Now more than ever, it’s important to strengthen connection, confidence and collaboration to enable us to perform well, both individually and professionally.

These recent times have affected each one of us differently. Uncertain times can be unsettling. Most of us will have spent some time worrying about our job, reflecting on our career and perhaps even contemplating the future path.

To further support the Association community during this period, and beyond, Beaumont People have expanded their Career Coaching and Transition Team to include an Associations & Memberships Specialist Career Coach.

Beaumont People is proud to introduce Louise Roper, who can provide professional advice and guidance to navigate through these changing times with practical tools and techniques. This will enable you to carve out a clear pathway for yourself, your business or your team. Louise will be familiar to many of you who have attended ACE or a Sydney networking lunch in the past or more recently, seen her smiling face on the Friday Virtual Coffee Chats. Louise is inquisitive and genuinely interested in people and business, ensuring a proactive approach in helping identify strengths and finding suitable roles.

If you have found yourself looking for a new role or even considering a change, the Career Coaching and Transition Team can help with everything from LinkedIn profiling, bio and resume writing to interviews, networking and polishing your pitch. If you are not at that stage yet or don’t know where to start, they also offer career assessment and strategy sessions, job search, selection and career coaching. Beaumont People also provide other complimentary resources and webinars that may help your job search.

It may even be the transition back to the office after the time away that needs additional support. Beaumont People recommend taking the time to ask your team members their preferences for returning to the office and planning the reunion. It is also a perfect time to review your people strategy.

Beaumont People are pleased to extend to the AuSAE community complimentary access to our many tools & resources Webinars, articles, downloadables and podcasts which include The Leadership Series for Individuals and teams.

Contact Beaumont People for more information on services by emailing Louise@beaumontpeople.com.au or rebeccarynehart@beaumontpeople.com.au or calling 02 9279 2777.

Yesterday we held our last webinar event in the Strengthening Associations Series, “Reflections and the Future of Associations”. For this special panel event we were joined by Damian Mitsch, Federal CEO, Australian Dental Association, Wes Lambert, CEO, Restaurant & Catering Industry Association Australia and Amelia Hodge, CEO, Australian Property Institute. I was able to join the panel in Sydney to facilitate this conversation and deep dive discussion into the road to recovery for our associations.

I would like to take this opportunity while my thoughts are fresh to share my key take aways from yesterday’s discussion. I think what inspired me most was that even though each of these associations have been impacted by the virus quite significantly the leaders were very optimistic about their teams, boards, member value and the future of associations as we move into the next stage. We were lucky enough to have such a breadth of representation and knowledge on this panel and the varying impacts and responses on each sector. We are still yet to see the full impact of this crisis on the economy and I know we have a hard road ahead as we move towards the end of the year but I do hope the panel discussion yesterday provided you with the insights and tools to keep moving forward.

What lessons, operational changes and team practices will we continue to keep after COVID-19:

• This crisis has highlighted the ability for associations to be agile, innovative and quick in decision making and execution. We have been forced to make decisions quicker than we are used to and our teams and boards have stepped up during this time to enable us to respond to our members and their needs.
• As restrictions came in we saw the cancellation of major events and associations’ ability to deliver training, education and networking for members. This has given us the ability and time to take a closer look and assess our member offering, what haven’t we been doing over this period and have we survived without it, did it add value and did the value outweigh the cost of delivery. Now is not the time to be saying ‘when can we go back to the old way and how we used to do it’.
• Continue the collaboration, it’s more important than ever to be collaborating with other associations, and leaders as we move into the next stage.
• Workplace flexibility is here to stay. Now we have proven that we can all work productively and successfully from home, we need to keep this option available for our employees.
• Let’s not take our foot off the pedal just yet. We keep hearing this but associations have never been more important than they are now. This period of time has highlighted to members, non-members, and the broader community the pivotal role that associations play to advocate and be the single source of truth for entire professions. We should use this time and harness this attention to continue to provide meaningful solutions to member problems.

A big thank you to our panel speakers yesterday, and all of our speakers who joined us online every week for the last three months. We are pleased that we could bring members and our community thought leaders and experts in the sector to help us navigate this new world. And finally a huge thank you to all of you for participating and joining us for each webinar – we have had an overwhelming response to this series and we look forward to continuing to bring you the information and knowledge you need as association leaders.

