How to become one with your association’s strategic goals
No, I’m not suggesting you rise at 5 a.m. and recite your association’s strategic plan as your daily morning mantra. But I’d like you to answer this simple question. How many of your association’s strategic goals can you recall right now?
(No cheating! And not the easy bits about your vision, mission, who you serve, or your programs and services — just your goals!)
I’ll wait…
Was that a little embarrassing? You’re not alone — when I tried this recently, I was pretty embarrassed too!
Last month I joined the board of a local non-profit, just in time to take part in the third and final board meeting to update our strategic plan. It was a productive and well-run meeting, expertly facilitated by non-profit consultant Lizann Peyton, and ten minutes before the scheduled end we had agreed on a list of five major goals, each with several subgoals.
Then Lizann asked us to avert our eyes from our notes and recall the goals we had just spent two hours formulating.
Oh my goodness! My mind went blank. We’d just been talking about our goals, but at that moment it became clear to me (and I suspect to most if not all board members) that we hadn’t internalized them.
That’s upsetting because, Dilbert jokes aside, organizational strategic plan goals need to be top of mind for board members and staff if there’s going to be a reasonable chance that they’ll actually be met. (Otherwise, what’s the point of having them?)
Lizann had clearly seen this movie before. She smoothly suggested three ways for us to become more familiar with our strategic goals at our board meetings.
Three suggestions on how to assist board members become one with your strategic goals
1) Add your list of strategic plan goals to each board meeting agenda. (Print them on the back if you’re still using paper agendas.)
2) At each board meeting, organize the agenda to reflect the structure of your strategic goals. Also, include a short discussion about some part of your strategic direction. For example, if one of your goals is to assess opportunities for the use of new space, include an agenda item at each meeting for a progress update from the new space committee.
3) Have the executive director’s reports to the board be organized around the strategic goals as well. After all, the director’s job is to help move the organization in the direction set by the board.
Lessons learned
My inability to recall conclusions that we’d just spent two hours creating clearly indicates the limitations of learning models that rely on one-time exposure to information (e.g., lecturing). Learning research tells us that “repeat to remember” is key to encoding learning in long-term memory. Although the monthly interval between our meetings is longer than optimum, following Lizann’s recommendations over time should help us internalize our strategic goals, reducing future potential embarrassment and, more importantly, improving our ability to achieve them.
Perhaps these recommendations will help your association’s staff and board members too!
Have you found other ways to help internalize your organization’s strategic goals? Share them in the comments below.
Then in 1966, a man named Dee Hock had the vision, determination, resources, and a little luck to break this logjam. Dee described his journey in a fascinating book he wrote after his retirement in 1984, intriguingly titled: Birth of The Chaordic Age. Dee was the first CEO of what became the mammoth multinational financial services corporation VISA, a company with a current market capitalization of over $200B.
What has this to do with associations? Well, VISA has never issued cards, extended credit, or set rates and fees for consumers. The company is, in structure if not in capitalist terms, an association of tens of thousands of member banks. They offer VISA-branded credit, debit, prepaid, and cash-access programs to their hundreds of millions of customers. While competing with each other for customers, these banks agree to honor each other’s trillions of dollars in transactions annually across borders and currencies.
A set of agreements
At its core, VISA is a set of agreements between its members. The company’s value to its owners and customers is created from its members’ mutual agreements. Without those agreements, VISA would not exist. We would return to the pre-VISA world when every financial entity needed its own system of offering customer credit.
VISA is an atypical kind of for-profit organization. However, its core purpose is essentially identical to that of trade and professional associations. Associations are society’s instantiations of communities of practice, groups of people who share a common interest, profession, or passion and agree to actively engage around what they have in common. That leads us to Dee Hock’s (and my) view of organizations like VISA and associations:
“…organizations exist only in the mind; they are no more than the conceptual embodiments of the ancient idea of community.” —Dee Hock, Birth of The Chaordic Age
When associations go astray
This perspective is extremely important because it’s easy for associations to forget their initial and continued reasons for existence. Every association is created when at some moment in time a group of people with something in common wants to further a particular profession and/or the interests of those engaged in a profession and/or the public interest. Typically, the community already exists informally. Its “members” want to create a formal, legal structure to support, deepen, and widen its reach.
