Category Archives: Recruitment and Retention

August 3, 2016 · 2:29 pm

Prepare Yourself Well #4: Access to Cutting Edge Content

th1What makes a university experience so valuable—and life-changing? I’ve identified four aspects of the university experience that serve as the basis for developing professionals: access to a meaningful network, a hotbed for emerging content, a laboratory to experiment, practice, and grow, and a platform from which to launch.

The challenge today is this: with rapidly changing knowledge, networks, and context, if you don’t build in a formal mechanism to continue to deepen and solidify your network, learn emerging content, have a laboratory to practice and develop, and a supporting foundation that will allow you to launch into greater impact, you fall behind. Way behind. “Prepare Yourself Well: There is Plenty of Room at the Top, It’s the Bottom that is Full” is something professionals need to remember—and do—every day if they are to survive, much less thrive, in today’s environment.

That’s where professional associations come in, and where they play an indispensable role today. There is no other entity that can effectively provide the four aspects that are so pivotal in becoming a professional. In fact, associations are uniquely built to carry out the lifetime learning and networking functions beyond a university setting.

By their very nature, universities provide great content. Faculty are doing cutting edge, innovative research, new science and practice is developed, discussed, disseminated, and evaluated. Emerging professionals learn not only content, but how to think and ask questions that will stimulate new innovation. After graduation, it can be a challenge to access, or feel connected to that hotbed of learning…unless you find and maintain your connection to the professional association for your field.

So, where are you going to go to have access to a vibrant network that exists to develop and disseminate emerging knowledge? And isn’t dues really the cheapest tuition to be able to have access? When you think of it, dues really isn’t that much more than students pay for “activities fees” in their tuition bundle. But you get so much more. How are you preparing yourself every day to be better than you were the day before?

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August 3, 2016 · 2:22 pm

Prepare Yourself Well #3 Networking and Association Engagement

networkI’ve previously written that we must change our paradigm of thinking about associations from one of a transaction based service (what I get now, for the dollar I spend now, like a coffee at Starbucks) to one of a life-long university experience, in which dues (tuition) represents an incredible value for benefit received. I identified four aspects of university experience that only associations can offer for professionals across the career span: access to a meaningful network, a hotbed for emerging content, a laboratory to experiment, practice, and grow, and a platform from which to launch. In this post, I want to highlight the Networking only association engagement can offer.

One might argue that social networks in a new interactive world diminish association membership as a way to facilitate network engagement. However, even in one of the best books on the changing paradigm to social that I have read, A World Gone Social, authors @tedcoine and @marksbabbit say that to fully activate the benefits of social, networks need to have both virtual and physical world connections (cups of coffee, face to face eventually matter).

Ted Coine identifies three aspects of a network that make it meaningful: He says that “it isn’t the size of one’s network that matters. Rather, what matters most is

  • the quality of expertise within our networks,
  • the ability to quickly and easily find these experts as needed, and most importantly–
  • their willingness to lend a hand when called.”

There really is no other mechanism, system, or entity where professionals can find, develop, and sustain the kind of networks necessary to succeed today than through membership and engagement in a professional association. Social may build it, but to have confidence in these three characteristics of your network, you need the lifelong university found in associations. What is your plan to prepare and sustain yourself well with a deep, meaningful network? And remember: Prepare Yourself Well–There is Plenty of Room at the Top; It’s the Bottom that’s Full.

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August 3, 2016 · 1:53 pm

Prepare Yourself Well, #2: Lifelong Engagement!

unknownIn a previous blog I focused on the message, “Prepare Yourself Well; There is Plenty of Room at the Top, It’s the Bottom that’s Full.” In this segment I’d like to how membership associations help professionals build a lifelong commitment to preparation and improvement.

I believe one must shift the concept of membership and dues from a transaction based perspective to an investment perspective. If lifelong learning, preparation, and improvement are goals, you simply cannot treat investing in that in the same way as you do a vanilla latte at Starbucks. When I paid tuition in both undergraduate and graduate schools, I viewed it as an investment in my future—preparation, not a transaction that had to meet immediate gratification of “value” tests. At the end of the day, dues represents lifelong tuition for learning.

