These days, association meetings need to be running on all three cylinders: targeted educational programs, strong networking opportunities and a compelling expo. The first two especially, according to Debra Bachman-Zabloudil, CAE, FACHE, president of Naperville, IL-based The Learning Studio, an education management and consulting company: “We do a lot of market research on education specifically, and what we find is that the two main drivers to coming to any annual meeting are education and meaningful connections. We find those to be our top two on almost every membership survey we do.” They are essentially the justifications for members to attend, and in some cases obtain funding to do so from their employers.

And attendance, as planners know, isn’t quite what it used to be. “What ASAE was showing at the height of the economic downturn was that many associations were experiencing their annual attendance drop by as much as 30 percent,” noted Bachman-Zabloudil. “And for all the organizations we’ve spoken with, certainly in 2009 the best anyone did was hold their own; most saw a decline.”

Compelling Content

Some associations, fortunately, are seeing their attendance numbers rebound for upcoming events. Lisa W. Block, director of meetings and conferences for the Alexandria, VA-based Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) said, “We have certainly seen some impact from the economy last year, but our numbers so far this year as we’re projecting ahead are really strong for all of our events. It’s definitely an uptick.” SHRM’s Annual Conference typically brings in about 20,000 HR professionals. The quality of the meeting’s educational content is critical to preserving that number, and there’s no way to determine what content will engage members other than through research on both industry trends and members’ needs. In the field of HR, for example, “different topics are more critical at different points depending on the economy, what’s happening in Congress, if different laws are passed and so forth,” said Block. “We are also constantly surveying our members on a wide variety of topics for their educational needs and opinions.”

Ongoing Membership Surveys

A logical first step, then, to targeting educational content is the membership survey, but it shouldn’t be a one-time project. “We recommend that the association start with a baseline survey and then ask as many similar questions as they can over time,” said Bachman-Zabloudil. The questions cover not only what topics members would like education on, but how they feel about current learning opportunities. “After putting together a program, you go back the next year and you ask them the same things and see if you’re evaluating higher on those areas. You want to know what they’ve liked or felt was valuable,” she said. “If you keep asking that every year, you should be seeing that the satisfaction is going up and that the outcomes are better.”

Chris Moore, training director for the Lexington, KY-based National Association of State Boating Law Administrators (NASBLA), pointed out that, in general, surveys should be “as short and direct as possible: two to four questions is good. You’ll get a response, particularly if they’re yes/no. If you send out a survey with 20–25 questions, your response rates are going to go way down.” Members might be asked, for instance, to pick the top three topics they’d like to see developed into an e-learning module. Even if the association already has a good idea of which three will be picked, the survey is conducted as a matter of due diligence. “We’re just looking for something to statistically back it up,” said Moore. “When we start developing that course, we can say, ‘We surveyed the members, and this was the top thing they wanted.’?”

The more feedback can be solicited from members, the better sense an association will get of its role in their careers, trades and businesses. Oftentimes professionals will be members of more than one association, and compartmentalize their education accordingly. It’s important for an association to know this information, Bachman-Zabloudil maintained. “We talk to some organizations whose members will say, ‘We don’t look to you to teach us about management; we want you to teach us about the technical aspects of XYZ,’?” she explained. “And if they’re going to the AMA, then maybe they don’t need customer service or supervisory skills training from your association. Then you don’t have to spend time and resources developing management courses that no one will take.”

At the same time that educational programming must be streamlined in accord with an association’s niche in the market, it must also be diversified to address members’ varying experience levels. “We really try to make sure we’re gearing our programming to meet the needs of our membership, and we have HR professionals all across the career span,” Block explained. “The field of HR spans so many different dimensions that we know that people along their career lifespan require different information and knowledge at different times.”

Targeting All Learning Levels

A survey also can shed light on the membership’s experience-level demographics. “We always encourage organizations to ask, ‘How long have you been in the field?’ and ‘How long have you been a member of this group?’” said Bachman-Zabloudil. “Then you can determine, for example, that 25 percent of your membership has been in the field five years or less.” In turn, the association can determine if it has the right distribution of beginner, intermediate and advanced programs. This inquiry is crucial to keeping the entire membership satisfied.