Warm regards

Toni

Toni Brearley
Chief Executive Officer
Australasian Society of Association Executives

Learn how to Shift Your Association’s Culture to Digital in the Coronavirus Era

In the midst of the global pandemic, nearly every organisation is trying to find the best ways to transform to a digital culture as quickly as possible while still protecting and improving the member experience.

AuSAE Premium Alliance Partner, Advanced Solutions International (ASI) is pleased to share with AuSAE subscribers this insightful whitepaper ‘Your Association’s Digital & Member Experience Guide’ written by ASI partner, Causeis.

ASI is sharing this important whitepaper with permission so you can benefit from the helpful 10-point plan author Michelle Lelempsis, Director of Causeis, has developed. The report will show you how to:

• Manage data and security
• Measure digital engagement
• Increase your financial control
• Track multi-channel communications, and more

Get your complimentary copy at www.advsol.com/ausaemxguide

About ASI

Advanced Solutions International (ASI) is a leading global provider of cloud-based software to associations and non-profits. We're the company behind iMIS Cloud, the Engagement  Management System (EMS)™ that empowers you to engage your members anytime, anywhere, from any device. Since 1991 we've helped thousands of clients grow revenue, reduce expenses, and improve performance by providing best practices, pragmatic client advice, and proven solutions.  ASI is proud to be an AuSAE Premium Alliance Partner.  Learn more at www.advsol.com/ausae. 

From the top down, resilience is key to surviving the crises of 2020. Here are just a few ways to firm up your foundation for better days.

If you’ve spent the last couple of months battening down the hatches, don’t feel bad. It’s going around. The secret to surviving this tough time is your ability to hang on, adapt well, and re-emerge on the other side.

In a word, you need resilience. It’s a quality that you should encourage at all levels of your organization. Here are a few ways to nurture a resilient spirit at your association:

Make sure the organization’s vision is solid. While a good technology backbone is important, it won’t be effective without vision, LumApps founder and CEO Sébastien Ricard writes for CMSWire. An organization’s vision should be broad and flexible, he says. “For instance, a company can have the core value of ‘Put the customers first’ or ‘Embrace and champion change.’ Overarching philosophical mantras like these don’t stand in the way of major organizational change. In fact, they make the process easier. Leaders need to emphasize these goals and make it clear that these objectives are what drive every other consideration.”

Develop organizational intelligence. In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, authors George Yip and Nelson Phillips say leaders need organizational intelligence (OQ) to drive the performance they want. OQ has multiple components, they say, but “one key OQ competency is sending messages that reinforce the strategy. The simpler and clearer, the better; organizational members at all levels suffer from information overload, so leaders need to be selective about what messages to send.”

Communicate regularly with staff. In an article for Forbes, Northwestern University’s Erald Minga, a human capital management and workforce strategy leader for the school, says regular messaging with your team will strengthen resilience by ensuring everyone is in the loop. “Regularly scheduled weekly all-staff presentations with updates on current events and creation of a strategic plan will help connect employees toward a shared mission and instill trust toward leadership,” Minga says. “The information should be clear, concise, and shared in a kind manner. HR can help close information gaps through pulse surveys and check-ins and provide additional support to leadership by creating follow-up training.”

Build your own resilience as a leader, too. A focus on positive emotion can help ensure that even if you feel the extremes of these tough times, you can find your equilibrium as a leader—and your team needs that. “Positive emotion broadens our cognitive repertoire. Positive emotion increases almost every factor of human performance and makes us more receptive to new ideas and feedback,” Scott Taylor, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Babson College, told Babson Thought & Action recently. “Positive emotion renews us in terms of immune system functioning as well as the ability to persist in an endeavor that we’re involved in.”

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

Government relations is typically done with a handshake, but the Direct Selling Association has found ways to connect virtually with legislators and regulators.

Advocacy is traditionally shoe-leather work at associations. Government relations staffers are experts at relationship-building—meeting with legislators, regulators, and their aides to make an association’s case clearly and efficiently. It’s a job practically defined by handshakes and face-to-face meetings. But so much, thanks to COVID-19, for that.

