Features - June / July 2008

By Karen Brost

In the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella had it easy. All he had to do was build something and people would magically show up. While things may not be quite that simple for associations, there are still plenty of strategies association executives can employ to “hit one out of the park” when it comes to boosting membership, attendance and revenue.

Spreading The Word
“If an association wants to attract new members, it needs to be in the news,” stated Michael Hart, a Birmingham, AL-based speaker and consultant on publicity and free marketing strategies. “A lot of associations are under the impression that they don’t have a lot of hot breaking news,” he continued. “It’s not about hot breaking news. Business news is dealt with differently than the local car accident. It is an information-driven segment of the media community.” 

He advises association planners to build relationships with reporters on the local and/or national level. “The media is starved for information,” he said. “Any time an association meets, they need to notify the media. If they’re bringing in a speaker, that needs to be released to the media.”

Hart said that associations can also get media attention by announcing the organization’s stand on various social issues or by endorsing a presidential candidate. Or, they may offer their expertise on a specific subject. For example, in the aftermath of a major storm, a contractor’s association might submit an article to the media on how to avoid being scammed by unscrupulous repair people. This would help position the association as a reliable industry source.

“The association will get its name mentioned,” Hart stated. He cited why this is so important. “You will find that in membership-driven organizations, people get more excited, and they participate (in meetings) more frequently when they see that the associations they’re involved in are being active.”

Fine, But What’s In It For Me?
Ron Rosenberg, CSP, is president of QualityTalk Inc. and an expert on marketing and customer service who has presented numerous sessions on marketing strategies for ASAE and The Center. He advises association professionals to turn a critical eye to their marketing materials to see if they’re spending too much space highlighting features when they really need to be promoting benefits.

“You’ve got to understand what you’re presenting to your members,” he said. “Most associations do what I call the ‘feature puke.’ It’s just what it sounds like. It’s the bulleted list of everything they provide. Sometimes they go as far as to call them benefits, but they’re features.” He explained that most associations have a membership brochure that contains a laundry list of items such as conferences and events, networking opportunities, and a monthly magazine on legislative advocacy. What’s wrong with this picture?

“People don’t want conferences and events,” Rosenberg explained. “They want conferences and events that give them proven, cutting-edge strategies guaranteed to make them more money. People don’t want networking opportunities. To them that means they’re sitting at a table with some vendor who is trying to sell them stuff. What people really want is networking opportunities that will help them find the solutions to the problems that are keeping them awake nights while their competition moves in on their customers.”

Rosenberg used “legislative advocacy” as another example. “When people hear legislative advocacy, the image they paint in their mind is of their hard-earned dues going to take some senator out to have dinner at McCormick & Schmick’s when they’re having dinner at Arby’s that night. What they really want is legislative advocacy that keeps the government from reaching into their bank account and stealing their hard-earned money. Features are about you, benefits are about the members. It’s really that simple.”

Fewer Blues Mean More Green
Rosenberg suggested a simple exercise called “blue marker/yellow marker” that an association can use to measure the effectiveness of its marketing materials.

He explained, “Anything that’s about you, such as how many years of experience your staff has, how wonderful your conference is, or the great locations you go to, you highlight in blue. Anything that’s about the member, such as what the membership or activity is going to do for her, how it will make her life easier, help her grow her business, or let her go buy her Porsche or take a trip to the islands, you highlight in yellow. The dominant color on most of these brochures is going to be blue. The strategy here is that when you turn blue to yellow, then yellow turns to green.

“People will say, we’re non-profit, it’s not about the money,” he added. “But if you don’t have money, you can’t book the good speakers. If you don’t have money, you can’t hire the good lobbyist. If you don’t have money, you can’t provide the good educational materials. You may be organized as a non-profit, but make no mistake, it’s all about money because otherwise you can’t provide benefits to your members.”

The Money-back Guarantee
Jim Edwards, CAE, ARM is executive director of the Carolinas Independent Automotive Dealers Association (CIADA) based in Harrisburg, NC. His organization has taken many of Rosenberg’s suggestions to heart.

“One of the things that Ron is a big advocate of is the notion of a money-back guarantee,” he commented. “The way to make whatever product or service an association has to offer more powerful is to include a money-back guarantee with no strings attached.

“We use that, for example, when we do dealer education seminars, which is really our sweet spot,” he continued. “We offer the money-back guarantee to everyone, but if I can tell that someone is not particularly enthused about being there, I will walk in front of that individual so he or she knows I’m delivering that message right to them. I simply tell them, ‘If at the end of this seminar you feel as though you didn’t learn

The Rotaract Club of Birmingham, AL, gained the side benefit of increased membership through its well-publicized gala, which raises funds to buy books for Birmingham City Schools. Photo by Daniel Arciniegas

anything useful or you didn’t learn anything that you didn’t know before you came in here, I’ll give you every copper penny back.’ I find that to be extremely powerful. After many, many years of doing this, I have yet to have anyone ask for their money back.

“Likewise,” he added, “when recruiting new members we’ll give them a fairly substantive discount if they’ll join for two years instead of one. But if at the end of the two years they tell me they’ve received no value or at least insufficient value to equal their investment in the membership for the two years, we’ll refund their money, no questions asked. For them, it’s a zero-risk undertaking.”

Giving Members What They Want
Edwards explained that he believes there are three main reasons individuals join an association. “For some people, they view membership in their profession or trade association as their credential. If they get nothing more than that from their membership, that’s perfectly fine with them.

“Then, you’ve got another group that wants a tangible value added,” he continued. “They say, ‘If I spend ‘X’ number of dollars for membership, can I look at my return on investment from a purely financial standpoint?’

