Tag: Ben Martin

Great Ideas Volunteer Unsession Meme

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

It’s a meme-a-palooza up in here!

Peggy Hoffman has asked several of us to share our five favorite short-term volunteer gigs (aka, did not require committing to a committee for the remainder of your natural life).

This is actually harder than it sounds! But here goes:

  1. Greater DC Cares events. Their system for getting projects and marshalling large numbers of volunteers is really impressive.
  2. Facilitating Idea Swaps for the Greater Washington Network – always a good time.
  3. Writing Voices from Our Center, the radio program for the UVA Women’s Center, while I was in grad school.
  4. Getting invited to ASAE with a bunch of smarty-smart association people this past fall to brainstorm some ways to make this year’s annual meeting even more awesome. Hope you like what we came up with!
  5. The Flying Geezers. Once upon a time, I was an avid swing dancer. And everyone got really into competitions. BIG WEIGHTY IMPORTANT competitions. Well, a whole bunch of us decided that we liked performing, but didn’t really want to deal with CHOREOGRAPHY and VERY SERIOUS PRACTICES and all that crap. So we started a performance group that danced for senior citizens and school kids. The only requirement? Show up for some gigs in vintage ready to dance. Best times? Dancing at the Old Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home in DC a couple of times a year.

 

WOM meme: Consulting

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

I’ve recently been tagged by the geniuses behind SocialFish to participate the Word of Mouth meme on the topic of consulting.

So here’s the meme: Please do a short blog post with an example of how you’ve seen WOM used in your work. Then tag a couple of [association/non-profit] people to do the same.

To quote one of my colleagues at Beaconfire: “If it’s memorable, people will pass it on.”

Consulting – or anything you want to market in the association space for that matter – is all about WOM.

This is coming at a particularly interesting time, because Beaconfire is in the midst of re-examining our strategy for engagement with associations. We’ve always been happy to work with associations, when they’ve come to us. But we recruit staff based on: “Work for a company that’s helping organizations that save the cute, furry animals!” No offense (I worked there for years and loved it), but saving the political scientists? Not as exciting.

But a funny thing happened on the way to saving the cute, furry animals. We realized that, in some ways, associations are much lower drama clients to work with. And while we still want – and need – to do a certain amount of cute, furry animal saving, we’d also like to work with more no drama clients to keep everyone out of the Betty Ford clinic.

So, how does a consulting firm increase the work it does with associations?

You already know the answer: word of mouth.

Getting association business is ALL about relationship and reputation. Those things are built by being in the community, being known to the community, and doing such a fantastic job for members of the community that, when their friends call them up to ask, “Hey, we’re trying to get more strategic about our website and how we use the Internet to reach our members and other constituents. You know anyone good who can help us?” your company’s name is the first thing that pops into their heads.

The tough thing about charitable organizations is that they’re all after the same audience – people who are willing and able to give money to causes – and the same dollars. Because of that, not a whole lot of working together and information sharing. But in the association world, the market for the Association of Accountants does not overlap with the market for the Association of Podiatrists. Hence, collaboration. Information sharing. Community. Word of mouth.

Edited Wednesday, Feb 18 to add: JNott reminds me that I’m also supposed to talk about how consulting is:

Easy: as Vinay reminded me at lunch today, consultants need a niche. Consultants who are successful do something that can be easily summed up in a few words. Consultants who try to be generalists? Generally not so successful.

Sharable: establishing the reputation I talked about above involves sharing your expertise with the association community so that people come to view you as a trusted adviser (thanks for the term, George) rather than “just another vendor trying to sell me something.”

Interesting: well, hell, if you’re not doing good work that produces good results, no one will think what you’re doing is interesting enough to pass your name along when one of their friends calls them up to ask, “Do you know anybody who can do…?”

BloggerCon and BloggerUnCon

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 4 Comments on BloggerCon and BloggerUnCon

This year was my first BloggerCon. It was also the first year that BloggerCon was part of the official program. So it was kind of a mixed group: long time bloggers about associations like Jeff, Mads, BMart, and JNott (aka McLovin), new bloggers about associations like, well, your truly, and lots of people whose organizations are blogging or thinking about starting blogs about the profession, industry, or issue they represent. So it was a pretty mixed bag.