Associations can, however, lose sight of this primal and ongoing purpose. When this happens, they concentrate on self-perpetuation and/or expansion at the expense of supporting the community of practice for which they were created. Remembering that an association is, at its core, a set of agreements in people’s minds about the instantiation of a community that is important to them is key to keeping the association relevant to the community it serves.
So remember that associations exist only in the mind. Keeping an association’s purpose foremost is critical to maintaining its community of practice’s core reasons for being.
In June 2016 I stepped down as President and Executive Director of edACCESS, an association I co-founded 25 years ago. This was the third time I’ve left an association leadership position. Here are some valuable lessons learned from these association leadership transitions.
The Solar Association of Vermont
Although the rapid growth of the solar energy industry may appear to be a recent phenomenon, North American boomers will remember the late 70s and early 80s when the 1979 “oil crisis” hit and interest in alternative energy generation soared. I moved to Vermont in 1978 and joined the management of a fledging solar hot water manufacturing business. After a couple of years, I helped to found the Solar Association of Southern Vermont. Eventually, we became the Solar Association of Vermont (SAVE!) We’d hold monthly meetings in the tiny rural town of Brattleboro and sixty people would show up. SAVE went on to produce many of the earliest alternative energy conferences in the United States.
But in the 80s Reagan was elected. He removed the solar collectors that a colleague of mine had installed on the White House. By the mid-80’s oil prices had returned to pre-crisis levels. Interest in solar energy dried up and SAVE meeting attendance shrank to a few people.
What did we do?
We shut SAVE down.
We held a big end-of-the-association party, inviting everyone who had been part of this brief flowering of community interest. Little did we know that our work would set the stage for the meteoric rise of solar photovoltaic systems today.
Lessons
As time passes, the key motivations for an association’s existence can transmute, or even disappear. I’ve worked with hundreds of associations, and seen some continue to struggle on long after their mission has become irrelevant. Check regularly that your association’s mission remains congruent with its circumstances. If not, change your mission or your operations to stay relevant. Or, if necessary, close up shop (not forgetting to celebrate all your good work if you do!)
A local association
After a number of years serving as a board member of a local chapter of a national association, the board offered me the presidency. The national was recommending that chapters fundamentally change the way they operated, a change I agreed with. I told the board that I would happily accept the presidency if we allocated the resources needed to make this transformation happen, arguing that the change would improve our financial resources by allowing us to significantly increase our community fundraising.
Unfortunately, the board refused to allocate the resources I requested.
Consequently, I reluctantly turned down the presidency and left the board, as I did not want to lead an association whose board did not support the vision I had for its future.
Looking back on the subsequent evolution of the association, I don’t regret my decision, though I wish I’d been better able to convince the board that my approach was a better alternative to staying with the status quo.
Lessons
Before taking an association leadership role, share your vision for the future and make sure the rest of the association buys into it. If they don’t, don’t take the job!
edACCESS
In 1991 I co-founded edACCESS, a 501(c)6 that supports information technology staff at small schools. Initially, I had a professional interest in the organization’s mission for many years and served for free. As my consulting focus shifted increasingly towards meeting design, I moved into a paid part-time executive director role.
In May, 2016, I decided to give up the position, with the goal of making the handover to new leadership as smooth as possible. I announced my intent at the June annual conference and offered to stay for a year in a supervisory role, coaching new leadership as needed.
The existing leadership handled my announcement very well. I told them I would provide any desired assistance and advice around leadership changes, but felt it was important not to be intimately involved in ongoing decisions. I was gratified by the response, which to me reflects the fundamental health of the association I helped to create.
The transition went well. The full year’s notice allowed me to take new and existing leadership through an entire life cycle of the core association process. The association stayed in good shape after I left.
Lessons
I have seen (and experienced) a number of associations that were severely stressed by the sudden departure of leadership and the total lack of any leadership succession planning. To be honest, edACCESS is small enough that we did not have a formal plan in place. I am glad I have the flexibility to offer what will hopefully be sufficient time and support to allow the association to continue effectively carrying out its mission. Don’t assume that key association staff or board members, will stay with the organization forever, or give you ample warning before they depart! Pre-emergency planning for leadership, staffing, and succession will minimize the turmoil that can be generated without warning when key personnel leave unexpectedly.