“There may be some gaping holes,” warned Bachman-Zabloudil. “We see, for example, some associations will have nothing for mid-career. They’re very good at getting people in the door, and they’re very good at getting the CEOs to be happy, so they’ve got senior executive programs. But what do you do for someone who’s in the field 10–15 years? That is when members tend to become disengaged and drop their membership, because there are no products and services for them. So you need a continuum of education throughout the lifetime of the member. It doesn’t always have to be face-to-face; it can be an article on the Web or in your magazine. But if they see a big gap, they start to ask, ‘Why am I a member of this association? Can I really justify my dues when I’m not active?’?”

The Certification Challenge

Analyzing educational offerings from the perspective of members’ careers is also important when considering whether to offer a certification program, which can be laborious and expensive to launch. “An association has to go into certification with their eyes wide open,” Bachman-Zabloudil said. “If the credential is not valued in the field, if putting it on your resume doesn’t give you an up on a job, then people aren’t really intrigued to sit for the exam. In other areas there are credentials that carry so much credence in the field that you wouldn’t make it without one. So it’s a matter of understanding the market value.”

Since a certain amount of education credits are required for members to sit for the exam that is the basis of the certification program, and then yearly credits are needed to recertify, these programs can ensure regular participation in an association’s educational programs. In addition, a credential that is internal to the organization means that members can’t obtain it anywhere else.

Certificate programs are different in that no exam is administered; participants instead receive training and a certificate of completion. But these also require a little work to launch, mainly in satisfying the standards set by the field’s accrediting bodies (e.g., the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education). NASBLA, for example, recently had a certificate program approved on boating-under-the-influence detection for marine law enforcement officers, and had to revamp its complaint-filing system as a result. The system was “very informal until we went through this process of getting accredited,” said Moore. “Now it’s formalized, so there’s no question as to who is responsible for reviewing and addressing complaints on the courses. Sometimes the advisory panel will wait to see if more complaints of the same type are filed, as it may be an isolated incident. But we have a logbook and if that complaint comes up again and again, action gets taken.”

Education ROI

The concept of ROI applies to educational programs in general, not just certification. An association must ensure that members get the most benefit relative to the time and money the organization spends in developing and staging the program. Keeping operating costs down is one side of the ROI coin, but to what extent can speaker and venue expenses be pared down without sacrificing the quality of the experience? “You can certainly look for more cost-effective venues, but I think many organizations have to be careful to stay within the same tier of facility that their members are used to,” said Bachman-Zabloudil. “They want to cut corners on things that are not as noticeable.” One possible strategy is to move to a type of venue that works out to be less expensive for logistical reasons, as opposed to downgrading the tier. A change from hotels to conference centers, for example, proved cost-effective for SHRM’s seminars by staving off attrition issues. “Most of our seminars are done in the same cities over and over again, and they tend to draw at least 50 percent from that city, so the attendees are not taking hotel rooms,” Block related. “Using conference centers is a way of being able to be really predictive in our budgeting.”

Regarding speakers, an association certainly wants its learning to be led by “big names” in the field, but the key to ROI is getting the most value from these experts while they’re at the meeting. “Consider using speakers for more than one session,” advised Bachman-Zabloudil. “For instance, if they’re coming in the night before, and they’re on at 10 a.m., ask them if they would mind doing a lottery breakfast with a group of attendees. In addition, they may be able to speak on more than one topic. So you can have the former chairman of GE come in and talk about how he turned around GE in one session, and then you could have him in the next session explaining what being the CEO of a big company did to his personal life.” This approach may well be less expensive than procuring two experts to speak individually on these kinds of topics.

