New portal offers wide range of training for vet practices

• Variety of learning available
• Courses designed by leading experts
• Vets, vet nurses and support staff to benefit

Auckland 21 June 2017 – Today, Bayer New Zealand has launched VetSpace, a new training portal that provides a wide range of online training essentials for keeping veterinary clinics up-to-date with new developments.

Launched at the annual New Zealand Veterinary Association conference, the portal offers broad training across all aspects of veterinary practice – for free.

It’s available to all New Zealand veterinary practices wanting to keep up-to-date with the latest in product development, new clinical information and business or retailing advice.

Bayer New Zealand managing director Derek Bartlett says the portal represents a new level of training for vet practices because it caters to everyone.

“Many online training portals focus on new products or information for vets only. We’ve taken it a step further and incorporated training modules for other vet clinic staff – the support staff, vet nurses, technicians and managers who are all an important part of keeping a veterinary business going.

“We really wanted to provide easy access to the most relevant information to enable vets to improve their practices – both technically and from a business point of view – at no charge,” adds Bartlett.

Courses cover information relevant to both farm animal and companion animal vets as well as mixed vet practices.

Well-known and respected industry vets, including learning and development specialist, Dr Lab Wilson, have designed some of the courses.

“Current thinking in learning and development circles recognises the value in training that allows busy people access to ‘just-in-time’ learning in bite-sized chunks.

“VetSpace provides this specifically for veterinary practice enabling practice personnel to learn what they want, how they want and when they need,” says Dr Wilson.

He also adds that keeping up-to-date is not only an ethical obligation, but is also essential in providing a high level of service and ensuring best practice standards are maintained.

Derek Bartlett says VetSpace will offer about eight courses to start with and have new courses added regularly.

They include:

1. Worm lifecycle: Sheep & Cattle by Dr Lab Wilson, BVSc MANZCVS

2. Lungworm: New updates for an old disease by Dr Pru Galloway, BVSc [distinction], MANZCVS, FANZCVS,

3. Communication tips to increase owner compliance by Dr. Liz Watkins BVSc MRCVS

4. The Facts about Flea by Dr Bob Rees, Bayer Animal Health

5. Online Marketing for Clinics by Dr James Ramsden,

6. Advantage – “No Bite is right!” by Bayer Animal Health

7. Collar fleas and ticks with Seresto® by Bayer Animal Health

8. Bringing you up to date: Selenium by Dr. Scott Oliver Knowles MSc, PhD & Dr. Neville D. Grace MAgSc, PhD

9. Bringing you up to date: Cobalt by Dr. Scott Oliver Knowles MSc, PhD & Dr. Neville D. Grace MAgSc, PhD.

The courses can also go towards annual CPD (continuing professional development) points.

Register for VetSpace at http://vetspace.co.nz

This article was originally sourced from Scoop Business.

Airline pilots are increasingly worried about drones and want tighter regulations around their use.

A review of Civil Aviation Authority rules is about to start and the New Zealand Airline Pilots' Association says it needs to be extensive.

Association president Tim Robinson said the number of incidents around New Zealand airports had increased during the last 12 months. Passenger aircraft had experienced near-misses at Christchurch and Queenstown.

''We know the Civil Aviation Authority is about to undertake that review. It needs to be extensive and it needs to include all stakeholders in the industry,'' he said.

Drone users flying in controlled airspace - such as around airports - need to receive clearance from Air Traffic Control. The association supports registration of drones.

''We're not anti-drones - we want to see their development safety into the New Zealand aviation system,'' said Robinson.

''We see them as having huge economic benefit for our country. We recognise that we're a bit of a test bed and the regulations have been fairly flexible - but now they've been operating for a couple of years we're starting to see the complaints and incidents increase and we need to see a tightening of regulations.''

Pilots are not the only group worried. OceanaGold, which owns the Martha Mine in Waihi, has warned that drone operators are endangering helicopters associated with its operation.

One recent posting on social media showing video of Waihi town was clearly well above 400 feet and staff estimated would have been at a height of least 1500 feet.

