A TIME FOR CHANGE

After this lesson, you should be able to:

1. Describe the societal and technological changes that are occurring

2. Describe the modern workplace

3. Summarize the importance of an organization’s purpose and culture.

4. Explain why associations exist

5. Identify how diversity and inclusion can increase loyalty

6. Summarize engagement principles

7. Explain ways to increase engagement

The task below will be automatically checked off once you complete taking the quiz.

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“More is likely to change about our professional and personal lives in the coming years than will stay the same.”

The primary factors driving those changes:

Societal changes, such as dual-income households and a resounding generational transition
Technological changes as the key enabler for many advancements in our modern work and life

Learn how to adapt to society’s evolution by examining the changes occurring in the workplace. When we do, sketches of a deeply collaborative workplace begin to take shape, one in which individuals are put ahead of departments, worksheets are less rigid, companies are smaller and more specialized, and a well-articulated sense of purpose enables coherence and creativity to work in harmony across all levels.

What provides a substantial push to ask for more often comes from an organization’s unwillingness to give, to flex and work with the evolving needs of their member and staff base alike. Many organizations are still operating with old bylaws and internal structures, mindsets, and practices that fail to capitalize on the opportunities the modern world offers. They are hampered instead by routines that, while familiar and safe, offer very little flexibility to the process of ingenuity. Without the ability to innovate, adapting to change to secure stability and growth is a futile effort.

For associations, engagement is about monitoring the all-important recruitment and retention equation. Conference attendance, online forum activity, social media followers and web traffic all help gauge member engagement. But they don’t necessarily correlate to renewals, new memberships or advancement of the underlying mission. Associations require a more thorough investigation into why and how members engage with them, as well as defined goals around what they hope to achieve from that engagement.

Answer these questions:

1. What are your members curious about?

2. What activities are they most interested in?

3. What types of products, services or information do they desire most, and why?

4. Where do they go most often for these products, services, and information?

5. What problems are they most concerned by?

ELEMENTS FOR EMBRACING CHANGE

The following descriptions are introductory in nature; you’ll learn more about each element as you progress through the course.

Click each topic to learn more.

Purpose

Our values and sense of purpose form the tolls we need to navigate the vast number of uncertainties we now encounter every day. A UNIQUE set of Core Values and a MEANINGFUL Core Purpose forms the basis of the Open Garden Model for healthy organization cultures to discover durable solutions to the problems we face as a faster moving, faster-thinking, better-connected global society.

Without a good idea of where we are and how we got here, it’s going to be much harder to prepare for where we may end up.

For associations with recruitment and retention problems, the most common problem is failure to establish and easily articulate a Purpose and culture that enables people to connect with the work they accomplish.

For associations to succeed in the expanding global market-place, they first need to thoroughly understand both themselves and the needs/wants of their current and prospective members, to think about their audience beyond current members.

Values

Associations often struggle to loosen the fixed structures of their past to adapt their values and purpose to an ever-evolving present, subsequently losing touch with the members they want to keep and attract. Organizations have begun prioritizing values like respect and trust in increasing numbers and, like all values, they should be clear in membership outreach as well as internal and external messages to management, members, clients, and staff; every communication should resonate the same message. Using generic values (like respect and trust) doesn’t leave a lasting impression or help people understand you.

Organizations that succeed in making their UNIQUE values central to their cultural identity gain a significant engagement advantage among today’s audiences, transforming customers and employees into members, and members into proud advocates.

Culture

Central to growth is the organizational CULTURE, which influences recruitment, engagement, and retention. People want to feel as though they really know an organization, and they want to see if the organization knows them, too. Their answer lies in how well an organization caters to the needs and wants of their lifestyle, even as it changes quickly. The benefit is culture is a constant within the organization, spanning changes in strategy, environment and everything else.

For an organizational culture that draws top talent and loyal members, you must first determine the association’s own VALUES and PURPOSE in accordance with the kind of people you want to attract. That set of Values and sense of Purpose need to be clear in all the organization’s messaging to coherently define and reinforce the organization’s identity.

Information and Connectivity

Associations of all kinds really exist to provide just two things: INFORMATION and CONNECTIVITY.

Because of technology, we have more choices and greater access to knowledge than any other time in history. The knowledge gained is transferred as information allowing associations to offer members relevant content, as well as provide access to training, conferences, and education.

On the connectivity side, associations provide a conduit for connecting people within a specific field of interest. Social networking tools like LinkedIn and Facebook usually have negative effects on associations in terms of both overall membership and engagement. It’s one-way technology has created competitive displacement in social and professional networking, which associations often rely on for membership incentives.