“Then there’s the third group, and these are typically the more sophisticated members. They’re looking at three things that I refer to, interestingly enough, as ‘The Big LIE.’ The ‘L’ is for legislative representation. The ‘I’ is for information, and the ‘E’ is for education. The very sophisticated members are looking for the legislative representation because they know that as individuals they can’t afford to hire legislative monitors and lobbyists to represent them.”

Edwards explained that these types of members also want information that will help them stay ahead of the curve in their business or industry. He added that the education part is based largely on compliance. “We’re a very regulatory-oriented society and compliance can be very daunting, confusing, intimidating and terribly expensive if you fail to be in compliance. That’s the third leg of the ‘Big LIE’ stool.”

Boosting Attendance
Members are much more likely to spend their hard-earned dollars to attend a conference or event if they have a clear idea of how they will benefit. To do this, Rosenberg advises associations to tailor their messages to different segments of their member audience. He said that while budget restrictions may prevent many associations from producing different versions of their conference brochures, they can do different versions of the cover letter to customize their message for the audience.

Rosenberg used a segment of small business owners as an example. The letter could state, “We want you to know that this year’s conference is designed for the small business owner like you. Take a look at the conference brochure at sessions T109 on page 19, W114 on page 20 and T8201 on page 24.”  As he noted, “Of course, those three programs are going to have names like ‘Accounting for the Small Business Owner.’” He even advised going a step further by hiring some students or an organization such as Goodwill to tab those pages before they go in the mail. After all, it’s hard for a reader to ignore pages that have been flagged especially for them.

Driving Up Revenue
Rosenberg suggested that one way to increase non-dues revenue is to secure early registrations for next year’s conference. “The best time to get attendees to register for next year’s conference is at this year’s conference,” he said. The reason is that their enthusiasm for this year’s program is still fresh in their minds. Rosenberg suggested offering a substantial discount on registration fees as an incentive. If association management balks at giving that discount, he added, remind them to consider the cost of mailings and other efforts it will take throughout the year to get that member to register at a later date.

Rosenberg said there are also creative ways to bring in revenue after an event or conference. For example, if a conference session or presentation received an especially enthusiastic response, attendees might be willing to pay to participate in a follow-up teleconference so they can gain additional information and ideas.

Edwards cited AARP as an organization that has built its success on meeting members’ needs. “I think the two biggest bullets in their gun are their legislative efforts and their affinity programs where they link up with various providers. That’s what we do.” AARP offers health insurance for its members as well as discounts on products and services such as prescriptions and travel. The organization also now offers the AARP Marketplace where members can purchase a wide variety of items such as TVs, cameras and GPS devices at a reduced price.

Staying On Top Of Trends
Associations also can benefit by taking advantage of current societal trends. “The new buzz words on the street are ‘social media,’” Hart explained, referring to Web sites such as LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook. “One of the things that people don’t understand is that all of these organizations have a business side to them. There’s a MySpace page for attorneys. There’s one for doctors.” He shared an impressive statistic. “MySpace gets more hits in one day than Google gets in one week. They estimate up to 18 million hits a day.”

So what does this mean for associations? “An association can do a two-, three- or four-minute YouTube-type video about their organization and post it on their MySpace page for free so people can go online and find out more about the association,” Hart said. “It lets the association connect with a broader audience because this is where people are spending their time. It’s a way of getting your name out there. And it’s free.”

The Bottom Line
“All association professionals want to increase membership and retention, get record attendance at their events, and find sources of non-dues revenue that go beyond the normal affinity credit cards and book stores,” Rosenberg summed up. “There are a lot of interesting things they can do.”    ACF

The Power Of PR No Budget? No Problem. Organizations don’t necessarily have to invest in costly ads and mailings to attract new members. Speaker and business consultant Michael Hart shared a success story about how the power of public relations worked for the Rotaract Club of Birmingham, AL, sponsored by the Rotary Club of Birmingham. “You have to be under 30 to join. When they approached me in Birmingham where I’m based, they had about 11 members. We started doing a lot of publicity on them. This organization made a great human interest story The Alabama Theatre for the Performing Arts hosted the Rotaract Club of Birmingham’s Gala in March that raised more than $105,000 for the club’s signature service literacy project, Ready-2-Read. Photo by Daniel Arciniegas because the whole issue is that people under 30 are beginning to shape the business culture of baby boomers. The story has legs, as they say.” Rotaract, which was founded in 2004, now has 125 members, and was recognized by Rotary International as being the largest Rotaract Club in the world.  Hart attributes the club’s expanding membership to the media attention they received. He explained that Rotaract decided to hold a gala to benefit the club’s signature service project, Ready-2-Read, which aims to place libraries in every second grade classroom in Birmingham City Schools. “For everyone that came to the ball and paid $40 to hear a local band, 20 of those dollars went to buy books and to fund libraries in schools. They got press because they had 300–400 young business people getting together to hear a band to raise money to buy books. “They created their own publicity,” he continued. “The thing is that they could have just gotten together to have a beer and a band and not tell anybody. What they did is that they took ‘X’ amount of dollars out of the ticket they were going to charge for anyway and donated it to a local organization. Now it becomes a newsworthy event.” The club’s charitable activities received coverage in The Birmingham News, Birmingham Magazine, The Birmingham Times and all the network television affiliates. “You just can’t buy that kind of advertising,” said Hart. He explained why the PR acted like a membership magnet. “If you’re under 30 years old and you’re coming up through the ranks, where do you want to go but to hang out with people that are so newsworthy the media can’t shut up about them? Here’s the interesting thing. When Rotoract established themselves as this 30-and-under group, every time something happened that was related to business and youth, they were the go-to group for the local media. Through their media outreach, they established themselves as the experts for people under 30 doing business in this market.” — KB