"That's a real worry for us as we regularly have helicopters flying in the Waihi area. That puts a recreational drone and an aircraft in the same airspace,'' the company said in a community newsletter.

This article was originally sourced from NZ Herald. 

The CEO of the New Zealand Technology Industry Association (NZTech) has foreshadowed the release later this month of an industry report into IoT saying that better application of IoT to dairy farming alone could bring benefits of $NZ448 million.

Graeme Muller, who also chairs the recently formed IoT Alliance —launched in March as one of several new initiatives set out in the government’s Building a Digital Nation report — said the project was being managed by the IoT Alliance and brought together major tech users, tech firms, the government, academia and industry groups such as NZTech, the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (TUANZ) and InternetNZ.

Muller said IoT would soon become critical to helping New Zealand raise its productivity and prosperity.

“Much of the initial hype around IoT has been derived from consumer IoT such as fitness trackers and intelligent fridges. The real value to be had from the Internet of Things is in enterprise and government applications,” he said.

He called on the Government to “act as a catalyst and to ensure all the right building blocks like security and connectivity remain in place.”

He said initial economic analysis had identified potential economic benefits in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the New Zealand economy through the deployment of IoT in sectors as diverse as agriculture, utilities, manufacturing, logistics and smart city services.

Agriculture urged to adopt IoT

Muller earlier this month issued another teaser for the forthcoming report — due out on 29 June — calling on New Zealand’s agriculture industry to latch on to technology faster to support economic growth and become a world leader in a fast growing agritech market.

That followed NZTech last September teaming up with the Precision Agriculture Association NZ to help New Zealand’s agriculture sector make better use of all kinds of technology.

Muller comment came during Fieldays, New Zealand’s major agricultural event at which the ANZ Bank’s rural economist, Con Williams, warned about a digital tsunami hitting the primary industries and which saw the launch of a significant agricultural IoT project.

Williams said the number of apps and innovations designed to help improve agricultural businesses had exploded in recent years and he called on farmers and growers to “embrace the changes new technology brings as they are all aimed at increasing the bottom line, and perhaps just as importantly, making it easier to do business.”

ANZ said its Innovation Pavilion at Fieldays gave visitors “a feel everything from health and safety apps, farm management, finance and compliance through to robotic fruit pickers and drone technology.”

Connected Farms pilot

Also on show at Fieldays was a pilot of an IoT project for farms led by NZ telco, Spark, Farmlands, Ballance AgriNutrients and the National Institute of Weather and Atmosphere (NIWA).

According to a blog post on the NZTech web site the pilot started in April with 40 farms in the Matamata-Piako region and 20 farms to in the South Island and is delivering connectivity to farms through an on-farm Wi-Fi mesh network connected to the Internet via Spark’s 4G network and a low power wide area network based on LoRaWAN technology.

It is demonstrating how farmers can get real-time information about their farm through an array of sensors and analyse the data in real time to support farm decisions.

This article was originally sourced from IoTHub. 

The Penalty Rates Decision, which was handed down on February 23rd of this year, marked a historic moment for Australian legislation. FCB Group, Australia’s top employment law firm, led the case for the ARA, resulting in a victory for retailers and small to medium businesses alike. We caught up with the team at FCB to get the inside story on their path to victory:

Background

Success for employers in these types of award cases are rare, and large wins in relation to the General Retail Industry Award 2010 are next to impossible. So, how did the landmark Penalty Rates reduction decision come to pass? We are able to provide valuable insight into how the case unfolded because we were involved every step of the way. FCB Workplace Law, acted on behalf of the Australian Retailers Association (ARA) and the retail industry, in this historic case. And we put the win down to three things – unity, funding and quality.

The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), the retail union, has historically dedicated significant resources to defend changes to retail awards, have consistently out-spent employer groups and, quite simply, have previously run better cases. FCB and the ARA propositioned to the rest of the retail industry that if we weren’t able to fund a single, unified case, with high quality representation in the 2014 Review, the existing Sunday penalty rate structure would be entrenched. The industry, and all of the retail associations, agreed to work together to fund the case, so we commenced planning.

