Archive for the 'Associations' Category
August 21, 2008
The Brutally Honest Mission
James Gilmore, speaking on authenticity, said the following at ASAE earlier this week:
Associations today are a platform to maintain the current paradigm.
Another way of saying that: Associations are largely engines for preservation of the status quo.
I’ve seen plenty of evidence for this in my career. Despite often rather high minded and flowery missions, many groups act to preserve the interests of their members over all else. The operational behaviors of the organization reveal their true purpose.
This is not a bad thing, necessarily. However, if you are in the status quo business, why not dedicate yourself to it? Many organizations would be more effective if they were brutally honest about why they exist.
A brutally honest status quo mission would allow the organization to jettison activities that take up a lot of time and resources without any commitment to change. This would free up that energy for outcomes to which you are actually committed.
Then you can have very productive discussions, such as: what have we done to maintain the status quo today?
I am being a bit tongue in cheek with this post but I think the underlying lesson is there, related to Gilmore’s presentation. Can you “render authenticity,” accruing the benefits Gilmore says come of such an approach, if you are inauthentic about why you exist?
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March 25, 2008
Social Value
Kevin Holland doesn’t care about your Twitter tweats. I’m with ya Kevin. I posted last year that the only interesting use I saw of twitter was as a mini travelogue posted by a friend traveling Cuba, using SMS to get around limited and heavily filtered internet access in the country. Now that was some compelling text written for the medium.
Any online media you publish has to provide value. The same goes for social media, where you are hoping to facilitate connections and collaboration among people. The value may be personal, professional or some mix of the two but it has to be there to maintain audience and participation.
Focusing on value is a cornerstone of how I work with clients and Kevin’s post shows very well why that is critical. It is too easy to chase after the shiny new toy instead of making a realistic assessment of the value you can create with it.
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March 21, 2008
Fear of litigation is the mind killer.
Hullabaloo over social media legal issues rears its head yet again in the association world.
Here is the deal folks: if your association tends to get sued or investigated over the comments of your members or staff every few years, then sponsoring participatory media activities may enhance that risk. For everyone else, get over it.
I am not a lawyer, therefore I can actually offer common sense advice about the online world.
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March 4, 2008
Your Global Web Site
Ever since a Brit invented it in Switzerland as part of a European scientific organization, the Web has been intended as a global medium.
Once your site is live, you immediately have access to a global audience that is only going to grow and diversify further in the future. I remember being amazed by the immediate flow of e-mail from around the globe that I started receiving once my name and address were listed as a resource on a new site that launched in 1995.
Yet, most organizations completely ignore the potential for addressing global audiences and their unique needs. The web is an often efficient way to grow your customer base around the world but it will only work effectively in that role if you develop a strategy for why those audiences will receive value from you.
I am speaking on this very issue Thursday at ASAE & the Center’s International Conference in Washington, DC. You can see the program agenda on their site and I have posted my session description below.
If you have any questions you would like addressed during the event, be sure to post them here or send me an e-mail at david@highcontext.com.
(As an aside, with all of its global initiatives, why does ASAE give the International Conference short shrift with an anemic web presence? Seems rather short sighted to me.)
Making your Web Go World Wide: Global Web Site Strategy
The Web is a powerful vehicle for establishing and enhancing your global presence. Maximizing the contribution of your web site to your international strategy takes much more than translating a few pages of content. This session will zero in on these key issues:
- Defining global strategy in terms of the Web
- Common strategies and design patterns for global web sites
- A decision framework for evaluating which approach best supports your goals
Leave this session with a clear understanding of how the Web can support your association’s international goals and how to make it happen.
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January 28, 2008
Dues are not Taxes
Ben Martin recently compared membership dues to taxes. Acknowledging that Ben is engaging in a thought experiment/debate, I do think this a horribly damaging analogy.
If your members think of paying dues to you like paying a tax, you are dead meat.
If your staff consider dues income to be a tithe from the industry or field, you are also dead meat.
If everyone involved considers paying dues as exchanging money for value, then you have a healthy economic relationship, creating incentives for value-producing behavior on both sides.
Thinking of dues as taxes is a poisonous idea. Just don’t do it.
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January 23, 2008
Products or Markets?
Kevin Holland posted last week about his position that associations should be driven by the needs of their market rather than any particular product they produce.
Many association do choose to drive their products and services based on the needs of their market (which are largely their members and others closely associated with them). This is fine and often works quite well.
