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.

Not long ago, I had a conversation with my oldest child, who recently entered the teenage years (heaven, help us). Having received his first smartphone, I wanted to talk to him about his online conduct, where mistakes can haunt you forever. After all, I told him, you can’t take that stuff back. Once you put something into the digital realm, removing it is like trying to take sugar out of a cake when it comes out of the oven.

After several minutes of me blathering on, I realized that he’d long since tuned me out. He wasn’t invested in anything I had to say, and I don’t blame him; I was delivering a message he didn’t want to hear, in a way that doesn’t resonate with him: the dreaded parental lecture.

Like most parents, I’ve never been able to make much of an impact by talking at my children, but that doesn’t stop me from foolishly returning to the well time after time after time, with consistently poor results.

“They’ll get it this time,” I reassure myself, confident that there’s nothing wrong with my delivery or previously failed communication attempts. Despite all evidence to the contrary – and there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary – I fall back into bad habits and fail to alter my approach.

Interestingly enough, I see this same phenomenon from a different perspective on a regular basis at work.

I Want to Believe

Part of my job involves working alongside Naylor’s association partners to develop and implement a communications plan for their print and online presence. As a result, I often have conversations with association staffers who have concrete ideas about what type of content their members want in a magazine, regardless of whether those notions are based in fact.

“Our members love to see pictures of themselves in the magazine,” an association executive once boasted to me. “They can’t get enough of ’em, and they tell me that all the time.”

However, just a few short months later, at the behest of that same executive – supremely assured that members would vindicate his statement – he was confronted with hard data that contradicted his assumptions.

A readership survey, completed by a portion of this association’s membership, indicated that most readers didn’t much care to see pictures of the most recent networking mixer in the association’s magazine, even though it had been a staple in the publication for years.

To his credit, he listened to the majority and adjusted his magazine’s editorial plan to better reflect this feedback, and the content in his magazine has steadily been getting stronger and stronger.

It’s not that including photos of past events is a bad thing on its face – it’s certainly possible to use these effectively as part of a larger strategy. Rather, the problem in this situation was that the executive was relying on anecdotal evidence and hadn’t thoroughly polled his members to find out what they wanted and, conversely, didn’t want.

Simply put, there is often a chasm of difference between the noise created by a small minority of outspoken voices and the overwhelming consensus of the less-vocal majority.

Hollywood knows this as well as anyone. Take, for example, the curious case of Snakes on a Plane. To say this horror/comedy film generated enormous buzz on the internet prior to its release would be an understatement tantamount to calling our most recent presidential election “a tiny bit polarizing.”

But when the movie hit theaters, it ultimately grossed a disappointing $34 million domestically – a scant $1 million more than its filming budget. Despite the early hype, the movie was a dud.

Ahead of its release, analysts were predicting a record-breaking run at the box office, but the echo chamber created by the film’s offbeat plot/title/marketing turned out to be just that – pure hype. The box office results weren’t at all indicative of the opinions of a relatively small group of vocal supporters who were impossible to ignore. Instead, the final numbers reflected the reality of the situation: The minority who were most invested drowned out the apathy of the general movie-going public.

The Truth is Out There

Setting aside perceptions based on anecdotal evidence, it may be tempting to resort to cheap, shortsighted tactics like clickbait, sensationalism or paid content masquerading in the form of editorial material. But, an association can effectively communicate with its members by implementing a well-planned strategy. And the best part? Given the chance, your members will tell you how to craft this strategy. As long as you pose the question in a structured format, you’ll end up with information that can prevent the echo chamber effect that will have you chasing shadows.

To add the cherry on top of this sundae of awesomeness, there are numerous free survey tools out there that associations can leverage in soliciting member feedback. There’s literally no reason to not check the pulse of your members on regular occasions.

For the past 10 years, I’ve had the good fortune to collaborate with some amazingly talented association executives, leaders and visionaries. The most successful of these dedicated men and women are able to look beyond their own biases – and we are all biased – to more accurately assess the needs and wants of their members. Adequately surveying their members allows these leaders to communicate with members instead of at them.

Because, as my kids will tell you, communicating at someone is like throwing paperclips at a dartboard. Nothing is going to stick.

This article was originally sourced from Association Adviser.

“My presentation is fine. It’s the audience’s fault if they don’t get it?”

“Why do I need to change the way I present? My lecture has worked for years. I get great scores and reviews.”

I’m sure you’ve heard statements like this. Maybe you’ve even said something similar yourself. So, why should speakers change how they present at your conference?