Case strategy

When planning these cases, or planning any litigation, the key is to start with the evidentiary contentions, which are the findings you want your evidence to support, that you want the Court or Commission to accept. These are drawn from elements of the relevant legislation and case law. In the Penalty Rates case our contentions needed to assist the FWC with their role in balancing the impact of a reduction in penalty rates on retail employees against the benefits in terms of employment and the performance of the retail industry.

What we wanted the FWC to accept (based on our evidence), was that existing Sunday Penalty Rates were the key reason retail employers limit available hours, and therefore, employment opportunities. Our evidence would support the contention that a reduction in the rates would allow retail employers to overcome these limits and could align Sunday operations more closely to other days. We also wanted the FWC to accept that people work on Sundays for a variety of reasons, and that despite the fact that reducing Sunday penalties would have a negative impact on employees, the existing penalty was overcompensating them for the disabilities associated with Sunday work. Finally, we needed to convince the FWC that at least part of the reduction in Sunday rates would be offset by additional hours offered to existing employees. To make these arguments we needed evidence, and traditionally it has been difficult to find enough employers prepared to step forward to provide it. To counter this challenge we would develop common threads between expert, survey and individual employer evidence to enable us to put our contentions to the FWC in a compelling way.

Case conduct

We commenced with an expert report identifying what retail employers were currently doing with Sunday rostering and how this would change if the penalty rate was reduced. Next we collaborated with other parties to present survey evidence to support this report and presented direct evidence from retail employers across a variety of geographical locations, size and retail categories. Armed with this we presented our evidentiary contentions based on the common threads arising from this evidence, and the FWC accepted them.

FCB and ARA also needed to address the issue of employee preferences and the problems employees associated with Sunday work, knowing the unions would present a vast amount of evidence regarding this. In addition, we needed to convince the FWC that reducing the Sunday penalty rate would not cause the industry difficulties in sourcing sufficient employees prepared to work on Sundays at that reduced rate.

While our retail specific expert report, survey results and focus group findings identified some of the disabilities associated with Sunday work, it also showed that employees were prepared to work for lower penalty rates and had chosen to work on Sundays because it suited them, with very few being forced to work on Sundays. This was crucial in countering evidence presented by the unions about employee choice and preference. We were able to put to the SDA expert and lay witnesses in cross examination contentions regarding the freedom they had to accept or reject Sunday work, and their preparedness to continue to work on Sundays at a lower penalty rate. Almost across the board those witnesses confirmed the contentions.

The Outcome

On Thursday, 23 February 2017 a Full Bench of the Fair Work Commission (FWC) issued its decision in the Penalty Rates case. In an historic ruling, the Full Bench determined that the Sunday and Public Holiday penalties in a number of modern awards would be varied.

The Transition

While the win for the retail industry is unprecedented, there were a number of matters to be resolved before the case is finalised. The Full Bench of the Fair Work Commission (Commission) had to decide how the rates would transition. The Commission determined that Sunday penalty rates will be reduced via a four (4) stage transition for permanent staff, and a three (3) stage transition for casual staff in the Retail industry. The Commission has also confirmed that Take Home Pay Orders are not available to employees impacted by the reductions, and that there will be no “red-circling” or “grandfathering” of existing employees.

The table below sets out the way the Sunday penalty rate reduction will transition:

General Retail Industry Award 2010

Hospitality Industry Award 2010

Pharmacy Industry Award 2010

Fast Food Industry Award 2010

The Commission also confirmed that the reductions in public holiday penalty rates will commence in full from 1 July 2017. Those reductions are:

What does this mean?

The Penalty Rates Reduction Case was a huge win for small businesses all throughout Australia. Currently, most franchises and large businesses are covered by an Enterprise Agreement, and therefore enjoy reduced penalty rates already. This case seeks to level the playing field, allowing for small businesses to flourish and create more diversity in the marketplace. For employees, we will see increased Sunday and Public holiday employment opportunities, with more businesses with capacity to roster on more hours.

If you would like assistance wth any of these matters, call FCB Group on (02) 9922 5188 or (03) 9098 9400.

