Trying to put together a 2021 budget based on a nonexistent crystal ball? One association found a novel approach to assessing member engagement to solve its 2021 budget quandary.

If you’re wondering how to prepare a 2021 budget amid unmatched uncertainty, join the club—it’s crowded!

An ASAE member recently posed a question in the Small Staff Association Professionals Community on ASAE’s online network, Collaborate, about how to figure in membership dues in a 2021 budget process. Christina Lewellen, CAE, executive director of the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools, had some excellent advice based on her own recent experience. I followed up with her to learn more.

FACTORING IN THE UNKNOWN

Lewellen started putting together a 2021 budget and quickly realized that so much of what ATLIS normally relies on in a traditional cycle didn’t exist. “The economy had just dropped off a cliff,” she said. “Nobody knew what was going to happen with independent schools and their budgets, or whether they would be able to open again in the fall.”

Once you get past the fear of frozen budgets and dire predictions of associations going under, she said, then you get down to what people need. “People will prioritize your offerings if you’re bringing them value.”

The more Lewellen looked at budget options, the more she realized nothing was resonating because there were too many unknowns. Without a crystal ball to work through projections during a global pandemic, ATLIS figured the best approach would be to isolate the variables.

The solution: a phased budget approach. Lewellen said the first major financial hurdle would be to get through the membership renewal cycle—which takes place from July through November—and then tackle the spring financial components when their in-person events were scheduled to happen.

LEVELS OF ENGAGEMENT

Without any capacity to project those in-person spring events in the short-term, the staff charged with budgeting decided to take them off the table and save that conversation for later. They took the overhead part of the budget down to a zero-based—or austerity—budget for all other departments besides membership.

Once they had isolated membership, they could analyze different levels of membership based on member engagement, looking at factors like longevity, volunteering, and participation in meetings.

“If you’ve got a decent database, you can see how many webinars [a member] came to, how many virtual town halls they participated in, and how many times they came to a conference. All of those things make them more ‘sticky,’” Lewellen said.

Each of those engagement elements, or “stickiness,” helped them gauge a member’s likelihood of renewing. Lewellen and her team divided up members into different buckets—red, yellow, and green—based on their levels of involvement with the association, ranging from high risk to low risk, and were able to put a dollar figure on the anticipated renewal rate.

“It made sense for our organization to look at members on a case-by-case basis and make our best guess of whether we thought that school would come back or not,” she said, “and that’s how we built the budget.”

She approached the renewal projections knowing that it was not productive to live in fear. “None of us has ever lived through anything like this before,” she said. “It’s time to be creative and find solutions that make sense for today.”

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Lisa Boylan. 

Welcome back to our AuSAE Member Chat Series – Half an Hour of Power. This week we are delighted to have sat down with AuSAE member, Joanne Phillips, Membership and Events Manager, AMPLA. AMPLA is the peak body for energy, resources and renewables law. AMPLA’s members are predominantly private practice lawyers in law firms, the membership also includes in house or general counsel in energy companies, academics and other professionals interested in energy and resources law.

In a short 30 minute interview we discussed four key questions with Joanne to reflect on the last four months and look forward to the future post this crisis.

What do the next 6 months look like for your association and your members 

Our members have been impacted financially during this crisis, with budgets striped right back across all levels of their organisations. However the sector they work in will always be here, and there are significant opportunities for the industry to harness to move out of this crisis and into a strong and prosperous future.

From our association’s perspective the next 6 months will be crucial to ensure we are providing the support our members need through thought leadership, high quality education and development opportunities. Like most associations right now, we are having open and honest conversations with our Board in relation to strategic outcomes, risk analysis and investment into the organisation’s future.

Areas of concern 

One of our areas of concern currently is membership renewals, we run a calendar year membership and will be starting the renewal process shortly. With the impact on our members and the “October cliff” coming we are looking at what we can do here to mitigate this risk.