The Lecture—The Presenters’ And Learners’ Desert Mirage

The standard didactic lecture…It’s been used successfully for years. Right?

All that glitters, you know. Or one could say, all that instructs through speech…

It’s the stuff that dreams, careers and legends are made of.

So how much value does the lecture really provide? Especially since it’s the most dominant form of conference education.

Lectures, panels, and speeches prevail even though evidence shows that the traditional stand-and-deliver lecture does little to help an audience learn (Bligh 1971; Freeman, McDonough, Okoroafor and Wenderoth 2014; Smith and Valentine 2012; Teaching College by Norman Eng just to name a few).

We’ve bought into securing, selling and promoting the presenters’ and learners’ desert mirage.

One Conference Improvement Challenge: Lectures Beget Lectures

Here is one of the primary challenges with improving conference education.

The majority of your conference speakers imitate what their teachers and professors did with them. They lecture. They mimic the traditional college professor didactic monologue.

Yet, there are no teaching license requirements for college professors as there are for teachers in kindergarten through grade 12. Most college professors—and conference presenters—spend little to no time understanding effective teaching and learning strategies. These academicians focus instead on cultivating their subject matter expertise.

So we have this ongoing cycle of lectures birthing more lectures.

Unless your conference presenters understand how their audience learns, the majority of your conference education will remain ineffective.

A Second Improvement Challenge: Pedagogy Versus Andragogy

Many successful presenters have crossed the ineffective lecture chasm to create more effective instructional strategies.

These speakers direct learning. They make the decision about what should be learned, how it will be learned and when it will be taught. They use a pedagogic model.

Pedagogy literally means the art and science of teaching children. The focus is on how information is presented and taught.

In the pedagogic model, the subject and the presenter are the starting point for conference education. The audience as learners are secondary. Thus the audience is required to adjust their learning and retention to an established way of information delivery. This results in the learner trying to substitute someone else’s experience and knowledge for their own…with little success.

However, most of the time the audience leaves a lecture feeling satisfied. These attendees believe they have actually learned from that lecture although they will probably forget most it within hours. Rarely do attendees complain about wanting a better model.

Both the presenter and the learner have bought into the lecture even though it’s a desert mirage.

Shifting To Learner-Centered Andragogy Models

John Dewey, Eduard C. Lindeman and Malcolm Knowles, are three professional education researchers that felt pedagogy fell short for effective learning, especially for adults. They promoted learner-focused education. They believed that we learn what we do. And that learning needs to connect to our experience, past knowledge and needs.

Knowles took these concepts deeper. He borrowed and promoted the term andragogy—the art and science of adult learning.

Andragogy defines an alternative to pedagogy. It refers to learner-focused education for people of all ages. Speakers design their presentations to facilitate participant learning. They focus on how the audience will receive and interpret the information instead of how to deliver it. They provide ample opportunities for participants to think, reflect, make sense of, connect, understand and apply that information.

For conference learning opportunities s to succeed in the future, we must unlearn our speaker- and teacher-centric reliance. We have to free ourselves of lecture- and pedagogic-bias as educator Marcia Connor would say. We have to adopt evidenced based education models that result in our participants’ learning, retention and on-the-job application

This article was originally sourced from Velvet Chainsaw. 

Despite all of the high-level risks, some board directors and administrators continue to email sensitive documents via non-secure platforms. Directors may even use their personal email accounts and mobile phones. This opens up your organization to vulnerabilities such as hacks and data breaches. Using various email and mobile platforms to email or text board documents is also a headache for IT and board administrators, as levels of visibility and control can be compromised.

We’ll examine the challenges of emailing and messaging confidential board information and make the case for adopting a secure messaging app.

Emailing puts your board’s sensitive information at risk

Directors use email and text to communicate with each other because it’s easy and convenient. But vulnerabilities and risks impacting your company include the following:

Phishing attacks: Criminals are becoming more strategic and stealthy with their email phishing attacks. These attacks seek to trick users into opening email attachments that are actually a sort of virus or malware. The emails may appear innocuous, even seeming to come from a reliable source. Board members, for example, may receive emails asking for tax information or requesting bank transfers. The messages may even come from a trusted email account — one that’s been hacked and taken over. Sometimes, board members use their personal email accounts to handle board communications so they won’t get these mixed in with the emails from the companies they work for, according to an article by CSO. But the use of those relatively unsafe accounts creates a risk that hackers might exploit.