In the “Ultimate Sales Machine”, Chet Holmes mentions that only 3% of your target market is ready to buy! 7% of your target market is open to buying but not looking, 30% of your market is comfortable with the status quo and 30% of your market believes they aren’t interested.

When it comes to LinkedIn marketing and social selling, where do you think everyone’s focus is? It’s on the top 3% of the market meaning they’re missing out on 67% more opportunities that my clients (like Schneider) are getting with a 40% to 70% improved chance of closing.

How sales & marketing professionals and social media lead generation companies are focused on only 3% of the target market…

In a recent article, SAP’s Nicholas Kontopoulos mentioned that social selling has become another form of spam! He wrote: “Social media is now just amplifying the bad selling behaviors of salespeople. Where a bad salesperson could deter dozens of potential customers, social platforms allow the same person to reach thousands of people…with the same one-night stand, transactional mentality and message.”

You see LinkedIn marketing and social selling has become a volume play. The focus is on how many connections are being made, how many prospects are joining the LinkedIn community, how many views the content is generating, how much website traffic are they getting, how many people are being reached with messages. They’re focused on how many people are being added to the pipeline even if they aren’t validated and qualified. They’re focused on lead generation even though most leads go nowhere – when the focus should be on prospect development.

Even social media experts are talking about social media being a volume play.

The majority of social media and social selling experts are coaching clients and followers to take a templated approach that lacks relevance to try to book as many calls and sales conversations as you possibly can. For example a digital sales prospecting trainer and coach, teaches clients to use templates like:

Hi, Sam.

How are you adding new capability to your ______________ [insert area of business your product addresses] at any time soon or in future? I work with organizations like _______ [prospect’s business] to make sure ________ [goal]. Would you like to quickly explore, via email, if a larger conversation makes sense? Please let me know what you decide.

So, instead of taking an account based marketing approach and focusing on issues that are relevant to targeted organizations. key decision makers and influencers, sales, marketing and social media lead generation firms using this approach are hoping that if they send it out to enough people, it will be relevant to someone and stick. They are focused on “trying” to hit that 3% of the market – the people that are most likely ready to buy now. If those leads that may or may not be part of the 3% of the market do not move forward, then you have a high cost for business growth. And, your efforts on LinkedIn are nothing more than a cost center. It doesn’t matter how low your cost-per-lead is if leads are being stuck at the top-of-the-funnel. It’s still a cost and investment that isn’t leading to revenue!

Social media firm focuses on lead goals even though the leads they delivered went nowhere!

As I share in this cost-per-lead post, I recently spoke to the President and CMO of a logistics company – and they were both so focused on how many leads we are able to deliver on a weekly and monthly basis. They proceeded to tell me how another social media lead generation firm was delivering 5 to 10 leads for sales calls per week.

However, those sales leads they were delivering sucked! 90% of the calls were with prospects who were not in the right stage of the buying process at this time – or they were with people who were not even a decision maker or influencer. The people who said “yes” to a call was just looking for free information, to network – and maybe refer the company. What good were those leads if there were no relationships being created and leveraged to create revenue opportunities?

How sales and marketing can capture 67% more opportunities instead of just leads that go nowhere

1. Focus on relevance across all levels using an account based sales and marketing approach

Adding the person’s name or position to a message or talking about their industry does not make you relevant. When you’re engaging in prospect development, you’re not just relevant on one or two levels – you’re relevant to the industry, to the company, to the person’s role and to the individual decision maker or influencer.

Being relevant to each key decision maker and opening doors with different demand units is what account based sales and marketing is about. It’s how you can forge stronger connections within individual people within potential customer organizations. Remember, developing relationships require getting to know the potential customer and demonstrating how you can bring relevant value to them. This is how you’ll move those that are indifferent or think they are not interested in your solution.

2. Engage in marketing for sales alignment:

Marketers who go beyond lead generation and focus on Sales and Marketing alignment to achieve revenue goals using LinkedIn can prove a clearer, stronger social media ROI. By providing rich insights into buyers, their companies, and their territories, marketers enable sales to better prioritize their efforts. And by focusing on relationships and how to leverage them, marketers can become the social bridge between buyers and sales. They can help build familiarity between salespeople and their customers. Together, sales and marketing can improve sales effectiveness using LinkedIn.

