LeaderConnect is the blog of Association Growth Partners, a division of Imagination Publishing. Here, Rebecca Rolfes and the AGP team will discuss the competitive forces impacting associations—such as globalization and technology—and the importance of using custom content to increase or maintain the relevance of their associations.
Passion Sells
29 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
“They have to advertise with us. We’re the association magazine.” An association executive actually said that to me once. That was before the recession but it was shocking even at the time. As I said in my book , “they” don’t have to do anything. They can take their ad dollars and their membership dues and their event registration fees and go anywhere they want.
Then this week, I sat in on a Vocus Webinar about trends in media where Rebecca Bredholt, Vocus managing editor for magazine content said that more associations are going to launch print magazines because the ability to deliver a highly targeted qualified audience is still a compelling message for advertisers.
Then, also this week, I saw the ad projections for the spring issue of one of our association magazines and heard that rep firms that traditionally relied on member goodwill to sell ads were having to beat the bushes a lot harder in an effort to find non-member advertisers.
According to everyone, niche magazines are where it’s at these days. Readers of niche and special-interest magazines are described as “cults.” About 12,000 readers of Paste actually donated $275,000 to keep the magazine they love afloat. Some of them actually had benefit concerts for the independent music magazine.
So here’s my question: if your association magazine has always been niche, if your readers can’t get what you publish anywhere else, if your cult is devoted to the subject matter, why are you struggling financially? It’s not necessarily easy—nothing is these days—but if you’re giving them what they want and can prove it, why don’t advertisers buy?
Possible reasons:
- Laziness. Lazy editorial and lazy ad reps. If your editorial is not cult-worthy, get out of the business. If you’re killing trees to tell readers who got elected to your board and to run pictures of your conference gala, get out of the business. If you’re publishing the same thing that your competing trade magazine publishes only not as good and not as timely, get out of the business. If your ad reps still rely on member goodwill, fire them. That scenario just hits your members for more money. They won’t get leads from it—they’re all in the same business so why would they buy from each other? If non-member advertisers don’t see your cult as worth reaching, your already dismal ad revenues will only get smaller.
- Not Going Where the Love Is. One of my old bosses used to use that expression. Play to the crowd that loves you. Specialize the hell out of it. Niche the niche into targeted audiences that they can’t reach any other way. If you’re trying to attract readers that are only marginally interested in what you offer, you’re spreading yourself too thin and won’t get anywhere anyway.
- Being All Things to All Readers. It’s tempting to plan a magazine that has something for everyone in an effort to attract readers and advertisers. Something for the C-suite as well as something for entry-level, something for manufacturers as well as something for academics; some thought leadership and some product reviews, some opinion and some how-to. Wrong. In the immortal words of the late Ann Richards, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road, but roadkill.” If you’re all things to all readers, you’re nothing special to anyone.
- Inagility. You publish what you’ve got or what’s on your editorial calendar instead of adjusting to what readers are really interested in. I saw an association magazine recently that led with an article about the shop floor. I talked to another that was considering a cover story about employee discipline. Readers just aren’t interested in that right now. They want to know how to keep their customers, how to maximize revenues. You could write about those two topics in every issue from now till the turnaround actually feels real and readers wouldn’t get tired of it. If your editorial is so evergreen that it is the journalistic equivalent of preservative-rich junk food—eat it now, eat it 10 years from now—you will not last much longer.
- Being Too Old-School. I’m a print journalist. I ascribe to John Updike’s words: To create content that results in “dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over…seems to me…a magical act, and a delightful technical process.” But dark marks on paper don’t attract revenues by themselves. Lead generation, audience management, e-commerce, content marketing can supplement traditional space advertising sales in ways that old print technology never could.
This is not a fun time to be in the publishing business but, look at it this way, you’ve got what everyone else in the business wants—a passionate audience. Passion sells, always has, always will.
It’s 2010. Do You Know Where Your Exhibitors Are?
28 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
Having just come back from a speech to the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributor’s Executive Council meeting, I’ve got meeting attendance on the brain. It’s down, in case you hadn’t heard. It’s way down in some industries, and not just because of the recession. Conventions, trade shows, conferences are becoming a commodity for a lot of industries. For the wholesalers, buying groups were already stealing their thunder and now are adding networking in ways that really undercut their value propositions as premier networking venues.
