Category: personal reflections

Velvet Rope or Come Party with Me?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Velvet Rope or Come Party with Me?
group of people at a Holi celebration throwing gulal

Scene one: I’m in New Orleans on vacation wandering down Frenchmen Street in Faubourg Marigny looking for a good place to hang out and hear some tunes on a Wednesday night. First stop: the Spotted Cat.  It was so packed I couldn’t get in the door (literally), so I hung out on the sidewalk with a WIDE mix of characters (and nobody does “characters” like NOLA) for a while enjoying the music wafting out…for free. At the band break, I decided to move on, and down the street, I heard the sweet strains of Shamarr Allen’s trumpet pouring out of Cafe Negril. There was a short line, as the guy at the door struggled to keep up making change for the $5 cover when everyone kept handing him $20s. When I got inside, the crowd ranged from middle aged and older white people to hipsters from the neighborhood to a “professional hugger” from Austin (Keep Austin Weird!) – all ages, all races, all styles of dress, everyone just hanging out and grooving to the Underdawgs. Vibe? Awesomesauce, even before the generous pour, reasonably priced cocktails.

Scene two: One of my spouse’s co-workers moonlights as a DJ in DC. He was spinning at a chi-chi lounge on a recent Saturday night, and we thought we’d swing by and see him. So we roll up only to spot a velvet rope, two scowling bouncers, and a LONG line. Vibe?  B-A-D BAD.  And totally unwelcoming.  And definitely *not* groovy.

So what’s the connection to associations?

  • What does your organization look like to an outsider?  Not someone on staff, not someone who’ s been a member for a million years, not someone who’s served on your Board – someone who doesn’t know you at all but might be interested in what you provide?
  • Are you welcoming to everyone or only to the “right” people?
  • Do you make it easy for people to get access to what they want and need, even if they aren’t an “insider”?
  • Do you let people participate at the level they want to, even if that’s the equivalent of standing on the banquette outside the club just grooving to the great tunes for free?
  • What’s your barrier to entry?
  • What’s your association’s reputation in your industry, profession, or community?
  • Are you affordable to people of lesser means or lower professional stature who might benefit from what you offer?

In short: Are you groovy or snooty?

Photo by Adam Whitlock on Unsplash

Focus in a Distracted Era

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Two people sitting next to each other on a bench in a lovely nature setting, both looking at their phones

I recently had the opportunity to attend my first Prometheus Retreat (more on that in a minute), and it got me thinking about the concepts of connection, distraction, unplugging, and focus, issues I’ve written about here before.

Twenty association executives (CEOs and EDs, AMC leaders, and consultants) gathered at a lovely resort in Pennsylvania to ponder some Big Issues together: AI, DEI, nurturing the next generation of association leaders, the role of voluntary membership associations in an increasingly polarized society, and, of course, boards boards boards.

At our closing circle, one of the other newbies mentioned that an experienced Promethian had, upon seeing her take out her phone to respond to email early in the retreat, advised her to put it away. My fellow newbie expressed her deep gratitude for that advice, which she chose to follow and which she felt dramatically improved her experience.

As I wrote back in 2009:

The thing about being “on” all the time is that it can seriously interfere both with our actual face-to-face relationships (and our ability to form and nurture them) and with our ability to really *think* about stuff. We’re not multitasking mavens – we’re just distracted…all the time.

“Connection” is ubiquitous today. We all always have a tiny super computer in our pockets that lures us with games and amusing (or infuriating) videos and the infinite scroll of social media platforms and “I’ll just take 30 seconds to answer this email right now and get it off my plate.”

But that doesn’t come without a cost. We’ve all seen – or been – the distracted spouse, parent, friend scrolling our phones rather than paying attention to the person in front of us. We’ve all experienced the Pavlovian response to the new email notification that “is just going to take 30 seconds” and yet interrupts our focus on whatever it was we were doing before it arrived for FAR LONGER than 30 seconds – that “switch tasking” (a more accurate descriptor than “multi-tasking”) can consume as much as 40% of your productive time.