Diversity & Inclusion

The world we live in is better connected with a global, massively diverse audience. To maximize opportunity while best serving our purpose on a global level, Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) must be a central part of our strategy.

Leadership benefits by recognizing their staff and members have different work and life circumstances today, whether it’s kids, elderly parents or even a personal hobby like marathon running. By knowing your staff and members more thoroughly, you can better meet them where their interests, needs/wants, sense of purpose and skills intersect with the organization’s.

D&I allows everyone to participate and share their voice in equal and open ways, regardless of the unique aspects of their individual background and way of life. The hidden benefit of a well-thought-out and executed D&I strategy is Diversity of Thought.

Diversity of Thought is the “killer app” of the D&I movement. Think of D&I in all its forms — race, gender, religion, lifestyle preferences and so on — to be the platform for the way an organization must operate. The outcome, or “app” that D&I produces, if done well, is an incredibly diverse set of ideas. If you foster this in a true way and are not simply checking the box when it comes to your D&I approach, you’ll find new ideas come at you faster than ever before.

Membership

When it comes to membership-based business overall, Americans appear to care about loser commitments, as evidenced by the recent surge in short-term subscription services (such as Netflix, Dropbox, Spotify and others that one in 10 millennials currently spend about $200 per month on), and brand organizations that cater to a specific lifestyle, such as REI, Blue Apron or even Apple and Nike.

The key idea here is flexibility needs to come first. These days, commitment comes through habit rather than contract. Habit is built by repetition, and repetition only forms where the greatest ENGAGEMENT value lies.

ENGAGEMENT

Most people inside and outside your organization are passive; they want to read content, watch videos, possibly attend some training seminars and other events, but they will not cross into active engagement. As you can see from the graphic below, only 10% of members are actively engaged, leaving 90% as an opportunity to connect with.

The problem is that associations tend to focus on actively engaged members rather than trying to get the disengaged and passively engaged to engage more. If successful, they will convert to being active. The challenge for associations is most don’t have a good reason to frequently engage with their members. They are good at deeply engaging on an infrequent basis, but don’t often have enough content to reach their audience daily, weekly, or even monthly, in ways that the recipient wants. It takes about six months of intense work for an organization to form this habit through repetition. To be a voice people listen to regularly in a profession or field, you have to hook them, and that is what the frequency of engagement is partially responsible for doing.

Rules of Engagement

Increasing Engagement

Offering multiple ways to engage allows the casual and uncommitted member to easily start engaging while providing ways to bring those who have shown a repeated interest in your offerings closer to your organization.

Click each tab to learn steps to increase engagement.

Step 1: Know them

Step 2: Treat as individuals

To engage staff and members in the best way possible, you have to treat them as individuals to understand their needs; otherwise, the masses are probably going to hear about it. To keep up with the shifting mindset that such a loss of public perception has afforded, the way people interact with an organization must allow for more customization. In order to leverage their full engagement potential, management structures should be designed to incorporate the strengths and aid the weaknesses and working styles of their staff and members.

Step 3: Create habits

Engaging your audience through their emotional connection drives a desire to frequently interact, which also helps form habit — that key component to maximizing revenue generation with the individual and with their network of aligned friends and colleagues. Without the emotional connection forged through common purpose and values, individuals are rarely motivated to engage in this way.

Engaging members requires strong resources (e.g., exclusive studies, noted experts, relevant news content) capable of explaining what’s going on in the members’ fields of interest. The more valuable their membership is to them, the more frequently they will engage and form a habit.

Step 4: Forecast

With interests changing faster than ever today, it is harder to predict where your audience will want to engage even in the near future. For this reason, it is more critical than ever to find ways to interact with your audience frequently to gather real-time insights into the trending and likely future interests of the group. These improved insights allow associations to better plan blog content, conference sessions/speakers, planned publications and educational courses.

People are generally terrible at forecasting the future for themselves or others. This is why predictive intelligence technology is so important when looking ahead. By looking more at the behaviors of a member or user, an organization can use tools to predict their future interests more accurately than by looking at the rear-view mirror feedback that typically comes from survey results.

Above all, for any association to engage their members, they first have to know who their members are. That means leaders must learn a number of things about their members, such as their strengths, weaknesses, problems they face and what they need help with in order to connect with them.

Activities to apply this lesson’s concepts

Click each tab for the activity.

Define

Establish

Understand

Resource

CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING

See if you understand the concepts by completing the quiz. Click A Time for Change Quiz to begin.

A Time for Change Quiz

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