The business model was already pretty wonky. Matt Rowan, executive director of the Health Industry Distributors Association is trying to change the 80-20 model where 80% of revenues are eaten up by shipping, logistics, booth companies, AV providers, etc. and only 20% ends up in the association’s pockets. He’s coming up with packages for his biggest exhibitors which save them 20% and allow the association to keep 50% of the revenues. “We’ve gotten into the booth-building business,” Rowan said. That was only one example from his “power package” idea that will give exhibitors what they want: “not more relationships but deeper relationships.”
“We were slaves to the number of attendees, the number of booths, the square footage,” Rowan said. “Now the metric is how many meetings exhibitors hosted. There’s meeting space in each booth along ‘Main Street’ plus private meeting spaces around the periphery of the hall. Exhibitors want to know who they’re meeting with even before they come to town.”
The makeup of HIDA’s attendees fit the dance card approach very well. Buyers can select sellers they’d like to talk to and vice versa so that everyone’s dance card fills up and HIDA has a basis for pricing.
John Garfinkel, executive director of the International Sanitary Supply Association, has managed to maintain attendance at or near the same levels as prior to the recession by opening the doors to service providers and end users through alliances with other associations.
These are only two ideas. I’m part of a major study that will look for more.
Fast Future Research’s Convention 2020 just kicked off and will look at the future of live events, venues and meeting destinations. The study’s site allows anyone to contribute their thoughts via a Trend Wiki. The study will run through October so that meeting planners can make better decisions this year for future meetings. After we gather everyone’s input, participants will be able to vote on which trends they see as most likely. I hope you’ll join up.
Are You the Establishment?
21 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
We all hear so much about associations’ difficulty in attracting younger members. They don’t want to hang with the old folks. They have different demands on their time. They’re not at the point in their careers when association membership typically occurs. They’re inventing their own version of community online. The economic downturn means that companies will not subsidize membership for junior staff, and promotions and raises are slower in coming.
All true, or at least partially true. All remediable.
Young professionals sections, career development opportunities, active social networking, entry-level and even job hunter membership rates can go a long way to overcoming the recruitment obstacles of simple demographics. All tactics employed by smart associations, many of which still have trouble attracting the next generation.
So what’s really holding them back?
I was reading something that mentioned “the establishment.” It’s very difficult these days to know what that means, who that is. Bill Clinton called Obama “the establishment candidate” (when Hilary was running against him) and just to prove how nebulous the term is, the New Republic called Mitt Romney the same thing and Jon Stewart said the same of Mrs. Clinton. Vanity Fair ranks the New Establishment of 100 technology power brokers every year while the New York Times says that the establishment is vanishing. But for the sake of argument, let’s say “the establishment” is whoever is currently in charge.
Is that you? Think about it. Aren’t associations in charge of making sure that the status quo stays the status quo? You have to protect and serve the members you have. They are the establishment in your industry or your profession. They don’t really want anything to change. They know it will but, as much as possible, their own interests focus on staying right where they are doing exactly what they’re doing. And then something like the recession comes along that forces change and makes everyone extremely uncomfortable.
Granted it’s not a comfortable situation but maybe part of the problem is that we are so unused to change and how to deal with it. We spend far too much time and energy protecting the current state of affairs. If we expended half that in leading members toward the inevitable changes, we would serve them better in knowing how to deal with unforeseen changes. And, I’ll argue, that in the process, we’d attract younger members. If associations were positioned less as “the establishment,” against which youth always rebels, and more as the agents and partners of change, they would be the dynamic, progressive forces that young people long to be part of.
We’ve all heard Mahatma Ghandi’s dictum, “Be the change.” I’ve already blogged about it once. Young people understand on some level that they are the force of change. If you’re not comfortable with that, they won’t be comfortable with you.
Trend to Mobile
18 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
According to a new study of media platforms, marketers are using one of three techniques to pay for their use of social media.
- They’re diverting money from the traditional media budget.
- They’re shifting funds from other marketing communications budgets.
- They’re creating an incremental budget.
The study by the Association of National Advertisers, B2B Magazine and the marketing services firm mktg shows that social media and viral video have seen the largest jumps in usage over last year. There are some interesting differences between B2B and B2C marketers that apply to B2B and B2C associations as well.