A few thoughts:

  • This session really demonstrated to me the importance of the social aspects of social media.
  • The typical question about moderating came up. Andy couldn’t be there, since he was giving his own session at that time, so I represented and brought up his/RIMS‘s practice of allowing members to self–moderate through “mark as inappropriate.” The truth about moderating is that pretty much any level of control from absolute to wild west free-for-all can be appropriate, as long as you’re consistent and have a reason for choosing what you choose. (But personally, I’m in favor of writing a strong disclaimer and then letting the chips fall where they may.)
  • I kind of feel like we should be past the “what is all this stuff?” questions at this point. But as was demonstrated in all the social media sessions (including many of the Social Media Labs), we’re not. Educate yourselves people!
  • Participants also asked if an organizational blog won’t result in diluting attention and interest in the organization’s other properties. And the answer is really no. Different audiences are going to want to get information in different formats. If you, as you should, think of at least 3 ways to use anything you write/produce, this is just one more method to get the word out. And it can provide nice cross-promotional opportunities.
  • Voice is key. (This came up in my Social Media Lab session, too.) Your CEO/ED doesn’t need a blog just to have a blog. Only start one if you can make the commitment to write frequently and authentically. Having your PR firm write pieces “from your CEO” is going to come off as fake. Sometimes it’s more useful to see what’s already out there – like maybe some fab member blogs on your profession or industry – and link to them rather than trying to force the creation of community where it doesn’t naturally exist.
  • And it’s OK to mix up format of your posts. It’s not the same as writing articles. Some posts can be be long, some can be short, some can be links, whatevs. They key is QUALITY CONTENT. If you can make it good, everything else is icing.

BloggerUnCon was a completely different experience. It wasn’t part of the official program, and it took place in the out-of-the-way CAE Lounge at the end of the program day on Monday. The information was only in the association blogosphere, too, so it was mostly the people doing the heavy lifting of association blogging. I definitely got the sense that this session was more like previous years’ BloggerCons.

Bob Wolfe kicked us off with a really great question: Why do we blog?

The answers were fascinating.

  • Ben talked about starting his blog to help him when he was studying for the CAE in 2004. Then he realized that he was helping other people, too, and just kept going. And helping people.
  • Matt spoke about how much he enjoyed hearing about other young association execs’ experiences and wanting to contribute to the conversation.
  • Jeff launched his blog as the original Principled Innovation website, after he’d been running the business for over a year, in order to “initiate the converation I wanted to have with the association community about innovation.”
  • Jamie indicated that blogs are better than resumes for getting a sense of who a person really is, as the cleverly named Get Me Jamie Notter would attest.
  • Bob himself pointed out that “thought leaders blog.”

In fact, several people mentioned the importance of blogging in creating a personal brand as an association professional and as a source of professional opportunity. It’s about creating a personal body of work.

Shifting employment patterns means that there are increasing opportunities for those thought leaders who work in or with associations to create and market personal expertise and a personal brand while still keeping their day jobs.

That was a huge driver for me in starting T4P. When I found out with 3 weeks notice that I was going to be laid off this spring, I considered – briefly – kicking off my own consulting firm. And I realized that I wasn’t known in the association community, at least not well enough to start consulting on my own without having to KILL myself to get clients. It was a real eye opener. (Also, I really, really love to write. And have for a long time.)

The conversation then shifted to the idea of voice, audience, and focus. What are you writing about and for whom? The participants had a variety of focuses (focii?) within the association space, but the common theme was the idea of the conversation, and participating in it.

We then drifted into a discussion of some of the technical details of the newly-launched A List Bloggers, in preparation for our plans for (association) world domination, before talking about what role we can – and should – play in convincing The Powers That Be of the power of social media.

The problem is, we aren’t where they are, and we’re not speaking with them in ways they understand. Which I think is a really valuable lesson in member engagement. You can’t expect people (CEOs/EDs or members) to come to you, and you can’t expect them to speak your language.

We have to learn to use terms that are meaningful to the people we want to convince – things like “engagement,” “community,” “collaboration,” and “attracting younger members.”

Even the medium of a Social Media Lab or socnet sessions may be the wrong way to go about this. What we need is to get social media experts on panel sessions about board relations and advocacy and creating vital educational experiences and recruiting and engaging members. Which is why every social media session ends up being a 101 session on “this is a blog, this a wiki, this is a social network” and it’s really, REALLY hard to focus the conversation on the “so what?” We have to get out of the social media ghetto and into the executive suites, the membership departments, the publications areas, the meetings teams.

As Ben put it, “It’s a simple calculation: engagement increases the likelihood of renewal. Renewal increases the likelihood of creating organizational evangelists. And virtual communities are an increasingly popular form of engagement.”

So I leave you with a question: what would your organization look like if your individual staff members didn’t focus specifically and exclusively on your journal, or getting out the renewal notices on time, or managing the membership database, or creating press releases, or your legislative fly in day, but instead worked as fluid team of engagement specialists on increasing engagement in your organization, your industry, your profession, for your entire universe of constituents? What would that world be like?