This is something that I’m sure all associations are considering but the return to large face to face events is another concern. What has unfolded this week alone in New Zealand is cause for concern. We are beginning to run smaller hybrid events in South Australia and Western Australia. As a national association it’s difficult to plan with any great confidence as things are changing so rapidly. And when we do return to larger face to face events and gatherings, how do we solve the issue of providing networking opportunities and interactions between members with social distancing rules in place. Our members are social and value the collegiate environment we provide, so how do we as an association provide that opportunity and the same level of value they are used to receiving?

Areas of opportunity 

This disruption has been challenging, stressful and unrelenting, however it has provided our association with opportunities, challenged our thinking, and expanded our member value offering and proposition. From the onset we have looked at this crisis as an opportunity to capitalise on the positives and I don’t think we could have made such rapid progress within the organisation without this disruption.

We pivoted quickly into the digital space, offering our members education, content and information in webinars and online learning events. By doing this we have ignited a new face to our membership and opened the door to a new engaged community. This crisis serves as a great reminder about our forgotten members, those members that you don’t hear from but are there – every member is important and every member is looking for a different and personalised experience with you.

Moving forward as we move out of this crisis, we will keep this digital presence with our members and explore this new area of growth and opportunity in our membership community.

We have also accelerated the development of new programs and offerings that we had in our strategic plan for the next five years which have now moved to next year. This includes the introduction of accreditation for our industry as well as the development of a partnership and sponsorship program.

Celebrated moments in the last four months 

In all of the craziness that 2020 has brought, we also accomplished the following: migrated to a new CRM, designed and launched a new website, and launched a new membership structure. As these projects were rolling out we were hit with COVID-19 and then moved quickly to expand and change our offering for members. As a small team we are proud to have achieved all of this while responding to our members, the crisis and the impacts on our own association.

By now you will have heard the news, New Zealand is swiftly moving into Alert levels 3 and 2 to break the chain of community transmission of COVID-19. Auckland has fallen back into Alert Level 3 restrictions.

The rest of New Zealand will be in Level 2. Remember that this isn’t new to us; we’ve been here before, and we’ll get through this again. To help you navigate Lockdown 2 our most useful guides are listed below.

For Auckland-based businesses

Vaughan Granier, HR Assured NZ’s Workplace Relations Manager, has published an article to help you navigate the constraints and trading limitations as the region returns to a Level 3 Lockdown. You can read it here: Managing the workplace during lockdown

Resources for all businesses:

If you find yourself needing any guidance or simply a refresher on what the Alert levels mean for your workplace, below is a list of our COVID-related guides and resources for employers:

On H&S and Working from home:

• The home truth about H&S and working from home
   
• Social Isolation and mental health

On Alert levels:

• The rules for level 3 - published when the country initially moved to level 3, the rules for returning to level 3 still apply!
   
• Moving from Alert level 3 to Alert level 2 - published when the country moved to level 2 in May but provides a comprehensive refresher on workplace obligations.
   
• Contact Tracing and the Privacy Act 1993

Full Detail on Alert Level Restrictions:

The rules and obligations we’ve experienced before remain the same.

You can find all details on Alert level 2 and 3 restrictions at covid19.govt.nz.

Stay safe, New Zealand. We can do this!


Kind Regards,
HR Assured

As the months go on, are you still struggling to manage your remote team effectively? Here are four ways to reboot and refocus on results.

Try as you might, remote work isn’t getting any easier to manage, even after five months of practice—and the reason for that may be rooted in the office you’ve left behind. Many employers are still trying to adapt their in-person management practices to virtual work. If that’s been your organization’s approach, it’s probably not going particularly well.