Of course, we all ask the “what am I going to get out of it” questions when we spend money. However, I didn’t expect my tuition on any given class to give me an immediate return that semester. In fact, some courses built on one another, so that it took cumulative experiences for the benefit to accrue. The goal of lifelong learning requires a mindset shift from transaction based purchase valuation to one of investment for longer-term goals. The investment (whether in professional knowledge or experience, or literally for retirement) may have some latency before gratification comes. But failure to invest in learning and improvement, in a world that isn’t standing still, means you fall behind. And if you are measuring membership dues with a “transaction” based model, you may already be losing ground.

So what aspects of lifelong learning did I get in my university experiences that are an inherent component of membership and engagement in associations? I see four: access to a meaningful network, a hotbed for emerging content, a laboratory to experiment, practice, and grow, and a platform from which to launch. And no one is good enough to build and maintain all four on his/her own. It takes a structured plan, process, and group to ensure those aspects are grown and developed over time.p

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August 3, 2016 · 1:37 pm

Prepare Yourself Well

franklin-quoteNote:  The following post was created as part a series of 5 posts overall to address student members of professional associations about the value of membership and engagement.

When I was an undergraduate (long ago in a galaxy far, far away), my roommate’s father came to our school to give a presentation. Prior to the event, we spent some time talking, and I asked him the basic point of what he was going to say. His words have stuck with me over the years, and this is what he said: “Prepare yourself well. There is plenty of room at the top, it is the bottom that is full.”

The adolescent, cynical side of me thought he was just making sure we didn’t waste the tuition money our parents were all coughing up. However, I knew intuitively that what he said was also true. What I didn’t grasp at the time, though, was that “preparing yourself” never ends. Looking at the rapid arc of change that is occurring in just about every sector of society, whether business or science—I’ve come to realize that preparation is not something you do once. It is something you do every day. Every day I have to get ready to do my very best work. The times demand it, and to contribute anywhere with excellence, I must model that kind of commitment to preparation. It’s a process, not an accomplishment.

How are you preparing yourself? What is your plan? And if you articulated where you are aiming, is it at the place where there is plenty of room (the top) or where it is crowded (the bottom)? Thinking about this over the holidays I was reminded of the commercial where the kid says, “When I grow up I want to claw my way all the way up to middle management.” Doesn’t being a professional imply we want more than that? And where do you go for context and opportunity to continue preparing yourself?

 

 

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May 13, 2016 · 9:19 am

Recruiting, Retaining, and Engaging Millennials (and Everyone Else) in Associations

UnknownYou are reading it everywhere:  millennials have different expectations for a member experience than other demographic groups.   Their history of social experience, being “digital natives” having come of age with social media, and the resultant values and norms create challenges for many associations who have built structures and features of membership primarily for boomers.

Ironically, while millennials will be driving change, as they will be 75% of the workforce by 2025, we are now in a period where the expectations of all demographic segments are changing as technology and social becomes embedded in the culture.   Almost all demographic groups have adopted social interaction on the web, from reviews on Amazon, Yelp, etc., to social platforms.  While millennials are the demographic that associations need to attract and retain to create lifetime value and members, the principles necessary for success matter to every age group at this point.

So how do we assess relevance and create a better context for success as leaders?  Boil down the research and literature, and what millennials (and others) are saying they want from associations can be summed up like this:

  • Connect me to people and give me relationships I can’t find easily elsewhere—including with you as an organization.  Organizations that primarily emphasize features or benefits of membership seem to have no personality—or transparency.  The impression is that the association is conducting transactions with customers, not having dialogue with a connected network of members.  Connect me with others, talk to me about why you are doing what you are, why it matters, and what should happen if we, together, are successful.  Most importantly:  listen to what I think is important, and show me that I have been heard.
  • Personalize my experience and value. In a nutshell, don’t try to sell me 800 cable channels for $200 a month.  Show that you know what matters to me, and deliver it without me having to wade through a multi-page channel guide to see if there might be something that’s interesting or important to me.
  • Tell me things I don’t know, that I need to know to grow and advance.  Deliver curated and relevant knowledge and information that is reliable.  Push it to me, so that I have access to the information early, and in a digestible manner.  Think of what I can read on my phone while waiting in the Starbucks line.
  • Relate what you—we—are doing and and what we stand for to a higher social value and meaning.  What difference is the organization trying to make, and how it is connected to my values about greater good?  Show me that, and you will win my loyalty and commitment.

You can run a test of these characteristics through everything you do as an association.  You can look at your communications (do you have a listening strategy, btw?), your programming, your membership recruitment/retention appeals, the messages your leaders give when they go to speak, and more.  On these measures, how do you scale?

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