Association 2.0

by C. David Gammel, CAE

Originally published in ASSOCIATIONS NOW, January 2006.

As your members visit other sites on the Web, they develop expectations for the level of service and ease of use for all Web sites.

They search Google with a two-word phrase, and it returns the right page within the top three results. They expect your association search engine to be just as effective.

They purchase a book from Amazon.com, post a review for another they have already read, and add a related product identified by Amazon to their shopping cart. They expect your association to provide the same level of e-commerce experience.

They customize their Yahoo! home page to include just the information they want to see every day and then expect your association to provide the same ability for your site.

During an interview on National Public Radio in 1999, science fiction writer William Gibson said, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” The latest round of online innovation is the development of services that make customer participation a key component of the experience. As this new way of incorporating customers into the inherent value of services spreads, your members will expect to be able to have as much of an impact on your association’s Web site as they can on Flickr, Wikipedia, and others. Will you be ready?

Web 2.0

Early commercial Web sites positioned their visitors as largely passive recipients of content. The company published content, and people came and read it, saw some ads, then moved on. End of story. Or they built a store selling widgets, and people bought them. This stage of the Web was simply an extension of the normal way of doing business along the lines of traditional bricks-and-mortar or mass-media models.

The new services being developed on the Web today now place that customer squarely in the middle of enhancing or even creating the value of the service itself. This new round of innovation has been described as “Web 2.0,” implying that a new version of the Web is being built by organizations and their members. While content is still important, participation-driven services are the new kings of the Web.

There is some argument about the exact definition of Web 2.0; however, it is commonly agreed that Web 2.0 services focus on participation as a key part of the value they provide. Initially, this sounds very much like the association model in which volunteers already largely drive organizations. However, Web 2.0 services are able to scale participation up to the level of hundreds of thousands of people. The challenge for associations is that their governance structures, which are primary vehicles for participation, cannot scale to embrace a significant portion of their members. If you accept that expectations will change in time, and members will demand more meaningful participation, how can you provide that as part of the membership experience rather than losing members when they go elsewhere to find it?

Here are three lessons from the new participatory models evolving today that will help you begin to answer that question.

Establish a Network Effect of Member Value

3Com founder Robert Metcalfe developed a maxim that became known as Metcalfe’s law in the latter half of the 1990s. Metcalfe’s law is that the value of a network grows by the square of the number of participants. The Internet as a whole is the greatest network of them all. Sites such as Flickr.com, Wikipedia.org, and del.ico.us are examples of the network effect in action at the level of a site or service.

On Flickr.com, new members add their own photos to the site and participate in tagging, commenting, and other social activities on the site. This participation provides enhanced value for the content of the site, benefiting all other members. Wikipedia is similar in that each person who chooses to edit an entry or add a new one provides value for everyone who uses the site, not just the site owners or themselves. Likewise, the del.ico.us experiment in social bookmarking takes a useful service-a Web-based store of your bookmarks sorted by keywords assigned by you-and dramatically increases the value of the service by letting you see what pages others have tagged with the same or similar words.

In each of these cases, the value of the network grows dramatically as the number of participants grows. The lesson here is not that all associations should launch social photo-sharing services for their members. Rather, associations need to learn how to design online services so that by merely using them, members create additional value for all other members. Questions you should ask yourselves as you design new services include the following: How can our members add value to our existing content and data? How can that value be provided to all other members? How can we recognize the efforts of participant members to provide role models and incentives to participate?

Disrupt Yourself by Facilitating Self-Forming Groups

As I’ve written in the Journal of Association Leadership, self-forming groups (PDF) are a phenomenon that associations must come to terms with. Activities that formerly required a national infrastructure to create can now be done rapidly and cheaply through services available on the Web.