Association leadership transitions
Have you made association leadership transitions? What lessons have you learned that others may value? Share in the comments!
The interview helped me verbalize the close connection between the reasons why associations begin and new conferences are born. I’ll leave you to read Joe’s excellent article for the details.
“Unmembership? What’s that?” It’s a word invented by my creative friend Mitchell Beer during a wonderful ninety minute coffee break during the 2014 PCMA Convening Leaders conference a few weeks ago. Let me explain.
First, some definitions. In this post I use the term “formal member” to refer someone who has paid dues to be an association member. “Informal members” are those people who would currently consider themselves to have a significant connection with an association. Unlike informal membership, the exact number of formal members of an association can be quantified at any moment from an AMS report. Associations that have no formal members use what Mitchell calls an unmembership model.
The role of membership in association business models
Over the past few years there’s been a growing debate about the role of membership in association business models. I’m sure I’ve only heard a portion of it, but a great place to start is Jeff De Cagna‘s excellent July 2012 articles Five reasons why membership is killing association business modelsPart I, Part II, and Part III. (I’ve included links to some other discussions at the end of this post.)
Jeff’s reasons for concern are that membership-centric business models:
organize all value around the membership relationship;
tend to focus on association outputs instead of stakeholder outcomes;
often depend on cross-subsidies that create unintended consequences;
ask members to make the most important decisions about new value creation; and
require a significant investment of human effort for an insufficient return.
A couple of examples of unmembership
I agree with all of Jeff’s arguments. Rather than repeat them I recommend you go and read the original articles. In this post I’ll share my experience as the co-founder and president of two small associations, which now both use the unmembership model.
The Marlboro School Association
One of these associations, a 501(c)(3), is so small that its lack of formal members is not especially remarkable. The Marlboro School Association (MSA) was founded in 1994 to raise an endowment for the small K-8 public school in the Vermont town (2000 census population, 978) where I live. Endowment income is used to improve attending students’ educational experience. The MSA was set up using an unmembership model right from the start. Volunteers run this non-profit, which has built a $250,000 endowment over the last twenty years. The informal members of the MSA are those community members who support the work of the MSA through donations of money or their time. We have no need for formal members.
edACCESS
The other association, edACCESS, a 501(c)(6), was founded in 1992 as a vehicle for administrative IT staff at small schools to explore the use of some amazing new devices called “personal computers”. For ten years, edACCESS used an annual dues membership model. At the time it seemed necessary. Potential vendors for our annual trade show would ask us how many members we had, and we felt compelled to be able to give them a number.
But over the years it became clear that maintaining formal membership was more trouble than it was worth. We discovered that tracking and collecting dues from formal members was distracting us from our core mission: supporting and fostering a community of informal members who shared the association’s purpose. In 2002 we abandoned our formal membership model. The trade show vendors didn’t seem to mind, because by then they were asking how many decision-makers would be attending our annual conference, and we had good information available for them.
Using volunteers
Volunteers ran edACCESS for sixteen years. In 2008, when I stopped consulting in the educational IT field and began a professional shift to meeting design, I asked the organization (the board, our conference steering committee, and the participants at the annual conference) if it would consider paying me to continue to coordinate its activities. Now I am the sole paid, very part-time, staff member (volunteers receive various perks and we reimburse their expenses). [Update: I stepped down from running edACCESS in 2017.]
The annual conference process effectively uncovers participants’ issues and occasionally leads us to hold further focused events during the year. A listserv (old-fashioned, but effective) and private wiki provide places for community members to access resources, ask questions and get support at any time. We also run a site-visit program that allows interested schools to receive targeted consulting for modest fees.
What is the edACCESS revenue model? Our income comes almost entirely from our events—the vast majority from our annual 3½-day conference. We construct our event budgets to cover our modest administrative needs. Over the years we have built up sufficient funds to weather several years of poorly attended or canceled events, though we have had no problems so far during our 22 years.