How do we ensure that all this wonderful tech serves us rather than the other way around?

Some of the practices I follow include:

  • Turning off nearly all notifications on both my computer and my smart phone
  • Using time blocking for tasks that I know will require significant uninterrupted focus
  • Confining work, to the greatest degree possible, to my actual physical home office (I am fortunate to have a dedicated room)
  • Not keeping my phone on me at all times (a privilege of not having school-aged children)
  • Resisting the siren song of false urgency (just because someone wants something right this second does not necessarily mean that they need it right this second, aka “A lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.”
  • Identifying a few trips each year where I am NOT working (and letting clients, partners, and my various volunteer gigs know that WELL in advance)

What practices have you found to be helpful in preserving your ability to focus in a distracted era?

Photo by Gigi on Unsplash

Becoming a Leader

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Scrabble board spelling out Lead, Team and Succeed

There’s plenty of advice on what it takes to be a good leader, but in my own experience, it doesn’t matter how curious or analytical or resilient you are if people don’t trust you enough to follow you. How do you make yourself worthy of that trust?

1. Praise in public, correct in private.

This encompasses a number of things:

  • Catch your people doing good stuff.
  • Make sure the people “above” you know when the people “below” you think of or do something great.
  • Remember that good ideas can come from anywhere.
  • There’s no such thing as too much praise.
  • Saying thank you is free.
  • Make sure your people know that you have their backs.
  • Be generous – GENEROUS – sharing credit.

2. Be willing to take risks.

Refusing to make a decision IS a decision. The only decision you’ll ever make in life that you can’t change later is the decision to have kids. Whatever you’re considering is probably not *that* serious.

Ask yourself, “What’s the worst thing that could happen if we do this?”AND “What’s the worst thing that could happen if we DON’T do this?”

3. Behave with integrity.

People have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can trust you. That doesn’t mean you’re never going to screw up. But when you do, own it and FIX IT.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Of Crowdsourcing and Cassandras

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Of Crowdsourcing and Cassandras
different people's hands on a tree trunk representing working together to accomplish a shared goal

Reupping this post I wrote back in 2009 about crowdsourcing, because my larger point is, I think, even more relevant in 2024.

Jeff Howe, who is credited with coining the term “Crowdsourcing,” was the opening keynoter at the 2009 ASAE Technology Conference, where he mad the point that no matter how smart the people around you are, most of the smartest people work somewhere else.

Crowdsourcing, he went on to explain is a result of:

the perfect storm of the amateur renaissance, the open source revolution, democratization of production, and the rise of online community.

As I wrote at the time:

AND THAT’S ALL LOVELY, really it is. And it’s happening whether we want it to or not, in our new world where the locus of community is less about geography or biological relationship than it is about affinity. And most people have a desire to create something. But I have to wonder: What about the people who lose not only their jobs, but their careers? 

Eventually you’re the last guy making buggy whips and then the industry folds because no one needs buggy whips anymore.

At the time, I was worried that Howe had no answer, which then – and now – seems to me to be the crux of the matter: There are some highly technical skills that probably can’t be crowdsourced. But if there’s always someone willing to do what I do for free, then what?

In an era of gig work and generative AI, this only seems more pressing.

On the gig work front, there are multiple problems. Most significantly, the workers themselves are often exploited, with no OSHA protections or wage guarantees. But also, have you noticed that your rideshares are a LOT more expensive lately? Because the model may always have been to push the cab companies out of business by offering the service WAY below actual cost and then, once cab companies were disempowered and consumers were accustomed to summoning rides via an app rather than a raised arm or whistle, to jack up the price. Which revenue, may I remind you, is NOT necessarily going to the workers. “Disruption” at work, and it may be coming for the profession or industry your association serves, particularly with the rise of generative AI.

