consultants: Transformation or Travails: The imperative for IT’s shift from support function to strategic asset (PDF).
We argue that world-class IT departments take a value-oriented approach to supporting the rest of the organization in achieving their strategic priorities, rather than defending their technocratic fiefdom. The paper concludes with the criteria for a truly strategic IT operation.
We welcome sharing this paper with your colleagues and staff.
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December 7, 2009
Questions to ask when you run the website.
Good news! You are now in charge of the website!
Now what?
Here are a few critical questions to consider when you take over the website. Discuss these with your team, your boss, and your peers.
How well does the site support our strategic outcomes?
What is your organization trying to achieve? How much of a contribution is the site making to those goals? What more could it do to provide value?
This is the first thing you have to understand before you can really do anything significant with the site.
Which segments of our target markets are the most relevant for us online?
Of all the markets your organization serves, which are the most relevant to your online goals? How well does your site target and serve those people?
Attracting welders to a knitting site probably doesn’t do anyone much good. Make sure your site has the right audience. If it doesn’t, you have a great opportunity to have a tremendous impact by getting the right people to the site.
Do we have the tools, technology and skills to execute effectively on our current goals?
Does your content flow freely to the site without errors or revisions? Do you have process bottlenecks? Are some things that should be simple to achieve highly complex?
As the new leader of the website, you have an opportunity to spot problems that have become invisible to everyone else yet are a big drag on productivity. Fixing some of these right off the bat is often relatively easy and gives you some early wins for your team and organization.
Does your new responsibility signal a great shift that the site must reflect?
Big picture: does your new role signal a broader change in the organization? If so, make sure you consider how that new high-level direction can be best supported by your team and website.
Get a mentor.
Finally, be sure you have a mentor or two to help you explore and master this new job. A mentor can be your boss, another internal leader, a colleague or someone outside the organization. The key thing is to have someone who will ask the tough questions of you to make sure you are focused on creating results and executing effectively to do so.
I offer coaching and mentoring to web and IT leaders if you desire an independent, external, source of feedback and advice.
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December 3, 2009
Two Web Strategy Screencasts
I created two screencasts (video of a browser session with voice over) showing websites that demonstrate several of the web strategies that I cover in my book, Online and On Mission: Practical Web Strategy for Breakthrough Results. The videos accompany an article I wrote for the December issue of Associations Now, What Drives Your Web Strategy?. You can view the videos below or go to read the article and see them there as well.
Revenue Examples
Market Needs and Marketing Examples
Many thanks to the folks at the following organizations: Air Conditioning Contractors of America; American Institute of Physics; Maryland Chamber of Commerce; and HopeWell Cancer Support.
Finally, thank to Lisa Junker for inviting me to be their first author to contribute both text and online video for Associations Now.
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December 3, 2009
Revenue is a Great Metric
A brief thought for the day:
People paying you money via your site for products and services is actually a pretty useful metric. While certainly not the only one you should look at, I’ll take increasing online revenue over increasing page views any day.
What revenue flows can you measure through your site? Track them and see if you can correlate promotions, changes in design, user interface improvement, blog mentions, etc., to changes in revenue. This will provide you with knowledge about what works and doesn’t for creating online sales.
This kind of knowledge is not priceless: it has a specific hard dollar value to it. This is a very good thing. Don’t forget to leverage it.
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December 2, 2009
Zappos using video to drive next actions
Zappos.com, the online shoe (and more) retailer recently acquired by Amazon.com, is experimenting with video promotions to drive click throughs to produce detail pages. Here is an example* from their first effort, promoting Nike running shoes. (Scroll down to see the video.)
As you watch the video you can mouse over both the shoes as well as the shirt the model is wearing. The video shows a box over clickable items, which then launches a small dialog box from which the viewer can then click to go to learn more about that product. Nifty technology!
The way Zappos is deploying this facilitates seeing the product in a rich medium while still making it very easy to progress to the product detail page where the sale will be completed. This approach could be effective for any product that would benefit from a video presentation to convey its value and message.
* I tried to use the embeddable video for this post but the way they have created it takes up a huge amount of space since it displays a lot more interface than just the video. This will need to be adjusted because few people will share a video that will blow up their web site layouts.
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