The Direct Selling Association, like most other groups, has had to adjust to the new normal, pivoting its meetings and events online in a hurry. DSA President and CEO Joseph N. Mariano says that in March DSA began ramping up its webinars and shifting its member content to “all virus, all the time.” (Last year, DSA hosted three webinars, Mariano says; this year, it’s hosted around 30.) That’s proven to be successful, especially in terms of its annual meeting, which was originally scheduled to be held earlier this month in Phoenix and instead was held entirely online.

But COVID-19 hasn’t changed DSA’s advocacy policy priorities, and in some ways it’s made them more complicated. DSA represents companies that sell household goods and health supplements, sometimes through multilevel marketing (MLM)—a structure that some critics equate to a pyramid scheme. Because DSA is mindful of the reputational issues related to the industry, it’s kept a close eye on how COVID-19 has affected it, and how government has responded.

Some of that work means maintaining ties with legislators from a distance. Many state legislatures cut their sessions, which in some ways was beneficial for DSA, Mariano says: “We didn’t have to deal defensively with anything that we might’ve seen in terms of legislation that we had to react to.” But, regardless, it’s held virtual town halls with U.S. congresspersons and senators to discuss member issues as a way to maintain connections—and find opportunities for deeper ones. “We wanted to take advantage of the willingness and ability of people like the senators from Arizona [it hosted virtual meetings with Senators Martha McSally and Kyrsten Sinema] to get together on webinars and virtual town halls in a way that they would not have made themselves available for prior to the virus,” he says.

That tactic applies to regulators as well. The Federal Trade Commission has sent two sets of warning letters this year to health-supplement MLMs about claims they’ve made about how their products can treat the coronavirus. In turn, DSA released a statement condemning false claims made by companies. Beyond that, it worked to both connect with the FTC and to get its guidance in front of DSA members in as personal a manner as possible, hosting a virtual conversation in May between an FTC representative and Mariano. Conversations between DSA and the FTC are nothing new—“we’ve been agreeing and disagreeing for 30-plus years,” Mariano says. But the context and the virtual environment were by necessity different.

It was the best-attended webinar DSA has done—approximately 500 members Zoomed in. “Our members are keenly interested in what the regulatory officials have to say because of the history of the industry and in some issues that these companies have faced,” Mariano says. “Interestingly, we did not talk about some of the issues that we’ve talked about historically with the Federal Trade Commission continually—things like what constitutes a pyramid scheme versus a legitimate direct selling company. That’s one of our key issues, but rather, and we agreed with the commission, we both wanted it to be focused on representations related to the virus.”

That’s a way for DSA to maintain connections that have the chance to sustain themselves once the pandemic crisis is over. “We already have enough questions about reputation in the marketplace and that we don’t need to have our companies doing distasteful things, much less potentially misleading things about products,” Mariano says. “So it was really important to hammer that message—the commission’s message, amplified by the association.”

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

Business meetings held in virtual settings come with some familiar rules and some different ones. Be sure you follow them to maintain your professional polish—even if you’re secretly wearing shorts.

Even though you’re probably working in a more casual environment these days, when you’re in a remote meeting, don’t forget your professional etiquette. Here are a few rules to brush up on before your next video call:

Don’t get too casual. Working at home, your instinct might be to dress down. But FlexJobs CEO Sara Sutton Fell, speaking to PC World, argues that your attire should match what would normally be expected at the office. “Your appearance should still be professional and reflect the organization you work for,” she said. “My company is fairly casual, so it’s OK to be in casual attire as long as you look presentable. However, if the people you are meeting with will be in suits, you should dress the same.” Just ask the lawyers in Broward County, Florida, who recently got an earful about dress code from a state judge: “Let’s treat court hearings as court hearings, whether Zooming or not,” Judge Dennis Bailey wrote in a letter published by the Weston Bar Association.