Speaking of, those services are ALSO being offered below cost – even, in many cases, for free. And we’re starting to see professions being disrupted – copy writers, technical writers, bookkeepers, data analysts, paralegals (Pew has done a VERY detailed analysis of professions, and the demographics of the people in them, most at risk). What happens when you’ve fired all your marketing coordinators because you can get ChatGPT to do that work for you for free? One, something tells me ChatGPT will no longer BE free. Also, what’s then the on-ramp for becoming tomorrow’s Chief Marketing Officer?

I don’t have any answers either, but I think it’s a conversation that needs to be engaged.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Ask Better Questions

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Definition of charente from Dictionary.com: a meeting in which all stakeholder in a project attempt to resolve conflicts and map solutions

I recently had the opportunity to participate in Association Charrette, a project of Vista Cova, facilitated by Lowell Apelbaum. Most commonly used in design focused industries (architecture, urban planning, landscaping), charrettes

“…serve as a way of quickly generating a design solution while integrating the aptitudes and interests of a diverse group of people. The general idea of a charrette is to create an innovative atmosphere in which a diverse group of stakeholders can collaborate to ‘generate visions for the future’.” (Wikipedia)

In its Association Charrette form, it’s kind of a cross between an un-conference and a retreat. The community of roughly 20 association professionals that forms for the event chooses the topics, and, as Lowell constructs it, the goal is not to solve the problems, but to frame the issues through multiple rounds of extended questioning. Which, as you might imagine, can be a bit frustrating for people who are generally paid to identify and solve problems, but it’s a useful exercise to undergo, to suspend the need for an answer and just stay with the process of questioning for an entire weekend. Also, as Lowell observed, the first questions you ask are often not the most insightful ones – it takes time to get beyond the obvious questions and get to those that will inspire new ways of thinking.

The issues this particular Charrette community chose:

  • Trust, within the context of the well-documented loss of trust in institutions and expertise, and how that might impact associations
  • Community and belonging, and associations’ role (or not!) in creating them
  • Structure
  • Emerging tech, particularly AI (in light of the recent advances demonstrated by ChatGPT and the attention being paid to them)

Again, the point wasn’t to try to answer or solve or fix any of these things, but to think through the kinds of questions we need to be considering as an industry as these forces impact us, our members, their customers, and the professions or industries we serve.

One thing that was new since the last time I was able to participate in Charrette was a “Mastermind group-lite” session on Saturday night. Each participant had the opportunity to submit a vexing problem (professional or personal) that was affecting her individually (NOT her organization) and then get 15 minutes to be the focus of the attention and ideas of four other participants.

If you’ve not had the opportunity to be a part of a Mastermind group, I highly recommend it. When I first launched Spark more than ten years ago, I was fortunate to be invited to participate in a Mastermind group, and it was invaluable.

What is a Mastermind group? It’s a group of 4-6 people who provide peer mentoring to each other about whatever the group forms to address. (In our case, it was how to be successful as a solo woman consultant in the association industry, but it can be about anything you want to learn or improve.)

You commit to meeting with each other regularly, and in each meeting, each participant “checks in,” and then the bulk of the meeting is focused on one person and her challenges (where obviously, you rotate who is the focus). The other participants provide concrete, actionable advice based on their experience.

It requires vulnerability – if you just want to pretend that everything is AWESOME all the time, Mastermind is not for you – the ability to take in advice that might challenge you or make you uncomfortable, the willingness to act on that advice and report back honestly about what happened, and the generosity to be the giver of advice and focused attention (rather than the receiver) next time around.

Top Ten

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Red running track with white lane markers counting up from 1

All in one post/place!