Distance Learning

Another clear route to cost savings is virtual learning: no venue rental, travel or lodging expenses are entailed. But the first thing to consider is whether the membership will be comfortable with that medium. “Look at the demographics,” advised Bachman-Zabloudil. “If your members work in manufacturing that are all over the age of 55, are you going to have as much success with distance learning as you would if you had members who in a professional setting are sitting at a computer all day?” And even if they prefer face to face, perhaps they still cannot afford the travel and lodging expenses for regular seminars apart from the annual meeting. So by default, online courses become the best option. These are the sorts of issues that a membership survey should address before a virtual course is developed. “One of the things that comes up repeatedly in our surveys is that they want more e-learning,” Moore said. Interestingly, those who want it are not only the members, but their employers. “We do a lot of training, but it takes their officers out of the field to come to training. It’s vital that they get the training, but it’s also vital that they’re in the field doing the job they were hired to do,” Moore explained. He admitted, though, that the older boating law administrators do face a learning curve when it comes to the technical aspects of e-learning, as well as its value. “Some BLAs have been in that position since the ’60s. I’m not sure they understand the benefits of it yet, but they’re coming around to the concept more and more as they go along.” Still, these older BLAs are not the majority of the membership; most members have been in the position five years or fewer.

Ongoing Education Online

Virtual education is particularly suited to address ongoing educational needs, where regular face-to-face learning would be impractical. That’s an important criterion for the Chicago, IL-based Institute of Food Technologists’ (IFT) online courses, which are between six to eight hours in duration. “Right now our philosophy is we’re looking for topics that tend to be more evergreen, that we know our membership needs as a base understanding,” said Bob Moore, MA, CAE, vice president, knowledge and learning experiences for the IFT. “So about a month ago we launched a regulatory course. And this is something that we see time and time again in our research: People will have questions about regulatory issues. We have in the past done it live, but people need that information more than once a year at our meeting.”

About five years ago, the institute launched an online Knowledge and Learning Center, where members can get information about both virtual and in-person education, and plenty of resources. About two years ago, it established a Learning Management System, facilitated by a third-party vendor, that allows members to search for available online courses, register, check on test results, track their credits and more. “We have three courses that are fully developed that are in the queue; what we did is establish a relationship with another third party that has pre-developed online courses that we plug into our system and have a revenue share,” said Moore. “People who have taken the courses have really enjoyed it; evaluations are very positive. We’ve also seen good response from companies who buy course packages for employees; it’s more affordable than sending them off to a course.”

Evaluation Consternation

The IFT also administers evaluations for its Annual Meeting & Food Expo, but it has proven logistically difficult to survey reactions to the scientific program too deeply. “It has been a sticky area for us just because we have about 125 sessions, with upwards of six speakers in each session,” said Moore. “The feedback we’ve received from attendees is that it’s ‘evaluation to death’ if you do it at the session level. So we do a post-event survey on the overall perception of quality and value of scientific program. We then also look at harder numbers such as number of people in sessions and number of paid registrants at the meeting.”

If Moore’s team discovers that a particular session drew weak attendance, that’s kept in mind for next year. “We’ll let people know, for example, that last year all the sessions that dealt with dairy were really low. We might want to be cognizant of that and not schedule too many sessions around that topic, or see how we can improve it, perhaps with new session formats,” he explained. Surprisingly, last year the IFT had strong attendance for “Sunrise Sessions,” which start at 7 a.m. “That’s crazy early, but the feedback was extremely positive so we’re choosing to do it again this year.”

Feedback Follow-up

Collecting positive feedback also serves a marketing function for future programs, especially when it can be traced to positive outcomes for members in their professional lives. That can be done, Bachman-Zabloudil suggested, by surveying cohorts of students over time. “Three months after the program, you can ask: ‘This is what you said when you walked out of the program, now did you do anything with the information?’ Six months out: ‘Did it result in a positive outcome?’ If you’re able to prove a positive outcome, that’s the best marketing tool you’ll ever have,” she stressed. “The next time you run the program, you can say, for example, ‘80 percent of participants in this program felt they had improved efficiencies six months later. And that’s a great thing to show bosses, if it’s a case where folks need to get approval to attend your programs. The employer will think the employee is going to come back and do a better job.” Indeed, we’ve all heard that good teachers make a difference in their students’ lives, and that’s just what an association should aim to do in its members’ professional lives.    ACF