So it might be time for a reset, especially considering it may be a while yet before it’s possible to a return to a traditional office experience. A few tips to help you start fresh:

Reconsider how you schedule team meetings. The software company Basecamp, which has been operating remotely for decades, has a smart approach to virtual meetings. In comments to Medium’s Marker site, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried said the secret to productive remote work is to minimize distractions. “Having video conferences all day long is totally the wrong direction,” Fried said. “The beauty of remote working is the opportunity to improve the way you work, to cut way back on meetings, to cut back on the number of people that need to be involved in any decision, to cut back on the need to FaceTime constantly.” Consider setting aside dedicated meeting-free times to give people the bandwidth they need to work without interruption.

Encourage employees to find their own work rhythms. Employees have been asked to make a whole lot of changes in short order to account for shifting needs. It’s only fair that employers do the same for them, allowing workers to structure their days in a way that produces their best results. That won’t look the same for everyone, writes Alexandra Samuel in the Wall Street Journal. “If you miss the creative spark that comes from in-person brainstorming, for instance, maybe it’s time to experiment with online whiteboards and mind-mapping tools that let you brainstorm with your colleagues in real time over the internet,” she writes. “If it’s hard to concentrate when you know the kitchen is full of dirty dishes, perhaps make a habit of calling into your first meeting of the day by phone instead of video, and do the dishes while you listen in. If you find yourself struggling with the blues every afternoon, when the isolation of home-based work sets in, maybe try restructuring your workweek around two-part workdays, and spend the middle of each day going for a walk or visiting with a friend.”

Understand that distractions will happen. People are working from home in unusual circumstances—with children, spouses, and roommates also present. In addition, television, social media, video games, and other home-based distractions are always within reach. Managers should try not to sweat it too much: Even though employees may be more easily pulled away from their desks, there’s evidence that they tend to work longer than they would in a traditional office—as much as two hours longer on average.

Worry less about the schedule and more about results. In other words, rethink your expectations. A New York Times piece recommends that leaders focus less on when people work and more on the performance results they show. “To adapt, managers should be very clear about expectations for the work assigned and when it’s due, researchers said—then leave the ‘how’ up to the workers and not worry about following the traditional 9-to-5 schedule,” Claire Cain Miller writes.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Ernie Smith. 

Keeping members engaged is often considered the hard part. One association CEO outlines key membership engagement points that work no matter what, even in troubled times. The key to it all: value.

“Membership engagement solves everything.”

That’s a pretty bold statement. Tom Morrison, CEO of the Metal Treating Institute, backs it up with impressive numbers: More than 80 percent of MTI members are engaged at some level, and the organization has maintained a 97 percent retention rate for 10 years in a row. He says engaged members lead to fiscal growth, better volunteerism, and program involvement, which is why it’s his number-one priority as an association leader.

Morrison recently cohosted a webinar outlining successful strategies for keeping members engaged, even in a crisis.

KNOW YOUR VALUE

“Members support your mission, but they buy your value,” Morrison said. It is essential, therefore, for associations to know exactly what their value is.

We all know advocacy and meetings are core elements of an association’s value proposition. Without advocacy and meetings, what’s left? Good question.

Several years ago, during a strategic planning session with MTI’s board, as part of an exercise to determine value, they took advocacy and meetings off the table. That forced leadership to look internally at problems and “high pain points” and analyze them. Sales forecasting, financial benchmarking, training, and professional development emerged as important value drivers for members.

Another value proposition that has re-emerged is information. It was a high-value point in the ‘80s, Morrison said, but now with the advent of widespread misinformation distributed across many platforms, “associations are back in the channel of interpretation of information.” Associations need to ask what information they are engaging members with, where it comes from, and how to become the authority on interpreting it, he said.

PERCEIVED VS. ACTUAL VALUE

“Relevance is directly related to your value as an association,” Morrison said. Members engage in what they value. But value can be perceived or actual, and the latter is the one that counts.

Morrison noted, for example, that some associations offer members a discount on car rentals, which he says most people can easily get on the internet for an even lower price so that is not technically an actual member benefit. It is something some associations put out there, but it isn’t really meaningful—so it falls into the perceived value category.