- B2B marketers have not embraced mobile to the extent that B2C has.
- B2B marketers prefer LinkedIn to Facebook.
- Webinars are found to be effective by a very high percentage of B2B marketers.
Mobile and viral video are set to take off among B2B marketers, the study says. Associations would do well to jump on that trend. Those with lots of members who do not use computers during the day are finding it difficult to communicate with members in a world where print is dying and push vehicles like email may never be read. These days everyone has a cell phone, however, and mobile could be the next huge wave in member communications platforms.
Lost Generation
13 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
I’ve been to two association clients’ events this week and people are a lot more cheerful now than they were a year ago. Both of these are industries that literally fell off the cliff and the companies are still dealing with the impact. One guy talked about how both the value of his business and the value of his house had gone to zero. The partners in his firm are “wearing tools”; they no longer manage people who do the work, they’re doing the work themselves. But they’ve survived and the feeling was that recession is the mother of innovation.
The problem for them and for associations is that they may have lost a generation. They laid people off and they didn’t hire. New graduates or people who lost their jobs may have had to leave the profession or the industry altogether. Reinvention is great but that leaves everyone with a dip in enrollment at the end of the decade.
One guy said that his company would hire the class of 2011 and that they will get better jobs with more responsibility and more autonomy. In the meantime, he loses that injection of energy and drive and ambition. And where does that leave the 10% of unemployed, and the classes of 2009 and 2010? Where does that leave the associations that would have recruited some of them to membership?
It leaves them with the need for innovation. How can you better serve the members you’ve got? What new ideas bring both benefits to them and revenues to you?
The Open Source Association
8 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
Associations Now asked me to contribute an essay, Visions for the Future of Associations, for its January cover story about what associations will be in 2030. Crystal ball gazing is fun and, by 2030, I will be in my 80s so no one will be able to point out whether I was right or wrong.
I think the future of associations is open-source. Members will create the experience they want. As Erick Peterson, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and head of the Seven Revolutions Initiative, says “Information should be not only available to all, but also modifiable by all.”
This means that associations will be:
- Able to delegate more of the management of innovation to outside sources
- Characterized by interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaborations
- Less vertical
- Organized into multiple administrative models to meet the needs of a diverse array of challenges and opportunities
- More flexible and better able to rapidly redeploy resources when and how members need them
An open-source association would expand its current volunteer infrastructure to the full industry or professional ecosystem—vendors, customers, suppliers, labor force, etc. With better, Web-based tools and a secure environment in which to work, they will form a third party platform with no stake in the outcome.
This will necessitate a huge cultural shift that I think is already under way. To use open source, you have to be open. The products and services developed by the open-source community need to be vetted by the larger membership so that everyone can reap the benefits. But you can’t control the process. You have to be open to the possibilities.
An open-source association brings a lot of smart people together and gives them a problem worth solving. The association expands in ways we’ve not seen before.
Read the full article: Visions for the Future of Associations
Kindleization
7 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
Full disclosure to start: I print every one of these links out and read them on paper as I prepare a blog post. I just don’t like reading on the screen. The screen is for work; paper is for reading. As we continue in the inexorable march toward e-readers rather than print, I will be like those people in airports looking for a pay phone.
However, some of the new digital mash ups that they say will be the future of magazine publishing are very exciting. Sports Illustrated obviously used a very talented print designer, a content strategist and a fantastic user experience expert to come up with its ideas of what the future digital edition will look like.
Wired, naturally, also has some way cool ideas of the future of magazine design and interactivity.
What publishers want from e-readers is control of their relationship with readers and advertisers and the revenue streams that they have traditionally enjoyed. They want to go back to getting paid for what they do rather than giving it away online for nothing. Device makers like Apple and Amazon want to go the iPod route, where they broker the deal with publishers for content and sell it themselves.
What readers want is what they want. I subscribe to the Economist and the New York Times. I don’t want to have to buy two devices to get what I want. There will be the inevitable fall-out that always happens with new hardware but the initial messy battle for position makes consumers want to scream “You’re not the boss of me.”