10. Five Tips for Success with Ad Hoc Volunteers

Original Post (2014)

Updated Post (2022)

9. Why Is Membership the Only Relationship?

Original Post (2013)

Updated Post (2022)

8. Membership 101: Effective Renewal Cycles

Original Post (2018)

Updated Post (2022)

7. Membership 101: Exit Surveys

Original Post (2018)

Updated Post (2022)

6. Explaining Marketing to a Kid 

Original Post (2014)

Updated Post (2022)

5. Ten Tips for Creating an Effective Marketing Piece 

Original Post (2013)

Updated Post (2022)

4. Five Ways NOT to Brainstorm

Original Post (2014)

Updated Post (2022)

3. Getting the Most Out of Your Consulting Partnerships

Original Post (2013)

Updated Post (2022)

2. Strategic Planning v. Strategic Thinking

Original Post (2013)

Updated Post (2022)

1. Membership 101: The Welcome Series

Original Post (2017)

Updated Post (2022)

What did we learn?

A lot of my original posts held up pretty well – that’s probably why they’re in the top ten, because ten years later, they’re still relevant – and, experience being a good guide, I was able to bring some additional nuance to some of them.

Thanks for coming along on this ride with me, both in the narrow sense, as I revisited these posts, and in the larger sense, as I’ve gone through the adventure that is running my own consulting business to the association industry these last ten years.

Photo by Charlie Wollborg on Unsplash

1: Membership 101: The Welcome Series

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on 1: Membership 101: The Welcome Series
Welcome in bright rainbow colors

And finally, coming in at #1 in the Spark All-Time Top 10 Blog Posts (and it wasn’t even close): Membership 101: The Welcome Series.

First written more than five years ago, this post remains the first or second most visited page on my entire website month after month (thanks, Google Analytics!).

Once again, I’m finding that the advice I provided, gleaned both from my own years as a membership director and my time working with clients, holds up: Create a drip campaign, mix your methods, keep it personal, focus on building a (hopefully long-term) relationship, and make sure you have calls to action to respond to and then pay attention to those responses.

In the interim, the lovely folks at Kaiser Insights and Dynamic Benchmarking have come out with two reports (one from 2018, and an update just released this fall) with data that backs up a lot of this advice, while also sharing some good practice metrics that my clients have found useful, such as:

  • 3-3-6 pacing: three communications in the first week, one a week for the remaining three weeks of the first month, then one a month for the next six months
  • 3-5 tactics: associations CAN use all kinds of tactics and platforms to communicate with (new and loyal) members, but you should probably stick with 3-5 so as not to spread your marcom team too thin, so you can develop expertise, and so your members know where to look for you

In fact, Amanda Kaiser just hosted a “launch party” for the updated study earlier this week, with Matchbox Virtual Media hosting many of the artifacts of that event.

As I’m thinking about how things have changed since the original post – and how they haven’t – I’m particularly intrigued by the responses to the “challenge questions” from the launch party (you’ll need to log into the Matchbox platform to get access to the Jamboards with the responses).

One of the biggest things that’s STILL holding associations back with regards to connecting with our newest members is: Most associations offer LOTS of benefits, but most members join for only a few of them.

The problem is, how do you learn which benefits any given member needs to help her solve her most important problems and achieve her biggest goals? 

Which gets back to my advice in the original post. You can do a great job creating a multi-channel drip campaign that shares your benefits (NOT features) one at a time and doesn’t ask your new member to spend more money too early, BUT if you aren’t paying attention to what happens next, you’ll never answer that important problems/biggest goals question, which means your new members will never get past that “awkward newbie” stage and connect both with the solutions your association provides and with the community of people you’ve gathered together (aka “the rest of your members”) that creates the magic that keeps them coming back year after year.

So yeah, you have to do the hard, unglamorous work of looking at your data periodically to see what messages on what platforms are resonating and with whom, and what actions are being taken and by whom, and then use that information to inform your next steps in relationship-building.

Or, as I closed out the original post:

[A]ctually develop an actual relationship as if you’re an actual person and so is she. Then, when that renewal invoice does arrive, her decision will be an easy one, and you’ll have a successful renewal.

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

3: Getting the Most Out of Your Consulting Partnerships

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
two women sitting in front of a computer monitor working together in an open office

Coming in at Number Three in the all-time Top 10 Spark blog posts: Getting the Most Out of Your Consulting Partnerships. (And it garnered a lot of pingbacks, which is probably one of the reasons it’s so high on the list.)