Associations need to drill down on their benefits and determine if their value is actual or perceived. Morrison noted that many members pay for consultants to help with issues that associations could be helping to solve at a fraction of the cost—or at no cost at all. You need to know what members are going to need on any given day that your association can provide, so they don’t go looking for it elsewhere.

Morrison said he keeps hearing people ask, “How do you communicate value during COVID?” Talking about value is not enough right now, he said, “It’s time to do your value.”

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Lisa Boylan. 

Your association may have weathered the initial disruption of COVID-19. That doesn’t mean you’re prepared for the next calamity. It’s time to review your business continuity plan.

Your 2020 bingo card probably didn’t include spots for last-minute cancellations of annual events or jury-rigging “office furniture” out of what you have at home. But that’s the point behind a business continuity plan, or BCP: anticipating what could go wrong and ensuring that your organization is resilient enough to to get through the worst.

Now that your association has done its best to weather the initial disruption of COVID-19, this is the time to give your BCP a thorough review. That review needs to be forward-looking, beyond the problems currently at hand, to make sure that the plan will stand up to future unexpected crises.

COVID-19 brought a dramatic uptick in BCPs specific to technology and cybersecurity due to the shift to remote work. But those plans may not be adequate, because many mobility infrastructures and cybersecurity measures assume that there’s still some connection to a physical office, according to Praful Krishna, a computing and AI expert, writing for CMSWire.

“Under security policies for most enterprises, remote access is limited in its permissions and bandwidth,” Krishna says. “IT and other support functions are based out of physical locations. In many situations even drive backups occur only over the office Wi-Fi. In other words, the current setup expects everyone to show up to work at least periodically. That’s no longer sustainable.”

Other aspects of BCPs need careful consideration too: leadership, continuity of workforce, financial and other types of risk, communications, and other core functions. As Jim Lippie put it at the Channel Futures blog, “Although it might feel a little late in the game for business continuity planning, the initial shift to remote work is only skimming the surface when it comes to preparing businesses for a variety of disruptions. VPNs and laptops are only one aspect of what’s required for firms to survive and thrive when things get crazy.”

THE GREAT UNKNOWN

Taking an approach that considers all kinds of scenarios provides organizations with the broadest protection. The next threat might not be about a physical workplace; it might be a condition that severely limits remote work instead of supporting it. It could even be something that happens halfway across the world—a possibility that organizations that heavily rely on global supply chains need to factor into their BCP. As an example, Krishna covers Fitbit’s decision to source from four countries instead of just one, anticipating a trade war with China, the primary materials source before the diversification.

Whatever needs your organization has, regular reassessment, reviewing, and testing will help ensure a thorough response to changing conditions, as Seth Siegel points out at Information Week. This diligence will also help you prioritize when plans are translated into action.

People need to be at the top of the priority list, according to Siegel: “Keeping them working, safe, productive, and engaged should be a top priority.” That goes for your own employees, but your members and the broader community your association supports need to be considered as well.

At Special Events, Patrick Hardy shares the story of an RV tradeshow that took a now-familiar digital pivot because of COVID-19. On a technical level, everything went smoothly. “What they did not anticipate, however, was that many of the vendors no longer wished to participate, as their customers preferred a kinesthetic experience and one-on-one interpersonal interaction with sales representatives. The value, for them, then, diminished, even when a virtual platform was deployed seamlessly.”

Even the most robust plans will need adjustments once they become reality. But by keeping resilience through disaster top of mind, association leaders can use this moment as a springboard into the future, however uncertain it may be.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano. 

Hallway conversations and chance meetings are staples of in-person events but can be hard to re-create in the virtual space. A look at three ideas for making it happen.

A few weeks ago, I came across this article on Wired.com about virtual tech conferences. The piece not only dove into some of the pluses of virtual events (e.g., lowered barriers to entry, reduced travel costs) but also highlighted what a lot of virtual attendees were missing, which it appropriately titled “the hang.”