First huge problem for device makers and publishers: I can get what you’re going to try to sell me for nothing on your website or someone else’s. Unless Sports Illustrated takes down a lot of the content on its own website and everyone else’s, why would I pay for it? You can’t boss me around. If I want the Kentucky-Louisville basketball score (Go, Big Blue!) I will find it the day of the game a lot of places.
Second huge problem: I don’t want another hunk of plastic to lug around. There will be mobile applications, of course, but that’s another rant for another day. The market for these things doesn’t exist and between the Kindle and the QUE and whatever else they’re hawking at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, I’m willing to wait till the dust settles before I cough up several hundred dollars.
Maybe it won’t come to a battle of devices. Hearst is working with Skiff ( formerly FirstPaper) to create a digital newsstand where you will be able to get whatever you want on the device of your choice. Time Inc. is working with Hulu to do much the same.
This sounds promising but it will take a long time for the millions of people who subscribe and buy print publications to fall in love with and buy another hunk of plastic.
Associations Left Behind?
Where does this leave associations? Unless you’re the AARP which has 225 staffers on its communications team, you will probably default to your website. You stop publishing your print periodical and put it all on your site.
First huge problem for associations: Same as for for-profit publishers: you lose the revenue streams. Digital ad dollars are tiny and won’t pay for the analog work that goes into creating the high quality content your members expect. You will have to password-protect all the content so you can still charge your members a subscription as part of the membership fee. This deprives you of the SEO benefits of all that good content and puts a barrier up in front of it that many members just won’t want to deal with.
Second huge problem: You’re not staffed for this. Even if you’re publishing a fantastic print magazine, your staff’s skills are not transferable. You’ll still need to create content but you’ll also need the user experience person and the content strategist and a whole lot of other people that you just don’t have.
Third really huge problem: If your industry trade publication is already a major competitive force, they will become even stronger and you will be less able to compete. If they can afford to do this and you can’t, you really will be left in the dust.
One sort of opportunity: Digimags are posting pretty good numbers and are recognized by BPA as legitimate circulation. Problem is and always has been that they appeal most successfully to people with a preference for electronic sources. They have not been able to convert print lovers into screen lovers. Essentially, it’s the print magazine online which does not make the best use of either medium. They save trees but they have not reinvented the print industry as e-readers may do.
One really big opportunity: Association publishers need to get in on the Time-Hulu action or something like it. Does there need to be a digital newsstand just for association publications? Should ASAE or SNAP do it?
Help from, You Guessed It, Associations
There is some guidance out there from the major publishing associations.
- The Magazine Publishers Associations is turning its annual Magazines 24/7 into a themed event about the e-reading revolution.
- The Newspaper Association of America offers a library of digital media resources which includes a “planbook” for reinventing print newspapers for digital platforms.
- American Business Media restructured its Business Information Network to include data about B2B digital spending.
Isn’t reinvention fun?
Survivors to My Right. Survivors to My Left.
30 Dec 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
I want to talk about survival. I’ve been reading those same year-end lists of bests and worsts, those same looks back over the year or the decade, all those complaints about how awful it’s all been. And I have to tell you, they’re wrong.
This was not a rotten decade—no 10 year span is. Yes, if you live in Iraq and the war’s been going on for 8 years, it’s pretty rotten. Yes, if you live in a refugee camp in any of the hopeless tent cities of the world, it’s ghastly. Yes, if you live in a country with an endless cycle of war lords and famine and terror, it is awful and may never get better.
But for most of us, that is not the case. Most of us have it pretty good.
This is the decade when the Dow doubled. I’d go through that again. This is the decade when emerging economies truly emerged. India may be a chaotic place but you can feel the energy, the power, the drive. This is the decade when the UN declared 2005 International Year of Microcredit and studies began to see whether microloans have long-term impacts on women’s empowerment, education, mortality rates in addition to the short-term effects on living standards. This is the decade when hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs decided to go for it, lousy credit market notwithstanding. This is the decade when Warren Buffet bought a railroad. A railroad for pity sake! It may be retrograde but it’s green and it’s a huge vote of confidence in the future of economic prosperity.
Media as we know it sped towards its demise but millions of people listen to music on iPods (2001), millions of children fell in love with reading when Harry Potter (1997-2008) appeared, millions listened to their news via podcasts (2004), more than 112,000,000 bloggers, according to Technorati, turned themselves into journalists.