Minimize distractions. If you’re meeting with someone in person, it’s usually considered rude to be looking at your phone or laptop instead of listening to what they’re saying. These distractions don’t go away during remote meetings, and there are additional ones to worry about, too, including background noise or poorly considered visuals. “Distractions make a significant impact on a video conference,” Vast Conference’s Jamie Davidson says. “It’s tempting to think that just because you aren’t in the same room as your fellow attendees they won’t notice you scrolling through your phone or composing an email on another screen.” But often they will. And speaking of technology, take time to ensure your gadgets are working before the meeting, rather than wasting people’s time with testing when the meeting should be getting started.

Be prepared. It’s bad form to take remote meetings without being prepared for the format or doing your homework in advance. “Be proactive and ask ahead of time about expectations if the organizer hasn’t provided upfront information,” Davidson says. “You want to be as prepared as possible.”

Show your human side. But all of this professional talk has its limits in the COVID-19 era. “The lack of real-world relationships is amplifying our need for human connection. Build in extra time for heartfelt people-to-people check-ins,” personal branding expert William Arruda writes for Forbes. “Add it to every agenda to ensure enough time and to show how important it is to the participants. And remember to shower others with praise that is due to them.” 

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

Running an association like a business, not a nonprofit, requires a good understanding of the financial viability of all your partners. That means asking some smart questions about how your members are faring in the current climate.

As the economic uncertainty caused by COVID-19 has unfolded in recent months, most associations have hunkered down and gone into preservation mode, assessed what they had in reserves, and then decided how to best move forward. Gary Oster, founder and strategic growth strategist at Topline Growth Partners, recommends one more key item: a comprehensive scan to assess the fiscal health of an association’s top members, sponsors, and strategic partners.

Business Intelligence

Association CEOs and senior leaders, Oster said, need to recognize they are nonprofits, but they are still running a business. He said a lot of leaders forget that they need enough money coming in to cover expenses so they can do the work their members want them to do.

Oster estimates that because of the current economic downturn, 90 percent of associations have eliminated a portion of their value proposition for their members. And they probably lost 20 to 30 percent of their revenue at the same time—largely, Oster speculates, because they didn’t understand their members’ fiscal health.

An astute organization needs to evaluate every member, strategic partner, and sponsor that makes a significant investment in the organization, because it’s imperative to know about member and partner revenue, profits, and details about whether they are looking to merge or acquire. “It’s business intelligence, and it doesn’t take a long time to do,” Oster said.

To delve deeper and find out what you know about your key members and top sponsors, he said, ask good questions: What do you know about your sponsors or your financial strategic partners? Do you really know what’s motivating them to be connected to your members and your organization? Do you know how fiscally healthy they are? Will members be fully engaged or limited in their participation? Will their staff attend conferences? Or, because they are on the edge of bankruptcy, will they cancel all forms of engagement?

Hope Is Not a Strategy

Some executives, Oster said, have the worst strategy of all: hope. “Hope is not a strategy,” he said. “Hope is a wish.” He cautioned that it is not enough to hope that membership dues will come in, or hope that people will come to tradeshows, or hope that foundation supporters will continue to donate.

“Actively manage your business at the top line so you can assure your future success and create a workplace where your organization thrives and your members become incredibly happy with the value that’s being created,” he said.

Association leaders who want their organizations to succeed must conduct thorough due diligence so they have a clear view of the financial landscape of all of their members and partners. “These insights could open the door to unseen opportunities—or unknown risks,” Oster said, “potentially inoculating the association from an unhealthy situation as they reframe and redirect their future success.”

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

The distractions of home can make it easy to ignore a virtual event. Give your annual meeting added punch by supporting it with innovative content.

There’s a certain level of commitment to attending a live event.

When someone pays money to register for an annual meeting or tradeshow, they’ve already committed to showing up and taking part in your event. And they’re generally looking forward to discovering a new or familiar place as they interact with their colleagues and peers.

But these are different times, thanks largely to the complexities of COVID-19. What was once live is now virtual. This changes the equation, not only for event organizers and sponsors, but also attendees.

In a webinar study that has some important takeaways for digital events, GoToWebinar finds that virtual marketing events have an attendance rate of just 44 percent. With everything virtual there is to choose from, and everyone working at or near a comfortable couch, how do you make your virtual event stand out as one that must be attended?