Those are the chance meetings or hallway conversations that attendees have while in line at registration, as they grab a coffee, or when they are seated next to each other waiting for a session to start.

“Conferences aren’t just about what’s on the schedule, but the side conversations and the other social aspects,” said Christina Warren, a former tech journalist and current podcast host who now works as senior cloud developer advocate at Microsoft, to Wired. “I don’t think we’ve quite figured out as an entire industry what the best way is to bring in some of those social interactions when an event is virtual.”

Replicating “the hang” in a virtual space is definitely a difficult task. Here are three ideas I’ve come across in recent weeks that may be food for thought as your association goes about planning online events.

Daily concert. In late June, the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science and the Association of Genetic Technologists held their 2020 Joint Annual Meeting online. Ahead of the event, organizers sent swag boxes to attendees—called JAM Packs—that included a kazoo. During each day of the event, there was a Kazoom session, where participants could join a Zoom room and kazoo a song together. “[Attendees] called it ‘The Daily Kazoom,’” said Michael Cubbage, CMP, CGMP, who served as an independent planner for the event, to Convene magazine.

Casual connections. VidCon—YouTube’s event for social media influencers, execs, fans, and the brands that want to reach them—also moved online for the first time in late June. “We really wanted to try and as much as possible replicate the interactive experience of an event, both the connections that you can get to speakers and creators and other things in sessions, but also the casual connections that you make with people in the hallways, in the lounges,” said VidCon General Manager Jim Louderback to Forbes last month. One way his team did this was to offer a variety of online interactions. Among them: one-minute direct conversations between a fan and a creator—what Louderback called “a video selfie”—and “ask me anything” sessions with well-known industry professionals.

Virtual shuttle ride. When the Institute of Food Technologists transitioned its Annual Meeting and Food Expo to SHIFT20 Virtual Event and Expo, organizers didn’t want to lose all of the networking opportunities that participants had grown accustomed to. Since shuttle rides often lead to spontaneous conversations and connections (you never know who’ll you’ll sit next to on the ride to the convention center or evening reception), IFT hosted a 15-minute virtual shuttle ride before every evening event. Each night, two IFT members moderated a live shuttle-bus-themed discussion with a trend-watching guest to chat about the ideas emerging at SHIFT20.

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Samantha Whitehorne. 

The pandemic may make it tempting to retool your strategic plan. But if your plan is aligned with your goals, one association learned, you needn’t rush to revise.

Every association leader faced a reckoning as COVID-19 took hold in early 2020, whether that meant helping members access government assistance or deciding what to do with the upcoming conference. Automotive Recyclers Association Executive Director Sandy Blalock was no different, but she also had another consideration: What to do with the strategic plan that ARA’s board had drafted in January, but which still hadn’t been formally approved?

The temptation to make big changes to an association’s guiding documents can be strong when it’s facing strong headwinds, as ARA has been. Though its industry was considered an essential business, Blalock says, “the impacts were still pretty huge for most of our members. … A lot of them had to lay off or furlough people and make changes to protect not only themselves and their employees, but their customers as well.”

Because ARA has a small staff—five full-time employees—it didn’t have the capacity to make strategic overhauls quickly, and Blalock wanted to take the time to see if it needed to. “In the middle of it, I reviewed it probably once a week to see if there was anything that I needed to bring to the board or bring to our executive committee that we might have to take a different look at,” she says.

Threading the needle of taking action too slowly or too quickly is a challenge for organizations of all stripes. According to a 2015 survey published in Harvard Business Review, nearly a third (29 percent) of corporate managers said they reacted too slowly to threats and opportunities, while nearly a quarter (24 percent) said they reacted too quickly in ways that lost sight of their strategy. Strategic planning documents are designed to be durable—ARA works with three-year plans—but COVID-19 has unquestionably been a black-swan event.