Media delivery changed but creativity will never die.
We had a lot of disasters: the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Sichuan, China, and, of course, the bombing of the World Trade Center. But H1N1 has not been the global pandemic we feared. Y2K did not bring the world to its knees. Drugs developed in the last decade allow people with HIV/AIDS to live otherwise healthy, productive lives. Some people every year are tragically unlucky. Their house is the one that blows away in the hurricane or sits in the path of the wild fire.
But most of us are not. Most of us are very lucky indeed. A good friend of mine lost his father two days before Christmas. Another friend had an extended family member in his 40s drop dead while shoveling snow. Puts things in perspective.
Sierra Leone ended 10 years of civil war with its first free election. Racism in the United States did not end but we elected a multi-racial man president and a Latina joined the Supreme Court. A newly constructed Reichstag opened in unified Germany. It’s taken all of my adulthood but women now make up half of the US workforce.
There is still a lot wrong with the world. Almost half the world population, more than 3 billion people, live on less than $2.50 a day. More will join them if we cannot control unemployment and create opportunities where none exist. Climate change is creating global havoc.
But flip what you heard at freshman orientation: Look to your right; look to your left. The three of you are survivors. The first decade of the 21st century was the decade of survival. Congratulations, you made it.
Annus Horribilis
22 Dec 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
It has not been a great year. A lot of very bad things happened to good people. Two wars, the recession, high unemployment…well, you’ve heard about all that. I will not now bore you with Pollyanna’s rosy outlook but I would like to offer a year-end look at why I think we’ll get back to something like an annus mirabilis. John Dryden’s poem after all was written about 1666, the year of London’s Great Fire and the plague. Dryden’s point was that it could have been worse. So just as the glass is always half empty or full, it could also always be better. I see reason to believe it will.
- I make microloans through Kiva. I try to find women entrepreneurs in countries I’ve visited and loan them $50. I’ve been loaning the same $50 since my daughter set up an account for me on my birthday a couple of years ago. Five or six women have benefited from that $50, the most recent paying it back pennies at a time by selling tamales in a market. Now a lady named Noellie born on Christmas day in Africa will use it to buy coolers for her frozen fish business. The lesson here is that you cannot keep small businesses down. Cannot! Entrepreneurship is the engine that runs every economy, even in countries where the barriers to opening a business are huge. Small businesses have something that no salary can buy: passion. They want it bad. They want it enough to work longer, harder and over more years than anyone else. Yes, a lot of them fail, especially when credit is tight and banks are stingy and markets collapse. But it is absolutely impossible to keep them down.
- My industry is going up in flames. The death knell for print journalism started tolling years ago but the recession set a torch to the pyre. Layoffs in newsrooms, the disappearance of entire professions within the industry, the closure of storied titles make this an extremely bad time to be part of the Fourth Estate. Much as this pains me, we are in fact living through “the greatest explosion in personal self-expression of all time,” according to Clay Shirky. Web 2.0, the read-write Web, enables everyman to be a journalist and, in the great tradition of Ben Franklin and citizen journalism, he is making use of the possibilities. And far from marking the death of good writing, the era is also improving literacy. Turns out that students now write more outside the classroom than in, what Andrea Lunsford, head of the Stanford Study of Writing, calls “life writing.” They write for an audience and have a much better sense of what that audience wants and how they want it—something they teach entire courses on in journalism school. Print is also a “stupid way” to deliver information, according to Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive editor online of The Wall Street Journal. Who knows whether we will all buy Condé Nast’s snazzy device that will make Sports Illustrated a mash-up of TV, print and talk radio? But we’ll buy something. Journalism won’t die and a lot of trees will live.
- We will turn off Facebook. And Twitter and texting and…and…and. Well, not literally, at least not in all cases. I recently did a post about our over consumption of media and much as I’d like a little break from the bombardment of information, I don’t see new media platforms being silenced. But I do see a rather desperate search for a respite from the cacophony of modern life. There are several books on how to find focus in the midst of it all. Rapt by Winifred Gallagher says, “You cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.” A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland finds the joy, the peace, the calm of being still, if only for moments at a time.
So as the year closes, take a deep breath. Be calm. Be joyful. We will be fine.