DRIVE VIRTUAL ATTENDANCE WITH CONTENT

Here are a few ways it could help your next event:

It can provide an additional funnel. Content can help get people in the door at a time when traditional buzz may be harder to build, which is why it needs to take on a more significant role now. For example, rather than simply sharing ramp-up content on social media a week ahead of the event, consider planning for a more robust build-out months in advance—maybe driven by a vlog, a series of behind-the-scenes newsletters to members, or perhaps even interactive quizzes.

It’s a good way to add context. Often at annual meetings, attendees tend to stumble into breakout sessions based on the title or just to see if they might find a gem—perhaps with the help of a printed conference guide or app. In a virtual context, this sort of self-discovery is a lot tougher to do. Fortunately, content can save the day. A well-considered pre-event strategy can build excitement around your speakers (keynoters and breakout speakers alike) and illustrate your event’s breadth. That can help differentiate your offering from just another glossy webinar.

It can add fresh value to your event. Virtual events pose a clear challenge, since attendees may not give them the same weight as your in-person events. But that’s only the half of it: Sponsors and exhibitors may feel shortchanged without a convention hall to highlight their wares. This is where content can save the day, not only by supplementing the digital event itself—by curating hours of coverage into thoughtful articles and video coverage—but by giving those sponsors and exhibitors effective alternatives to the convention hall. If designed right, a strong content program can offer both attendees and sponsors something very impactful: a leave-behind component (maybe an in-depth curated resource or a piece of swag), that lives on well past the event itself.

MAKE ROOM FOR PRINT, TOO

Considering everything else about most events is already digital, it’s important to think about nondigital content strategies, too. While print content has been less popular than digital content in recent years, ironically, it may be just what the doctor ordered in the current climate—adding much-needed texture to your virtual meeting. There are many directions printed content for a virtual meeting can go.

For example, researchers have found that, in a learning environment, people tend to remember more when they write things down with a paper and pen. This is a clear opportunity to create dedicated notebooks for attendees that you can send to their homes, complete with additional educational resources.

But even before the meeting begins, there are plenty of ways to reach your attendees through print, which offers the personal touch we so desperately crave right now. You can send printed letters or handwritten postcards (perhaps penned by the keynote speaker); create a conference magazine or newsletter; or even offer a “special gift” to attendees pre-event—something political fundraisers are doing a lot these days. It’s a small way to close the gap between a live event and a virtual one.

Physical events give your association the important opportunity to showcase its weight and scale. Virtual events can do the same. They will just require a bit more planning and ingenuity, beyond simply livestreaming presentations, to make it happen. With a carefully crafted content strategy melding both the digital and tangible worlds, you could see success rivalling the good old days of destination meetings.

This article is written by Eric Goodstadt, and was sourced directly from Associations Now here. 

Taking a hard line on reopening your office and setting ambitious productivity goals doesn’t project strength right now. Patience, and small wins, can be a balm for stressed staffers.

Good leadership is supposed to be decisive, but we’re in a moment that makes decisiveness a particular challenge. Associations are eager to get their meetings and events back on track and bring staffers back to the office. But COVID-19’s persistence—I’m in Arizona, where documented cases and hospitalizations are still on the rise—makes it hard to identify a start date. And protests around racial justice in America ought to be prompting leaders to think about how they best serve all their employees and members.

It’s an uncomfortable time, but the best thing a leader can do right now is own that discomfort.

Last week, neuropsychologist Dr. Julia DiGangi wrote in the Harvard Business Review about a firm that made the mistake of taking a hard line with remote workers: Anxious to make sure that productivity still kept pace, it asked workers to sign contracts saying their homes would be free of distractions. As they say, good luck with that.

“Not only is this request absurd for the millions of people who continue to have ‘coworkers’ in school and in diapers, but it disrupts team cohesion by implicitly communicating that employees cannot be trusted to manage the complexities of their own jobs and lives,” she writes.

That’s an extreme case, of course. The executives I’ve spoken with since late March for this blog series on COVID-19 have committed to supporting their staffs without laying down the law in such a needlessly rigid way. But the moment might still demand more vulnerability out of leaders than they’ve been used to. “Vulnerability” isn’t the opposite of decisiveness right now. It’s a way of signaling support for those you lead—even, DiGangi writes, “the pragmatic thing to do.”