Ultimately, ARA pretty much stood pat when the board finally approved a new strategic plan in late July. Part of what gave Blalock and the board confidence in the document is that its core concerns remained intact during the pandemic. Indeed, two of the four pillars in the document seemed to respond to them directly.

In terms of government relations, ARA has a committee that takes a state-by-state approach to advocacy, and that’s been essential this year. “The federal government has some say (in the industry), but I think we saw that during the COVID crisis more than anything, every state said, ‘We’re doing it our way, that’s our right to do it,’” she says. “That makes it very challenging because we have 50 states that define our industry 50 different ways.”

Another pillar of the new strategic plan, branding, proved just as relevant. Bolstering an industry during a crisis has a lot to do with visibility and image, and ARA has made a decision to invest in addressing misconceptions about what automotive recyclers do. “I don’t think a lot of people understand the high level of professionalism in the industry,” she says. “Most people still think we’re Grandpa’s junkyard.”

None of which is to say that associations shouldn’t shift their strategic direction if they see a good reason to. In April, nonprofit consultant Jarrett Ransom wrote at Bloomerang about how organizations can retool their plans, so long as they keep a few essentials nailed down: keep programs and activities relevant to your overall vision, consider the factors that might keep you from executing, and think through multiple scenarios that might affect your goals.

That same kind of North Star thinking gave Blalock confidence that ARA could stick to its plan without an overhaul. “I think this could have easily rattled everybody, especially when you’re short-staffed,” she says. “But we supported each other and didn’t lose sight of who we were and what our goals are.”

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Mark Athitakis. 

The fact is, there is more attack surface than ever when employees work remotely en masse, and a basic understanding of cybersecurity issues is essential to helping ensure corporate safety. Here’s why.

When just a handful of workers were doing their jobs remotely, cybersecurity issues were a bit more isolated.

But when everyone is working remotely? Suddenly, those isolated issues become widespread. A recent study from VMWare found that 89 percent of respondents had experienced attacks realted to COVID-19 malware.

And because so many workers now find themselves in environments that aren’t controlled by the IT department, it creates a need for a general understanding of good cybersecurity practices.

A few considerations that associations should be aware of:

Good cybersecurity needs to be as basic as washing your hands. Part of the problem with cybersecurity in remote environments is that people who aren’t personally trained on the process can put such approaches on the back burner, which makes them more susceptible to attack. Jim Alkove, Salesforce’s chief trust officer, recommends getting employees up to speed on the basics. “I think the best thing that any business can do in securing yourself, especially as adapting to … this new work-from-anywhere environment, is to nail the basics,” Alkove explained in an interview with ZDNet. “There are a small number of really important cybersecurity hygiene actions, so think about it in the current climate as washing your hands from a cybersecurity perspective, that businesses can do to really eliminate the risk associated with a lot of common cybersecurity threats.”

It can help ease security complications caused by employee job-hopping. Even before the current crisis, people had a tendency to jump between jobs, and having employees work remotely can exacerbate problems caused by such transitions, writes Bob Evans in a blog post for the security firm RSA. “If WFH becomes our norm, then businesses need to address the ‘mover and leaver’ situation. Job-hopping is more prevalent today, and that trend and will continue into the future,” Evans says. “So, the ‘talent churn’ means companies must impart necessary cybersecurity training and hygiene during onboarding and offboarding.”

Cybersecurity issues can plague even more traditional experiences. If your users are traveling on dangerous parts of the information superhighway, it can put the work network in danger. But the problem is, sometimes the threat comes to you. For example, there was recently a vulnerability with the videoconferencing service Zoom in which the company’s vanity URL feature was used to impersonate business accounts. Properly training employees can help them distinguish threats far easier than they might be able to otherwise.