The original post was written about a year into the Spark journey.

So how did I already have a perspective on effective consulting partnerships?

Well, aside from having worked with consultants in my 13 years as an association exec before launching Spark, I’d also had the opportunity to do two years of consulting (one for a big firm, one for a small firm) before launching. (That turned out to have been seriously helpful when I did launch, as then I didn’t have to try to learn how to consult AND how to run a small business at the same time. But that’s a different post.)

I think my opening question: “Hire a consultant, or…?” is still a good one. Association execs do have lots of options: hiring or training staff, outsourcing, relying on member volunteers. Consultants are, I think, mostly useful for bringing an experienced, outsider strategic perspective in situations where you don’t need access to that type of expertise all the time.

The rest of the advice in the post remains solid, too, I think.

In the past decade, I have, however, noticed some things that can really cause a consulting relationship to go sideways:

  • Lack of agreement on the problem we’re trying to solve. Getting clarity on this is a shared responsibility that requires a willingness on both sides to be open and honest about what’s really going on at the association. If the client’s staff hides unflattering information from the consultant or the consultant is afraid to tell the client what she really thinks, everyone’s going to be working at cross-purposes and there will be a LOT of misunderstandings. And then no one ends up happy.
  • Lack of buy-in from staff and/or volunteer leadership. I’m thinking of a particular project where a VP hired me and then promptly quit – his last day on staff was the day of our project kickoff meeting. That left our project without an executive-level sponsor. The project team and I worked really hard for months, and it all turned out to be for nothing, as we discovered as we were delivering our recommendations that the CEO was never in favor of the project in the first place. Not good.
  • Negative organizational culture. The committee chairs are angry with the board. The board doesn’t trust the executive director. The staff is mad at the affiliate leaders or vice versa. Different departments maliciously conceal information from each other. There’s no agreement about organizational priorities. People don’t trust each other or communicate well internally. Everyone’s attitude is on a downward spiral, and everyone’s trying to sabotage their perceived enemies. The consultant ends up rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg. Yikes.
  • Unrealistic expectations. “We’d like you to triple our membership in six months or less. And we’d like a guarantee of success. And we have a budget of about $5,000.” Again, expectation setting is a shared responsibility and should happen early in the process – like during the proposal or, at the latest, at the kickoff meeting. But if what you’re asking for sounds crazy, it probably is.

It’s important for association execs to remember that consultants don’t just want you to pay us for our expertise (although of course we do want that), we want to help you with your problems and for you to be happy with the results. We want to come up with solutions for you that you can actually implement and that work. Don’t treat us as adversaries – we’re not. Most of us have, at one point or another in our careers, been in your shoes. We empathize, but we also have perspective. Take advantage of that.

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

4: Five Ways NOT to Brainstorm

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Cartoon from The Oatmeal - one person holding another person horizontally and yelling "WHOOSH!"

The 4th most popular blog post on the all-time top ten list is an unexpected entry: Five Ways NOT to Brainstorm.

Written almost exactly eight years ago, it was intended to be funny and a little silly – mostly.

I had read a couple of articles in Fast Company and the New Yorker about the perhaps counter-intuitive reality that brainstorming is rarely productive, which I found ironic.

Brainstorming was originated in the 1940s by a “Mad Men” era exec at BBDO, one of the big Madison Avenue advertising firms. The basic concept was that being too critical early on stifles creativity, so get a bunch of people together, suspend judgement, and watch the ideas flow. (The New Yorker article goes into a lot more detail about this history.)

Sounds plausible, but it turns out not to be true.

As the Fast Company article reports, further social science experiments indicate that it’s group dynamics more than criticism that stifles creative thinking.

Which group dynamics? Well, if you’ve were ever assigned a team project during your formative years, you know the answer: The forces that encourage everyone to sit back and assume someone else will do all the work. (Unless you’re the one who was always the “someone” in the group, in which case, we should meet for coffee sometime because I think we’d have a lot in common.)