I would like to make the point, however, that an association could choose to have a particular product or service (or set of products/services) as the driving force for their strategy, addressing any market that values them. Their customers and members would change over time as they find new markets for their core product. The CFA Institute is a good example of what this might look like in practice.
Driving your choice of markets by a particular set of products you produce is as valid a strategy as determining your products/services by the needs of a defined market. Each would lead to very different looking associations but that’s the whole point of strategy: picking a direction and putting it into action.
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January 7, 2008
Why Business Intelligence is Often Stupid
Business intelligence (or BI) has been all the rage for the last couple of years. It is a central topic in ASAE’s Tech conference later this month, with many sessions focused on how to extract data from your systems and present them in shiny dashboard interfaces. There is a problem though:
Many business intelligence tools are plain stupid.
All the dials, speedometers, bar graphs, and status icons in the world won’t help you if you do not first ground your efforts in what data you need to make sound decision in pursuit of your business outcomes. A lot of vendors and consultants out there gloss over these critical issues in pursuit of the BI sale.
Take dashboards, for example. The concept is that a single screen will give you all the data you need to make quick decisions, just like you can with a car dashboard. The problem is, most businesses and organizations don’t have to make a decision in a split second like you do when driving an automobile. Auto dashboards are optimized to give the driver critical feedback in a glance lasting less than a second.
When is the last time you had to make a decision of major import to the organization from your desk in less than a second? It just doesn’t happen.
Yet, a lot of business intelligence dashboard tools look just like the dashboard of a car. It is a literal interpretation that ruins a somewhat valuable idea.
So, what to do?
You have to start with the objectives you are trying to achieve. What process are you putting into place to achieve an objective? What are the measurable steps within that process? What data sources do you need to tap into to generate those measures? How will you use that data to make decisions?
Once you have answered all those questions you should be able to identify what measures you should monitor and how often. If one or more of them matter on a daily basis, a dashboard interface might make a lot of sense for presentation of the data. If not, a simple report will probably meet your needs and save you the time, effort and expense of developing a dashboard you don’t need.
That is being intelligent about your business data.
By the way, I will be presenting a session with Wes Trochlil at the ASAE Technology Conference titled: “Getting Intelligent About Business Intelligence: Finding the Value Behind the Hype.” If you only go to one BI session, I suggest you make it ours.
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December 18, 2007
Why you should hire Mickie Rops
Mickie is an excellent consultant because she says thing like this when asked if she is an advocate for certification programs:
If certification is really right for the field, then I’m an advocate. If it’s not, then I’m not.
Sounds obvious but she makes the point in her post that a lot of consultants are happy to help you build a certification program whether your field needs it or not! You need advisors who will question your basic assumptions before you make significant investments instead of cheering you on without analysis.
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December 14, 2007
Rapid and Participatory Publishing
Here are the slides from another presentation I gave at ASAE’s Great Ideas conference: Rapid and Participatory Publishing. In this presentation I discuss two cases of traditional book publishers who have leveraged the Web to enhance and extend their publishing efforts. These models are a great fit for most associations that have existing publishing operations. The short-form ebook model could also be a good option for an organization looking to get into book publishing.
I have an article discussing this material forthcoming in ASAE’s Journal of Association Leadership. The new issue with my article should be out this month.
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December 10, 2007
What is Innovation?
I gave a presentation at ASAE’s Great Ideas conference this past Saturday on innovation, technology and risk for associations. This post is the first of several I’m going to write this week on elements of the presentation. A good question to start with is: what is innovation?
Innovation often gets mythologized in the business press to the point that mere mortals feel that they cannot hope to do something innovative in their work. However, to innovate merely means to do something as you haven’t done it before. Not much more to it than that.
Peter Drucker, in his seminal book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, defines two kinds of innovation: supply-side innovation and demand-side innovation.
Supply-side innovation is when you improve the use of your resources in support of existing value delivered to your customers. This is often in the form of greater efficiency but could also mean achieving the same end via means that result in improved employee morale, for example.
Demand-side innovation refers to changes that create greater value for your customers. This could be improving an existing product or service or creating entirely new offerings. The impact of the innovation is on the value received/perceived by the ultimate customer.
Looking at it in those terms, it is easy to realize that you probably innovate something every week if not every day. Innovation is merely the creation of new value.
Update: Here are the slides from the presentation:
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