For example, the BlogHer conference was formed by three people who decided that a conference addressing issues specific to women bloggers was needed. They started a blog to talk about the idea of the conference and ultimately used it to organize and spread the word about the meeting. The event was well attended, and they are planning another for 2006. All of this was done without direct mail or other traditional forms of advertising. The participants blogged the event as it happened and posted audio online as podcasts for others to download. They also created a wiki Web site to highlight women speakers for other event organizers. The use of these social applications made the success of this event possible.

This type of innovation is very similar to what Clayton M. Christensen describes in his books The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution. In Dilemma, Christensen discusses how companies continually chase products and customers at the high end of the value chain in order to increase profit. Their initial low-end products and services are often left to atrophy or are ceded to competitors, since they are not as profitable. However, it is at this low end of the market where innovation typically happens, and organizations that focus on the high end can eventually be undercut as upstarts take their innovations up the same value chain.

In Solution, Christensen and his coauthor recommend that organizations develop programs of innovation, which operate independently within the organization for the purpose of creating disruptive innovations, even if they will eventually undercut their main business. Better to disrupt yourself than to have someone else do it for you. This approach enables organizations to continually renew themselves.

The lesson from events like BlogHer is to pay attention to any self-organizing groups forming in your sector. These passionate organizers could be great allies for your organization if you approach them in the spirit of partnership and support, lending the strength you have as a national organization with comparatively deep resources. In this way you may disrupt your own organization rather than being disrupted by somebody else who sees and fills a need your members have. The key to working with these groups, however, is having the courage to let them set their own agenda with the association acting primarily as a facilitator.

Make Members Integral Participants in the Publishing Process

Publishing company Pragmatic Programmers (PP) offers a powerful lesson for associations on how they can use Web technology to involve their members in the publishing process, simultaneously improving the quality of the publication and accelerating sales. They did this by publishing a beta version of one of its programming books and invited feedback on improving it.

Early in 2005, PP had decided to publish a book on a technology known as Ruby on Rails (ROR)–a new development framework for creating interactive Web sites. RoR was, and is, a hot new framework for which there was great interest in technical communities around the world. However, no good how-to books were available yet. Sounds like a perfect opportunity. What PP did, though, was leverage the high interest of the RoR community to involve them in the creation and marketing of the book.

When a first draft of the book was ready, PP began to sell it on its Web site as a PDF. As new drafts of the book were completed, they would release an updated version to everyone who had bought it, up to and including the final version of the book. Customers could also purchase a hard copy with the PDF, which would be delivered once it had been printed. Those who bought the beta version of the book were encouraged to submit corrections for any errors they found in the book and suggestions for additions. The authors of the book wrote about their progress via a blog and accepted feedback via a Web-based form on the PP Web site. These are well-established technologies, but they were used to support a new model for publishing.

There were two key results of this publishing process: The first printing of the book was sold out before it had been delivered to the publisher, and there were virtually no errata for the book after it had been declared final and cleared to print.

PP leveraged the passion of the RoR user community to improve the book. Not only that, anyone who submitted a correction or suggestion that was incorporated in the book received thanks in the final version. By making its audience a public part of the authoring process, PP dramatically increased word-of-mouth marketing for the product while increasing the quality of the publication. This model would be a natural for associations to adopt if they can set expectations appropriately and select topics that have high interest yet few available resources.

Scaling Member Participation

What all of these lessons contribute to is scaling meaningful participation with the association to an incredibly high percentage of your membership. Current governance and volunteer structures cannot scale beyond a very low percentage of your members. Traditional volunteer opportunities are typically available only after years of membership and networking. While this has been good enough for a long time, members going forward will begin to expect to be able to contribute to the association in a meaningful way within 10 minutes of joining rather than within 10 years. The challenge is to reconceive current services so that they allow contributions from all members while creating value for all other members at the same time. Paying attention to and experimenting with the ideas and technologies being developed in Web 2.0 will prepare you to meet the inevitable rise in expectations that will occur.

+1 (410) 742-9088 | david@highcontext.com

High Context Consulting, LLC