But marketing has to use its influence on LinkedIn and become more of a sales enabler – and support sales in a more meaningful way so they can close deals.. There can’t be these silos anymore where marketing is focused on the company page, sponsored updates and the solutions that LinkedIn Marketing Solutions provides and relying on sales to make the relationships. Marketing needs to become a sales enabler on LinkedIn by focusing on the complete awareness to revenue customer life-cycle that includes a set of psychological transitions where customers become aware of, evaluate, like, advocate and invest in a specific product or service. We need to go beyond the awareness tactics that social media and digital marketing executives take and meld traditional marketing with LinkedIn to increase the percentages of transitions as well as increase the speed at which they transition.

3. Focus on breaking down the potential customer’s status quo

When going beyond the 3% of the market that is ready to buy, you have to spend time breaking down the customer’s status quo. As the CEB mentions in their Challenger Demand Gen Marketer Role Guide, “Without breaking down the status quo, potential customers may engage with your content, talk to your sales reps and nod along. But ultimately. they won’t take the hard actions to drive consensus and take the next steps toward investing in your solution.”

It’s not enough to just challenge prospects and show them a new approach. You need to give prospects a reason to change. For a positioning and messaging firm client, we were only able to help the firm gain clients once the firm’s President was able to show sales and marketing how their positioning and messaging was affecting sales and marketing performance – especially in the areas that were high on the priority list. Once we were able to target specific companies with specific positioning and messaging issues and show sales and marketing leaders why they needed to change, the firm gained clients like Membrain, Mariner Partners, Shift Energy, Idea5, Rocket Software and SmartOrg.

4. Don’t optimize content for social media engagement

When you’re optimizing content for social media engagement, you’re optimizing it for reach. You’re optimizing the content for top of the funnel awareness which may attract that top 3% of the market that is ready to buy – but it won’t move the other 67% of the market. As the CEB mentions, you want to optimize your content for consumption of disruption or, in other words, focus on how your content is driving changes in thoughts and actions.

5. Focus on lead validation and qualification

The CEO of a popular social selling firm tells clients:

“With each new connection, determine if they are someone you’d like to speak with and tweak the LinkedIn message slightly: NAME, it is nice to be connected on LinkedIn. Typically I like to have a brief call with my new connections so we can explore ways we might be able to work together now or in the future. Here is a link to my calendar: xxxxxxxx. Please pick a time that is most convenient for you. I am looking forward to our call.”

So she’s telling business leaders and sales and marketing professionals to go for the call–don’t worry about lead qualification and validation. She’s saying don’t worry if they haven’t seen your value yet and that you haven’t demonstrated your relevance. Don’t worry if you haven’t identified a need yet and don’t worry if they are not in the right buying stage. This shotgun thinking assumes that getting the sales information “out there” may eventually lead to a sale. But all it really does is cost you time and money.

This article was originally sourced from Business 2 Community. 

Tapping into Reddit’s many niche communities could be a valuable source of market research for your organization. 

Reddit is a behemoth of a website with millions of daily users. According to Alexa, it is the fourth-most-popular website in the United States. If you have a passing familiarity with the site, you might think it’s a time-waster made up of funny GIFs and dog memes, but with more than 50,000 distinct communities called subreddits, Reddit holds a treasure trove of information for your organization.

Hootsuite provides a handy how-to guide for using Reddit as a resource for market research.

The key is to find the most relevant subreddits for your organization. For instance, marketers from a diabetes-related association will want to search for subreddits about diabetes, of which there could be dozens of communities. Once you’ve found the relevant subreddits, do some keyword research about your organization to get honest sentiments about your group.

“It’s easy to forget that the public has much different experiences than we do inside the walls of a marketing department,” writes James Mulvey. “Reddit is amazing for revealing unfiltered opinions about brands, products, industries, and categories.”

Hootsuite provides specific direction for how to analyze and monitor a variety of subreddits like you would any other social listening channel.

It’s that time of year again! The annual Internet Trends report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker is out. It’s chock-full of need-to-know information about online advertising, media, and more.