Password hacks: Some directors will use the same password for their personal and business email accounts. If an attacker gets a hold of the password for one email account, that could potentially give him access to the business at large, and an organization’s confidential information could be compromised. For example, a cybercriminal could hack a director’s password, log in and extract sensitive information by posing as the director via their email. The information could go public and damage the organization, or the criminal might hold the sensitive information hostage and ask for a ransom. Either way, the results could be disastrous.

Rogue apps: Employees may use these unvetted and often insecure rogue apps, which are apps that have not yet been vetted, approved and supported by the company, to improve productivity. But doing so places the company’s sensitive data at risk, as these apps may not be secure, and could have backdoors that hackers could exploit.

The case for adopting a secure board messaging app

If your board is considering adopting a board messaging app, here are some suggested strategic best practices for selecting a solution:

• Assess the security threat. What are your company’s vulnerabilities? How are your directors treating sensitive documents? Be sure the board messaging app you select delivers enterprise-level security so that you can maintain control and ensure compliance. Security is a top priority, so be sure the vendor you choose has top-notch security features.
• Get leadership buy-in earlier during the review process. Involve your leadership and board directors in the solution assessment and in the selection process. Determine what features and benefits mean the most to them and set up a comparison grid outlining the potential solutions. If you don’t get leadership’s input early, you may select a messaging app that doesn’t meet their needs and that won’t be universally adopted.
• Stick with one, and only one, solution. Using several messaging solutions creates fragmentation and headaches for your IT department. Using multiple solutions could also cause more vulnerabilities, as they may not all possess the same level of security. Just select the best solution for your needs and eliminate the rest. If board members or staff members are using their own apps for certain tasks, understand what problems they’re trying to solve, and how you can address those problems.
• Educate directors and administrators. A messaging app won’t work if board members and staff aren’t trained to use it. When deploying the solution, it’s important to educate the teams using the app. This will also help ensure that they use it properly, so information stays safe and secure.

How Diligent Messenger delivers the safer, smarter way to email and message

Don’t compromise the security of your Diligent Boards solution by emailing board materials outside of the portal.

Diligent Messenger safeguards all data with the same best-in-class security infrastructure and encryption as Diligent Boards. Because users are authenticated by your Boards and Messenger sites, you can control the potential recipients of communications.

Benefits for directors and board administrators include:

• Compliance with your organization’s document retention policy, so messages can be retained or deleted;
• Improved communication and collaboration, which allows directors to connect instantly with other directors while reviewing board materials; and
• Real-time sharing, so users can share documents securely in real time to augment collaboration efforts.

Overall, a secure board messaging app — like Diligent Messenger — improves collaboration and communication while keeping your organization’s information safe and secure.

For more information, visit http://diligent.com/messenger/.

The Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) Board is delighted to announce the appointment of Ms Tanya Barden as the new Chief Executive Officer of AFGC.

Ms Barden will commence as CEO on 3 July 2017.

Chairman of the AFGC, Mr Terry O’Brien, congratulated Tanya on her appointment from a field of high calibre candidates.

“Tanya brings tremendous experience and proven success at senior executive levels in both the public and private sectors, with a career spanning the public service and business. Importantly, she also has experience with the $126 billion food and grocery sector, having worked as AFGC Director of Economics, Trade and Sustainability,” said Mr O’Brien.

“Ms Barden comes to the position with a strong background in competition, energy and economics policy and regulation having worked in various roles at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Subsequent to this she worked for energy retailer ActewAGL and ran her own on-line food retail business.

“Tanya has been at the forefront of AFGC’s advocacy on key areas of reform, particularly flagging to governments the need to commit to strong energy market reform to reduce the cost pressures caused by the spike in energy costs. She has also led the sector’s trade agenda having driven an ongoing focus to improve market access through the reduction of non-tariff barriers.

“In these government and corporate roles, Tanya has demonstrated a strong collaborative style and a great ability to think strategically, develop policy, campaign effectively and engage with business and government on a range of issues,” Mr O’Brien said.

“The AFGC Board and staff welcome Tanya to this exciting position. Members are very familiar with her outstanding contribution to the policy advocacy for the sector, and we very much look forward to her taking an expanded role from July.”

Mr O’Brien also paid tribute to the leadership provided by Acting Chief Executive Dr Geoffrey Annison.

“Geoffrey is a great asset to the AFGC with tremendous knowledge of our industry and commitment to its ongoing growth. The Board thanks him for providing steady leadership to the organisation until Tanya begins, and we are delighted that Geoffrey will continue as Deputy CEO beyond that date.”

This media release was sourced directly from AFGC and was written by James Mathews.