What can we conclude from these examples?
First of all, I hope they illustrate that unmembeship is a viable path for small associations. The MSA has enjoyed a few hundred informal members during its history, edACCESS a few thousand. Both associations are fulfilling their missions while maintaining healthy finances. As Joe Rominiecki comments in his article referenced below, adopting an unmembership model “removes some complacency; the organization has to be relevant to its community, or the community will just go elsewhere. They haven’t committed money in advance that might keep them around.”
What about associations that supply other benefits to their members? Industry research, lobbying, and chapter support, for example, all cost money to provide. I think there’s a role here for tying support to unbundled programs using a Kickstarter approach. “Want your association to do X? $Y is what such-and-such level of X will cost. Here are suggested donation amounts, (which might be associated with specific individual/corporate benefits). If pledges reach $Y we’ll do X, otherwise we won’t.” Funding models for potential programs would incorporate the associated administrative expenses incurred. In other words, rather than guess or impose what your association community wants, let them choose for themselves.
“Free membership” association models
I haven’t said anything so far about “free membership” association models that straddle the formal and informal definitions I’ve given above. Clearly, as the rapid growth of Doximity shows, there can be demand for a free service when the target “member” is a well-compensated professional defined by third-party certification. The question in my mind is whether it’s possible to generate sufficient revenue to pay for the “free” service. In Doximity’s case, revenue currently seems to be a combination of advertising, LinkedIn-like recruiting firm fees, and, perhaps, ultimately consumer subscriptions to some kind of referral service. Time will tell whether this is a sustainable model.
Finally I don’t think that all associations will embrace an unmembership model in the future. For example, any associations that have a lock on key certification requirements or continuing education for their industry are very unlikely to give up the membership income that their members essentially have to provide to become or remain certified in their field. Nevertheless, I expect there to be a growing trend towards unmembership associations providing flexible unbundled services to the informal members who find them of value.
Other posts that may be of interest on the role of membership in associations
I’ve never run a conference without volunteers. I’ve spent over thirty years organizing meetings. Here are 6 lessons I’ve learned about volunteers at conferences.
1) Is this conference marketable?
One of the most important ways I leverage volunteers is during the earliest conference planning stages to determine whether a proposed event is marketable.
Here’s my simple rule of thumb when deciding whether an idea for a conference might work.
Can I find at least five people enthusiastic enough about the proposed combination of topic/theme, audience, location, and duration to volunteer their time and energy to make the event happen?
If I can’t easily find at least five volunteers enthusiastic about a conference, I’ve (painfully) learned that the event is almost always unviable.
2) Use volunteers for creative work
You’ve got a bunch of willing volunteers—what should you have them do? I try to allocate volunteers to creative jobs at conferences. Research indicates that paying people to do interesting work can make them less motivated! Here are some examples of conference tasks well suited to volunteers:
greeting arriving attendees
introducing attendees to each other
facilitating sessions
organizing and running fun activities
I generally use volunteers for creative work and reserve mechanical tasks for paid staff.
3) Check in with your volunteers
Talk with each volunteer individually well before the event. Ask them how they’d like to help and come to a clear understanding as to what’s expected from them.
4) Plan to have enough volunteers
Volunteers are sometimes less reliable than paid staff. Ensure you have a few people who can cover for last-minute gaps in your volunteer staff during the event.
5) Reward your volunteers
Reward your volunteers throughout the event. Make sure volunteers receive refreshments, meals, and access to conference amenities. If they are attending the conference, offer them reduced or free admission. Reimburse them for any incidental expenses they incur.
6) Never take your volunteers for granted!
Make sure you recognize their contributions, not only publicly, using appropriate perks, awards, and publicity, but also privately. Show them you genuinely appreciate their contributions, and they will become your biggest boosters.
These are the 6 lessons I’ve learned about volunteers at conferences.
How do you work with volunteers at your events? What lessons have you learned?
How to become one with your association’s strategic goals
How to become one with your association’s strategic goals
Professional, trade, and public interest associations are significant businesses. In the United States alone, 
In June 2016 I stepped down as President and Executive Director of 