Using company-approved equipment can help limit problems. If a user is hopping onto the network with a laptop that is loaded with malware, it can cause problems for everyone else on the network. Jarrod Sadulski, a criminal justice professor at American Military University, recommends ensuring that employees are aware of the need to use employer-approved equipment, including laptops and VPNs. “This strategy is helpful because a corporate virtual private network (VPN) can be used, enabling remote employees to access secure end-to-end encrypted cloud resources from the company’s secure network,” Sadulski writes for InCyberDefense. “In addition, using a work-issued computer and VPN allows a company’s IT department to push security updates onto the remote computer and increase cybersecurity on the device. Even if a company computer is not utilized, a private VPN is a good cybersecurity tool.”

This article was sourced directly from Associations Now here, and is written by Ernie Smith. 

Hi, I thought you might find this blog post of interest.

We’ll be posting occasional ideas that might assist industry associations and membership organisations to build better relationships with their members, so keep an eye on theprcompany.co.nz

How effective is your membership engagement?

All associations communicate with their members, but unfortunately that communication can often be ineffective.  Why is that?

And ineffective communication is one of the big reasons that members feel disenfranchised from their association.

That’s because good communication is such an important part of any relationship, be it with your partner at home, or between members and their association.

Here are five sure-fire ways you can improve your communications to members, and enhance their relationship with you.

1.        Don’t ‘broadcast’

Associations assume that all members want the same information all the time.  They don’t.  Members are individuals and will have differing content requirements.  Content must be targeted.  Yes, it takes a bit more time and effort but the alternative is to broadcast information that can be seen as unimportant, irrelevant or inconsequential and if that happens members will switch off.  And nothing will spoil a relationship faster than poor communication.

2.        Fix the ‘newsletter problem’

Some associations publish newsletters that are almost impenetrable.  Some fill the space with whatever is to hand come publication time.  Often the business of producing the newsletter is so all-consuming that little thought goes into it anymore.  However, it’s imperative that real care and attention is paid to newsletter content.  Think about your newsletter and your social media platforms as a subscriber-based media.  Ask yourself “would I pay to read this?”  Because, effectively, your members are paying to read it and they may not always want to pay for it.  This mindset might influence your choice of content.  It might also enhance your member communications and engagement.

3.        Give ‘em news they can use

In line with the above, keep this thought in mind when casting about for content:  Give them ‘news they can use’.  This is how a journalist thinks.  Most members don’t care about the administrivia of their association.  They want content they will find interesting on a personal level or that impacts their business or other aspects of their life.  So ask yourself – is it useful information, is it entertaining, is it meaningful to members in some way?  Or is it space-filler?

4.        Use the RACSS formula

When you construct content, use the RACSS formula.  Write in such a way that your content is:

• Relevant to your audience
• Actionable in that the material motivates action or thought
• Compelling – it is difficult to ignore, forget, overlook
• Sticky – it is memorable
•  Simple to understand

5.       Use the media to engage with members

Use the media whenever you can.  Nearly 80% of NZers get their news from the 6pm news.   Stuff is the most widely read site in NZ, closely followed by the Herald.  Newstalk ZB 7am news rates off the scale.  Your members are listening to, watching and reading those news outlets, among others.  If your message is in the media, your members will get it.  There are three key benefits to using the media to communicate with members.

• The media is distilling messages so they are accessible and digestible.  Not all association newsletters do that.  So using the media to deliver messages means members get relevant information in easy-to-understand chunks. 
• You are being seen to be abreast topical issues.  Members like the fact their association is on top of things and is respected enough by the media to have a voice.  They take pride in that.  It’s also important for stakeholders to see you in the media, for the same reasons.  Being in the media gives you a cachet, some kudos. 
• Members just want to feel that their association ‘matters’.  They are paying you good money for an intangible service and part of keeping members happy is to make them feel they are paying their money to a worthwhile entity.  Being quoted in the media reinforces that perception.

So there you have it.  Five simple ideas to engage more effectively with your members.  Why do you need to engage them as opposed to just communicate with them?  Watch this space.

Written by Daniel Paul, Director, The PR Company , Wellington NZ