AdWeek shares several highlights from this year’s report, including the fact that internet ad spending eclipsed television spending for the first time in 2016. “Of the internet ad spending, Google and Facebook continued to take the lion’s share, accounting for 85 percent of all growth in the U.S.,” writes Marty Swant.

While the growth of internet users is expected to stay flat, adults are spending more time with digital media, increasing to 5.6 hours per day in 2016.

This article was originally sourced from Associations Now. 

While using social media channels to get the word out about your meeting or event might be getting all the attention right now, don’t make the mistake of discounting a tried-and-true channel 91 percent of us check every day: email.

Yes, that humble in-box is responsible for 43 percent of all ticket sales, according to the 2017 Event Email Benchmarking Report from event technology platform company EventBrite. The study involved 341 organizers in the U.S. and U.K., the majority of whom—51 percent—planned business events, along with festivals (14 percent), classes (12 percent), and musical (7 percent) and sporting events (5 percent).

When It Comes to Lists, Size Matters

While of course your list will scale to the size of the event you’re marketing, generally speaking, bigger is better, according to the survey. Almost half of the survey respondents said their lists went to 1,000 or fewer recipients, while 20 percent went to 10,000 or more, and 29 percent said their list lands somewhere in between. About a fifth, however, said they don’t actively grow their lists—but you likely don’t want to be in that group if you also want to grow your event registrations.

Ways to collect email addresses include:

• Require an email address on the registration form for your events, e-newsletters, and websites.
• See if your sponsors and other business partners will share their lists. You also can ask if they would let you run a promotion on their website, mail or e-newsletters.
• In printed mailed fliers, onsite promotions, and through social media, offer a discount or an opportunity to win free tickets or a VIP pass to those who share their email addresses. You can tell them they have to provide their email to claim their prize. Social media was the most popular inbound marketing channel for survey participants, used by 45 percent of U.S. and 51 percent of U.K. respondents.
• Ask those on your current list to pass your emails—especially those filled with non-promotional content—with their network.
• Add a sign-up button to your event’s Facebook page that links to great content they have to register with their email to see.

When to Send

You don’t want to deluge your potential registrants with so many emails that they roll their eyes and delete your missives without opening them, but you also don’t want to have them forget all about your event with too-infrequent emails. The happy medium, survey respondents said, was about one message a week.

It is important to have a regular schedule so people will know when to expect to hear from you. To figure out when the optimal days and times are, the study suggests trying out different frequencies and measuring the results. You also can offer to let people decide for themselves how often they want to hear from you.

That being said, U.K. respondents leaned toward sending email on Tuesdays, while U.S. event marketers said Wednesdays were the best for them, especially for professional conference promotions. The study suggests starting out with a Tuesday schedule (adding Thursday if you opt for twice-a-week), but keep testing to see what days work best for your specific audience.

For more benchmarking data on open, click-through, click-to-open, and conversion rates, and other metrics and email marketing strategy tips, visit the EventBrite download page. Yes, free registration, including an email address, is required.

This article was originally sourced from Meetings Net.

Toolkits are a proven way to address member challenges, but not all toolkits are created equal. One expert shares tips for creating toolkits that best meet members’ needs.

Toolkits are one of the best ways to deliver value to your members by showing them how to make good use of the programs, products, and services your association offers—whether the purpose is to raise awareness of a new campaign, describe a benefit, or teach an important skill or process. But a lot can go wrong in producing a toolkit.

Your project team can get sidetracked or delayed. Or worse, your toolkit might not meet members’ needs and instead it sits on the shelf collecting dust.

Amalea Hijar has more than a decade of experience developing and writing member toolkits for associations. She’s worked on them for the American Staffing Association and the American College of Cardiology, and in her current role as program director for growth at Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation, she’s thinking about how toolkits can better serve industry partners.

She also recently wrote an e-book about how toolkits can serve to enhance component relations. In her experience, the best toolkits deliver on a basic member challenge.

“A good toolkit, regardless of the size or scope, addresses a serious membership issue,” Hijar says. “With a toolkit, you’re basically saying to the member, ‘Here is a way to help you solve your problem.’”

