Archive for the ‘Association Magazines’ Category
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.
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?
Focus on the Mission Not the Members
10 Nov 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
I’ve been thinking a lot about business models—not in concrete terms but as they play into what organizations in general are struggling with. We can’t reinvent healthcare because it would cost businesses more money. We can’t reinvent climate legislation because it would put a lot of companies out of business. In other words, the business models that exist worked when they were put in place but even if they are no longer appropriate to our needs, dismantling them in favor of something else—something untried—is terrifying and disruptive.
There are several very large companies that own the energy industry. They’re not evil companies (not all of them anyway); they’re not all against legislation to rectify climate change. But they can’t just vote themselves out of existence.
A couple of months ago, I interviewed Paul Anderson for one of our magazines. He’s a former C-level executive with several huge companies in the energy, automotive and metals industries. He cited the example of a new technology that was being developed while he was CEO of BHP Billiton in Australia. It would have displaced conventional blast furnaces.
“But we had blast furnaces,” he said. “In essence, it would have made everything we had obsolete.” Instead, they entered into a joint venture with another company. “We put it into a market other than our own and obsoleted the blast furnaces over there.”
Associations too are struggling with revamping outdated business models, models built on print publications, live meetings, controlled messaging. Just as people develop an unlimited appetite for content—anytime, anywhere, round-the-clock—the business model that pays the people who create that content falls apart.
That’s part of association’s we-can’t-do-this-because mentality. It doesn’t fit in the business model; there’s no way to pay for it and we don’t have the time or the resources to just go for it.
Kevin Holland, division VP for business operations and membership at the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, writes in Associations Now that associations look alike and provide similar services—meetings, publications, etc.—because that’s the way they’re built now. He worries that they will substitute webinars for meetings, blogs for newsletters and call it reinvention.
So how do you build a new house while you’re still living in the old one? How do you rip out the foundation without having the whole structure come down on your head? How do you “obsolete” someone else’s business rather than your own?
This is going to sound like heresy but focus on your mission instead of your members. Focus on what you’re trying to accomplish together rather than who’s doing it.
“Our growth is based on what we do not on who we do it for,” says Stephen Lieber CAE, president and CEO of the Healthcare Information Management Society. “No one asks the question ‘what have you done for me lately,’ instead it’s ‘what have we done to improve the delivery of healthcare through technology.’ The focus is on the end result not on the individuals or companies working to achieve that result.”
HIMSS has grown from $9 million in revenues to $42 million in the last nine years but only increased membership from 17,000 to 23,000. Mission-based programs are the difference; dues are only 10% to 12% of overall revenues.
IEEE is taking over production of IBM’s online Journal of Research and Development. The association is one of the largest publishers of engineering, computing and technology information, so leveraging their publishing infrastructure gives them a new business model that helps accomplish their mission of “advancing innovation and technological excellence for the benefit of humanity.”
According Naveen Maddali, the association’s online services product manager “IEEE has a vision of becoming a leading resource of technology and innovation, and growing our portfolio of content will lead that. The IBM journals directly fit into this plan. Additionally, the high quality content in these journals represents a nice revenue opportunity for both IEEE and IBM.”
What are you trying to accomplish? If you could start from scratch, what would you do to accomplish that goal? Forget what you do now. What would make the most sense in this brave, new reinventable world? Are you the one who’s going to be made obsolete?
The Future Is Just Like the Past
10 Jul 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
I’m getting ready to speak at the Rotary International conference next week in Montreal. The audience will be the editors and publishers of Rotary’s magazines from around the world. Rotary headquarters in Evanston, Ill., publishes the Rotarian, the flagship magazine, but, with 32,000 clubs in 200 countries, no one publication can serve all readers.
Rotary is, in fact, an excellent example of a truly global association—not a U.S. association with a few international members and not one with a few offices in places where the population is wealthy enough to make it worth their while. Rotary is completely local in every one of those countries and to every one of those clubs.
They inspired the lead to my book, The Competition Within, when I saw a Rotary welcome sign in Patagonia, Argentina, only a couple of years after seeing a similar sign in Patagonia, Arizona.
The topic of my speech is the future of associations and what that will mean for association publishing. Rotary’s average member is 58 years old, very much a print-friendly group, and my audience will be mostly print publication professionals. But we all know that’s not the future.
So I started to do a little research. ASAE published something about the “bright and glittering technofuture of association publishing” in 1994 which did a surprisingly good job of predicting things like the Kindle and the digital magazine.
Lisa Junker, editor of Associations Now, recently did a blog post on the subject. She encouraged association publishers to ask themselves a few questions about future competition, delivering value, content partnerships, digital-only publications and the continuing viability of print.
Interestingly, nowhere did I see any mention of the only constant in this not-so-bright and not-so-glittering future with fewer and fewer advertisers and less and less printed matter. Print publications everywhere—newsstand publishers as well as associations—seem to have lost track of the only thing that matters: the reader.