Good remote leadership is rooted in this kind of openness and flexibility. In 2016, I wrote about the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, an association with an entirely remote staff, back when such a concept was quirky enough in itself to write about. After cluing me in to matters of managing Zoom meetings around different time zones and such like, then-executive director Robert Rich, CAE, explained that leading remote staff requires a different temperament from leaders.

“One of the big things I’ve had to change is to think more about where people are at, and to make sure I find out,” he said. “Where are they in terms of how much of a workload they feel they have? How do they feel about their deadlines? How do they feel about the projects they’re working on?”

Call it “management by Zooming around”—whatever capacity you’ve developed for emotional intelligence, you’ll likely need more of it, and need to develop the skills to better express it. My colleague Rasheeda Childress wrote last week about some of the ways leaders can encourage and support their newly remote employees, sustaining productivity without being high pressure about it.

But beyond making sure you’re there for your employees on a day-to-day basis, leaders might also think about what expectations they need to set for their organizations. This is definitely a time to experiment and test out new ideas when you can, but don’t get caught up in the notion that you need to accomplish a moonshot. Fast Company cofounder Bill Taylor recently wrote in HBR about the virtue of setting smaller goals right now, not just because it eases stress on staff but because it clears a path for bigger things, building confidence in the process. “Amidst this big crisis, leaders should give themselves permission to focus on the power of small wins.”

This is an uncertain time. Last month, one tracking survey from McKinley Advisors suggested that a plurality of associations were ready to open their offices in June. Last week, an ASAE Research Foundation survey showed that July is looking more likely, and many are holding off till the fall.

Don’t take the data as a guide for when to open your doors; take it as a reminder that you can’t know everything. In the meantime, you can know your people a little better, and set goals for them that are meaningful and doable until more things become certain.

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

As associations make plans to reopen their offices, many staff members will feel anxious about returning to work. An expert offers tips for employers and employees to help mitigate fears and concerns.

As organizations make plans to reopen their offices, many employees are feeling anxious about going back. A recent survey from Best Practice Institute found that only 13 percent of employees want to return to the office full-time, with many expressing concerns about safety.

Michelle Paul, psychologist and director of The PRACTICE Mental Health Clinic at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said it’s natural to be anxious about returning to work. However, employers can help anxious staffers by being proactive.

“One of the first things employers can do is validate that this is a difficult time, and it makes sense that their employees feel nervous, anxious, afraid, trepidation,” Paul said. “That can go a long way in creating goodwill and trust.”

Trust will be essential if back-to-work plans are going to succeed. “Without the foundation of trust and a working alliance between employer and employee, the tasks required to get back to work are not going to be as effective,” Paul said.

Employers should follow guidelines for going back to work safely, using resources from the government and associations. Then, they need to communicate what they are doing to employees.

“Always check in,” Paul said. “Don’t assume people know what you’re doing, even though you’re living and breathing it as an employer. You have to repeat yourself many times.”

She said that employers should remind employees that this a path they’re traversing together. “Navigating the pandemic is like driving in a snowstorm with limited visibility,” Paul said. “I need my passengers to be looking with me. I’ll look out this window. You look out that window. We don’t know what the future is going to look like, so we have to be vigilant together. We have to support each other.”

While employers can calm anxieties by following best practices and communicating them, for staff, the key to anxiety reduction is figuring out what things are making them feel that way.

“The anxieties are going to be different depending on the setting and the circumstances,” Paul said. “Once you can put some words to it, and get out, ‘What am I afraid of?’ you can make a plan. Does what I’m feeling make a whole lot of sense, and I can do something about it? Or is it a general anxiety?”

Unfortunately, pandemics come with general anxiety. “The fear is not going to be resolved until we have a vaccine, so we have to live our lives with a certain level of fear,” Paul said. “Recognize that and make room for self-care and compassion for yourself and others.”

However, if anxiety becomes so overwhelming it interferes with daily functioning, Paul recommends seeking out professional help. The good news is that COVID-19 has brought telehealth to the forefront, so those anxious about going out during a pandemic don’t have to leave home.

“Now might be the best time to get services in your home without having to travel,” Paul said. 

This article is written by Rasheeda Childress, and was sourced directly from Associations Now here.