Are for-profits muscling in on association events?

A cartoon of two people in business suits walking towards each other in front of a conference venue displaying a banner "The Association Conference". The woman on the left is smiling and carrying a briefcase labeled "Revenue Opportunities". The man on the right is nervously clutching a folder labeled "Community Mission".Are for-profits stepping into territory traditionally held by associations? Lately, I’ve seen signs that they might be. Recently, I’ve received inquiries from suppliers of products and services wanting to hold events for the communities they serve.  In fact, I’m currently designing an event for a for-profit client that directly competes with association conferences in their profession.

Suppliers have held client events for their customers for many years. However, the for-profit supplier event I’m designing includes a small tradeshow with many suppliers of interest to potential professional attendees.

I’m flattered by my client’s belief that the participant-driven and participation-rich meetings I design provide a better experience than competing traditional association events. But, as someone who values the communities that well-functioning associations offer, I can’t help but feel concerned.

Read the rest of this entry »

When association leadership loses its way

leadership: a caricature model of a greedy businessman with a large grinIs it OK for a U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit association to:

  • Make large profits;
  • Pay its four top executives well over $1M per year; and yet
  • Do little for its members?

In an astonishing article, Professor Dorothy Vera Margaret Bishop, FRS FBA FMedSci, who is Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford shares an example of an association that’s guilty of all of the above.

“The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) makes humongous amounts of money from its journal and meetings, but spends very little on helping its members, while treating overseas researchers with indifference bordering on disdain.”
—Dorothy Vera Margaret Bishop, Has the Society for Neuroscience lost its way?

Why the SfN lost its way

Bishop’s article gives the financial details, also available from the association’s 2016 (latest) IRS Form 990. To summarize, the Society for Neuroscience:

  1. Makes millions of dollars in profit from its journal submission fees. But claims these fees only cover “a portion of the costs associated with peer review.”
  2. Makes millions of dollars profit from its annual meeting.
  3. Despite its stated claim of wanting to support neuroscience globally, uses little of its enormous reserves (more than $100M at the end of 2016) to “offer grants for scientists in resource-poor countries to buy equipment, pay for research assistants or attend meetings. Quite small sums could be transformational in such a context. As far as I can see, SfN currently offers a few awards, but some of these are paid for by external donations, and, in relation to their huge reserves, the sums are paltry.”

This is a classic example of a non-profit whose leadership lost its way. It created an association whose commitment to membership is secondary to leadership’s focus on pursuing profit (and, presumably their own consequently generous salaries). As Bishop says:

“…instead of being an organisation that exists to promote neuroscience and help their members, the members are rather regarded as nothing but a source of income, which is then stashed away in investments.”

The Plan and The Reality

Reading the Society’s lofty Mission and Strategic Plan, I’m struck by how little it reflects the Society’s actual operational decisions that Bishop and I describe. In 2016 alone, the association stashed away $6M out of $33M of revenues. Yet the 8,000-word document spends far more time describing how diversity and equity issues will be handled (worthy goals for sure) and the importance of seeking funding from external sources, than providing any kind of cold hard cash support to its less well-off members.

Founded in 1969, the Society for Neuroscience began — as every association does — as a group of people wanting to further a particular profession, the interests of those engaged in the profession, and the public interest. Half a century later the Society’s leadership has apparently forgotten its founders’ reasons for existence. Instead, it concentrates on self-perpetuation and expansion over fully supporting the community of practice.

Remembering that an association is, at its core, a set of agreements in people’s minds about supporting a community that is important to them is key to keeping the association relevant to the community it serves. Sadly, the Society for Neuroscience leadership has lost its way.

I wish the Society for Neuroscience was the only association whose leadership has forgotten that the core purpose of an association is to serve its members. Unfortunately, in my experience, such associations are common these days. Do you have other examples to share? Feel free to do so in the comments below.

How to become one with your association’s strategic goals

association's strategic goals: an animated gif of a person meditating by a rushing streamHow 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!

association's strategic goals

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 too.  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.