In fact, criticism can actually help produce more ideas in the form of solutions as the group gets more clear about what problem it is they’re trying to solve exactly. As Fast Company advises:

…the fact is that people are usually better at finding fault than they are at finding answers. Properly harnessed, that could be a good thing.

Or, as the New Yorker article puts it:

In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives.

Interestingly, as we’re all contemplating issues related to where we work as the pandemic emergency transitions into an endemic problem we’ll have to learn to manage, physical proximity appears to matter, in everything from the “best” scientific research (measured by number of citations) to the famed MIT Rad Lab to making “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles.”

Again quoting the New Yorker:

The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.

But it’s equally important not to just throw people together in the interest of “team input theater,” where, per Scott Berkun, a bad manager:

holds a stiff and awkward meeting, some stuff is written down, a few smiles are exchanged, and then: nothing happens. (emphasis added)

And that’s actually a key point: follow up. Once you have all those ideas – good, bad, indifferent, WTF?, whatever – DO SOMETHING WITH THEM. The boss (maybe that’s you) needs to assign someone to weed through them and then assign tasks back out to the group. Otherwise, you’re just wasting everyone’s time.

And in the spirit of the original post, LONG LIVE GARBAGE FONDUE FOUNTAINS! (Be warned: If you follow that link to The Oatmeal, the language is definitely R-rated. But you should check it out, as it’s the source of the great image that heads this post, which is part of a funny and profane take on the promises and perils of brainstorming by author and artist Matthew Inman.)

 

 

5: 10 Tips for Creating an Effective Marketing Piece

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Price Is Right-style spinner wheel stopped on the number ten

We’re at the midpoint of the Top 10 All-Time Spark blog posts, with #5: 10 Tips for Creating an Effective Marketing Piece.

The original piece was written in response to a conference presentation I’ve given a handful of times, where I ask participants to submit their marketing pieces ahead of time, I work with the sponsoring organization to mount them on foamboard and place them around the room on easels in advance, and then after sharing the 10 Tips, I hand the attendees markers and turn them loose to critique each others’ pieces.

At the end, we do a debrief and the people who were brave enough to offer their pieces up for commentary get to take them – and the other participants’ ideas and suggestions for improvement (and compliments!) – home.

It’s fun and energetic and, in addition to gaining a little knowledge, the participants also get to see a big library of marketing samples in person.

Looking back at the ten tips, I think it’s all still applicable.

If I had to reduce it to just a few things to keep top of mind, I would say that the best marketing pieces include a clear call to action and are sent as part of a multi-channel integrated campaign that maintains a consistent visual through-line.

Call to action: You have to have one, otherwise why are you bothering people and wasting your own time and money? And make sure the call to action is clear to people who don’t have insider knowledge about your association (so not just staff and your most dedicated volunteers).

Multi-channel campaign: With the pandemic, it’s become particularly tempting to switch all our marketing communications over to email – after all, who’s in the office these days? Thing is, even for associations, which have an unusually high email open (~36%) and click (~16%) rate (per Higher Logic’s 2018 State of Marketing Automation report), that’s still an AWFUL lot of people who AREN’T reading those emails. A few years ago, I was working with an association on a renewal campaign. Their renewal rate had dropped to about 65%. We obviously made a LOT of changes, but one of the most effective things we did was to resume sending a mail piece (which they’d previously stopped doing), in the form of a colorful postcard with a snappy member testimonial and a custom URL that led to a simplified renewal process. By the end of the campaign, the renewal rate for our key membership category (full rate professional members) topped 72%. Was it just the postcard? Of course not, but the postcard had a measurable impact on that improvement.

Visual through-line: You don’t want your members and other audiences to delete/ignore/immediately recycle without reading your lovely marketing pieces because they have no idea who it’s coming from. ‘Nuff said.

Oh – and be sure to proofread. I still remember that event marketing piece that had no information about the date, time, or location of the event. C’MON, MAN!

Photo by Krissia Cruz on Unsplash