WHY ARE YOU HERE?

"Everyone in the association must ask themselves why the organization exists so often that the answer is engrained in every decision they make, large and small."

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

1. Describe the importance of Core Purpose

2. Determine if your association’s Core Purpose is emotionally meaningful

3. Explain the consequences of having a risk-averse culture

4. Describe today’s membership culture

5. Describe ways to increase engagement

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

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CORE PURPOSE

To move an organization forward, everyone must understand and believe in the organization’s fundamental (and ideological) purpose, which we’ll call Core Purpose.

Download your Open Garden Core Purpose Worksheet to help you discover your own organization's Core Purpose.

Core Purpose...

is a navigational device against which EVERY choice should be measured
tells everyone, inside and outside the organization, WHY they are there
tells everyone why they should care about the organization’s work, offering to them something BIGGER than themselves
it shouldn’t just explain an organization’s particular function or goals; it should inspire them
informs EVERYTHING the organization does, from the high-level planning to the seemingly mundane tasks at the entry-level
provides the ANSWER to every dilemma people may face, whether as an individual or as an organization.

Test It

Your Core Purpose needs to be an emotionally meaningful idea to people who are both outside and inside your organization.

Test how emotionally meaningful your Core Purpose is by asking a few simple questions first:

If your organization disappeared tomorrow, who would miss it? Put another way, does your "why" matter to anyone outside your immediate orbit?

2. Ask people outside your organization, "What emotions do you feel when you hear our stated purpose? What does it mean to you?

To meaningfully advance, we must be willing to embrace failure as a way to learn and improve.

No organization desires failure, but the most successful ones are willing to take risks, absorb, learn from failures and then drive hard to a better long term result.

If short term success is demanded at all times and failure is viewed as toxic, then the team is going to do the things they know are unlikely to fail, and that causes you to repeat the past rather than look to the future.

CULTURE

The culture of associations, in general, needs to embrace a willingness to experiment, fail and learn from failure. If your organization is risk-averse, often you will be discouraging members and staff from taking risks, trying new things, listening to new ideas and pushing the organization and its work toward better.

Success often breeds contentment, which makes it harder to seek higher levels of success.

Some organizations are so risk-averse they create more risk to themselves by analyzing every decision for a very long time. Rather than making small, incremental changes, testing them out and seeing what happens, they theorize changes until it’s too late to make them or are no longer unique, innovative or as impactful.

Click each tab to learn how to have a risk-taking culture.

Willingness to fail

Experimentation

Encourage innovation by taking small, measured risks when trying new ideas first. Measure the outcome, and then iterate until you achieve the desired results.

Experimentation is required to drive change because it forces you out of your comfort zone and into your growth zone. It forces you to try things that are different from what you have done before and to examine the incremental change.

But before anyone can feel comfortable taking risks and experimenting with ideas, they have to know that it’s safe for them to fail. This demands an organization prioritize strategies meant to cultivate vulnerability in their staff and members because an experimentation culture without vulnerability doesn’t lead to true introspection and learning. Building such a culture must start from the top. To expect people throughout an organization to show their vulnerability when the top leaders are deemed infallible is unrealistic.

Learn

In an environment where people feel comfortable talking about their failures and showing their vulnerability to risk, a feedback loop opens up that makes experimentation useful.

If you’re not willing to be vulnerable and encourage others to experiment, then people are going to search for theoretical success rather than trying to figure out what’s actually happening. The trick is that when you fail, you fail in the pursuit of something good, and you fail differently than how you might have failed before.

All that’s important is people learn from failure and share that knowledge with others. The hope is the next time they or their colleagues fail, they don’t fail the same way. You don’t want to encourage failure the same way over and over, nor do you want failure to be for lack of effort or insight; you want to encourage trying something new that advances your goals, and if it fails from time to time, that’s not only okay but something you should consider a win.

It’s a win because you learned something new that makes you smarter, faster and more agile.

How to implement experimentation

1. Identify what you have influence over.

2. Think about how you can affect change through whatever influence your role affords. There is much more power in the day-to-day folks and the things they do if they think about them the right way. It’s the people on the ground who control the culture of an organization, the figurative sails of the ship.

3. Complete low-cost, low-risk, low-distraction experiments first to determine which ideas will hit the mark and which ones won’t.

4. Once an experiment is successful, allocate more resources to implement the change.

Extrapolating small, successful ideas into huge hits has a much greater impact than does innovation for the sake of innovating.

MEMBERSHIP AND ENGAGEMENT

It’s time to move beyond thinking of just “members” and “non-members.”

Download your Open Garden Worksheet for rethinking your audience.

Click each tab to learn more.

Membership

Associations often think selling a membership is the first thing you do with someone. Doing it later is a key strategy to embrace in today’s marketplace. Don’t try too aggressively to sell someone on the benefits of joining. Rather, let the process go naturally, and the benefits will sell memberships themselves.

Today’s membership consumers desire a more casual relationship, meaning associations — much like Amazon — are better off engaging with a broader audience earlier on and letting memberships sell themselves down the road.

This is a large part of what the Open Garden Model is all about: letting people into the organization so they can better see the value of the organization’s work and how members contribute outside its borders firsthand.

Some people may choose to become members because of their experience, and others may never become members. Either way, a larger audience will have greater revenue potential and impact on achieving the organization’s Core Purpose.

The key is to create an experience that non-members value, and then build membership pricing around it. The added benefits of membership can then serve as purchase incentives, but often the intangible benefit of wanting to belong will cause people to join after they’ve gained more insight into and respect for the organization as a non-member.

Engagement

The key is to know how members want you to interact with them and be able to adjust your approach individually. Most associations understand the structure of the organization centers on volunteers, followed by members.

What many associations fail to see, however, is the potential financial benefits of including three other key groups in their marketing and events planning strategies:

People who are interested in or contribute to the association’s work but are not interested in memberships.
People who are part of a related field but don’t align with joining the association as a member.
The general public, who are not likely to become members, but may be interested in resources the association can provide.

If you’re not tuned into the entire structure of getting people to do something simple with you, they’re far less likely to do anything at all with you.

TYING BACK TO PURPOSE

Your organization’s purpose doesn’t just permeate everything your organization does internally; it lays the groundwork for how you communicate with the people inside and outside your organization, quietly setting the stage for what ultimately happens when you do engage with them.

If you have a purpose that’s all about getting people to enter the walled garden, which is membership models, then it becomes a lot harder to think of ways to engage people outside that wall. The purpose you assign yourself or others is the same that’s inevitably given as the reason people should join. In other words, it sets the tone for the relationship even before it begins.

It sends subliminal messages through every interaction you have with your audience, i.e. website design, the association’s media content, interpersonal communications with the staff, who you book for events.

Purpose is alive 24/7/365. It is present at every point of contact an organization has with staff, members and non-members. With that much presence and influence, your ability to hone in on the simplest, most inspiring and thought-provoking focus will determine your chances for successful growth more than anything else. It’s the proverbial foundation of your organization’s staff, leadership, member base, and content.

In other words, without a purpose, there is nothing.

Activities to apply this lesson’s concepts

Click each tab for the activity.

Purpose

Why?

Recruit

Identify

Answer

To implement change

Click each tab.

Be vulnerable

Experiment

Prioritize

Diversify sources

Start small

CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING

See if you understand the concepts by completing the quiz. Click Why are You Here? Quiz to begin.

Why are You Here? Quiz

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