Hijar has learned some valuable lessons that can be easily applied to your next toolkit. She suggests approaching the process through a four-step plan.

STEP 1: TALK TO MEMBERS TO IDENTIFY THE CHALLENGE

Toolkits can be designed for a specific set of members or membership needs, but the most effective toolkits always start with member input on the problem. That means listening to members and asking them what the association can do better.

Hijar starts every toolkit by interviewing members to identify common challenges and interests. Those conversations have helped her identify specific topics, including a toolkit on workplace safety and another for early-career members.

“You need to develop toolkits that speak directly to a subset of members,” Hijar says, “because nobody is going to use your toolkit if you are solving a problem that doesn’t actually exist.”

STEP 2: INCLUDE MEMBERS IN THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

After you have identified a member challenge, Hijar says you can tap highly engaged members to assist with content development. Keep in mind that you’ll need volunteers who can commit to a project that typically takes about three months to complete.

“You need to be thoughtful about time and make sure you’re including people who are passionate and care about the issue too,” Hijar says. “One way that I like to do that is by being upfront with the member and mapping out a three-month timeline to complete project.”

The first meeting with your project team can help to outline the parameters of the content development process. In her e-book, Hijar suggests three key objectives for that meeting:

• Identify each person’s areas of expertise and passion.
• Brainstorm the mission and vision for the toolkit.
• Agree on a timeline to complete the project.

STEP 3: REFINE YOUR TOOLKIT WITH MICRO-VOLUNTEERS

Of course, not all of your volunteers will be able to dedicate three months to developing a member toolkit, and that’s OK.

A lot of your engaged members may be better suited to assist with small project tasks. For instance, Hijar says local chapters or individual members can be tapped to provide models and samples of work that can be easily incorporated into the toolkit.

“Maybe you’re pulling together a media toolkit, and your chapter has a great template for creating press releases. Make sure to use it,” Hijar says. “Peer examples also have the added benefit of making the toolkit approachable.”

Hijar also recommends scouting out a group of micro-volunteers—those who can devote just a few hours to the project—to try out the toolkit before it’s widely distributed. This informal user testing will help to identify content gaps or other problems, and the content development team can then further refine the toolkit.

STEP 4: EVALUATE AND REVIEW TOOLKIT USE

Publishing your toolkit may feel like the last step, but Hijar says it’s really only the beginning. The content development team should continue to review the toolkit as it’s being used. She recommends having at least two team meetings where the project can be evaluated based on user feedback.

Tracking downloads and surveying those who downloaded the toolkit can also tell you a lot about how the document is being accessed and used. Most associations forget that a successful toolkit needs periodic updates, as well as a member-focused distribution strategy that includes a variety of content-specific formats.

The standard format that most associations use is a digital .pdf, Hijar says, which works in some distribution channels but isn’t well suited for accessing the toolkit from a mobile device.

“A good toolkit can be shared in a variety of formats—on social media, across email, or even handed from one member to the next,” she says. “You need to think about making it accessible and you can decide what formats work best, based off member feedback.”

This article was originally sourced from Associations Now. 

A longtime association executive shares the essential characteristics needed to be a leader. Also: Find out how to streamline dues processing.

Being an association executive is a unique experience. An executive must have a variety of hard skills, including a deep knowledge of his or her field, the ins and outs of organizational management, and an understanding of disciplines like marketing, fundraising, and more.

But there are soft skills that can turn a good leader into a great one. Octavio Peralta, an association executive for the past 25 years, outlines what he believes to be the “five essential attributes of an association executive” in a recent post for Business Mirror.

Look to the acronym DEPTH for leadership characteristics. “D” stands for dedication. “Associations thrive and sustain themselves because of their purpose, i.e., advancing a cause or advocacy,” writes Peralta. “Dedication also connotes a self-sacrificing devotion and loyalty, requiring total familiarity of the organization and the hard work it entails to do so.”

“E” is for entrepreneurship. “While associations are considered ‘not-for-profit organizations,’ it is incumbent upon them to raise funds and generate revenues to be a sustainable organization,” says Peralta. “Entrepreneurial spirit is characterized by innovation and risk-taking, and is an essential part of an association’s ability to succeed in an ever-changing and increasingly competitive marketplace.”

Check out the rest of Peralta’s post for more on DEPTH.

Administrative time and effort can be one of the biggest drags of any organization. Dues processing can be particularly frustrating, but there may be a more efficient way to manage that effort.

The Billhighway blog outlines several steps that national chapters should take to simplify dues processing. “When chapters are run by volunteer leaders and small staffs, it’s in everyone’s best interest to relieve their administrative burden by finding ways to streamline and standardize processes,” writes Kyle Bazzy.

Start with data reconciliation. Different chapters have different ways to collect data and multiple payment processes. How do you tackle this? “Assign a unique member ID number to accompany future dues payments,” says Bazzy. And make sure to offer a self-service portal tied to the national AMS to all local chapters, thereby reducing the data entry duties of local chapters.

Bazzy also details a payment-reconciliation process and advises creating a standard data sharing and reporting method.

This article was originally sourced from Associations Now.

Membership organisations know that the millennial generation, which will soon be the majority of our workforce and membership base, is the most diverse generation we’ve ever had in North America. And the yet-to-be-named generation coming up behind them is even more so.

Membership organisations are also aware of the ever-increasing number of studies showing that increased diversity and authentic inclusion produce innovation, better decision-making, faster and more creative problem-solving, better outcomes, and an improved bottom line.

Membership organisations know that embracing and promoting D+I is the right thing to do, on many levels.

And many membership organisations have adopted strong statements that claim a commitment to D+I among their leadership and membership.

Where organisations often stumble is in turning those beautifully crafted and carefully vetted D+I statements into real change among staff teams, volunteer leadership, the memberships, and the professions and industries we serve.

But membership organisations also have a secret power: the depth and variety of relationships you have with your audiences. Those deep, ongoing relationships with boards of directors, members, and the industries and professions you serve provide an excellent opportunity to have a significant impact on diversity and inclusion, but also carry with them increased responsibility to create change.

For instance, in-person events like conferences can be fraught situations. Bringing large groups of people together in semi-professional, semi-social situations sets the stage for potential misconduct. Participation in conferences is often critical to professional advancement, but it also creates an ideal environment for ill-intentioned people to harass other attendees, most frequently (but not always) based on their race/ethnicity, gender expression or sexual orientation. That’s a challenge.

But membership organisations have a corresponding opportunity to foster change at in-person events via creating and enforcing strong codes of conduct.

Meeting harassment is far more common than you may realise. (For the data on this, see these survey results.) To be effective in preventing and addressing meeting harassment:

• Create a strong meeting harassment policy that includes a clear, simple reporting mechanism (the Entomological Society of America’s code of conduct is a good example).
• Train your staff.
• Program a pop-up into your online event registration, and require all meeting registrants to indicate that they have read it and agree to abide by it. That doesn’t mean they’ll read it, it just means they can’t claim they didn’t know about it.
• Put the policy in a prominent place in your meeting program, like inside the front cover. Don’t bury it on page 55.
• Make sure your code of conduct includes detailed information about how and to whom to report an incident: name, cell phone number and email address. If you want to encourage reporting, this should be one person, not just “staff.”
• Put the policy with the contact information on signs that are posted throughout the meeting venue, including the exhibit hall and especially at the entrances of any event where alcohol is served.
• Announce the policy at the start of all plenary sessions.

This accomplishes two crucial things: you’ve put potential harassers on notice, while also sending a clear message to women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others that you are committed to creating a safe and welcoming meeting. If you actually enforce the policy by removing harassers from your meetings and banning repeat harassers from registering and attending, what you’ll see is a spike in incident reports for the first couple of meetings, and then a rapid drop-off as the worst of the serial harassers are weeded out, and the others learn to rein themselves in.

To learn more about how you can leverage the variety of relationships your organization has with your audiences to create genuine diversity and inclusion, download your free copy of Include is a Verb: Moving from Talk to Action on Diversity and Inclusion at http://bit.ly/2peWwP0.

This article was originally sourced from Association Adviser.