First rule of journalism: Who is the reader.
The free press started because of “the public’s right to know.” It didn’t say anything about content or delivery mechanism; it was about the readers and their access to information.
The future of association publishing has a lot less to do with technology and a lot more to do with demographics. Who is your member now? Who will your member be? What should you do to serve the core of members you have? What should you be changing and preparing for to serve the members you will have in the future?
Readers (synonymous with members for associations) come to media today with very high expectations and really short attention spans. Any Google search will lead them to thousands of links, much more information than you can possibly cram into one print issue or one digital upload.
The future of association publishing is in doing what extremely high quality journalism has always done: hook them with something they either genuinely didn’t know, otherwise find compelling or really great to look at. After 30 years in the business, I know exactly how hard—verging on impossible—that is to do consistently but that’s the big secret. Know your reader and then serve them better than anyone else.
Association Lessons from E-tail
14 May 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
We do a publication for the Healthcare Financial Management Association. Its aim is to demonstrate that reforming healthcare isn’t a big mystery. There are many smart people in the industry with excellent ideas who see the problems and know what to do about them, but they aren’t talking to each other. Insurance companies, doctors, nurses, administrators, politicians, patients all can contribute to making healthcare more affordable, more responsive and more universal.
Reforming/reinventing associations should, if anything, be simpler but seems a mystery to many. Or possibly the way forward is clear but the path is too painful to start down and so associations are stuck in place.
Healthcare has learned a lot from retail. Think about it: You walk into the Gap, someone greets you, there’s music playing, the lighting is easy on your eyes, it smells good, you can easily find what you want. A few years ago, you’d walk into a hospital or a doctor’s office and it smelled like disinfectant, the lighting was harsh, the chairs were uncomfortable and the magazines were ancient. If you weren’t feeling well, you instantly began to feel worse. Little doc-in-a-box clinics appeared, places where you didn’t need an appointment, the wait was short, the plants were live and the receptionist smiled at you.
A few months ago, I did a post called Retail Therapy for Associations and I’ve kept thinking about what retail, or more specifically e-tail, can teach associations.
Then I came across AVA Living and I asked myself, how is it different from an association? It’s a beautiful site for interior designers and consumers whose aim is to connect the two and dramatically increase the market for design services by “10,000 times,” says Founder David Bassett-Parkins. You have to join (free) and, if you’re a designer, you have to qualify for membership. Designers can see each other’s work and communicate directly with each other, sharing best practices and asking for advice. There is community, content, knowledge sharing all with the ultimate goal of helping interior designers do their jobs better and get more customers.
How is this different from the two largest interior design associations, the American Society of Interior Design and the International Interior Design Association ? I’m not saying that either of them is doing a bad job. IIDA is one of my clients and I think they’re fantastic. Both of these organizations have traditional association business models, however, and, as we all know, that model was already under threat and the recession is making matters a whole lot worse.
AVA Living has none of that legacy to undo so has been free to invent a new business model.
Only 25% of interior designers have a website, according to Bassett-Parkins. Most are small firms that rely on referrals to get business. There’s an automatic limit to their growth because they’re local. Firms in small towns will remain small regardless of the design talent, for instance. Designers believe that if they could only educate consumers about the benefits of good design, they could convert them to customers. Consumers, however, are more interested in buying products than paying to be educated. Designers charge by the hour so find it difficult to give prospective customers a firm price. Finding a designer who can and will answer the one question you have is difficult.
AVA Living has concentrated on building a community of designers in its first 18 months, now “in the thousands.” Instead of needing their own sites, a designer can set up a profile that will be seen my consumers all over the world. The basis of the interaction is called Designer Room Review. A consumer submits photos of a room and selects a designer to critique it. The designer rates the room on 5 criteria and writes a review.
“This gives them something to talk about,” Bassett-Parkins says. “The consumer may only want conceptual design services and not even get into furniture. They want only what they want. Consumers are afraid that the designer will do something they don’t like and they’ll have to plop down a whole lot of money. This service is standardized.”
Now the business model: Right now the site carries luxury advertising but that is “but one of the revenue streams that will be developing,” Bassett-Parkins says. Suppliers will be brought into the fold and designers will be able to specify products to be delivered directly to the consumer: paint in a specific shade, a sofa with exactly this upholstery. Eventually, AVA Living will sell its own products and there will be the usual retail mark up.
The limits on the designer’s business just disappeared. The ongoing customer conversation is happening, the designer is selling expertise but the consumer is buying a product they understand. The location of the two parties is immaterial. “The market here is huge,” Bassett-Parkins says, “but it’s going to explode in China. That is not business most American designers would ever be able to go after.”
There are obvious reasons why a non-profit can’t go as far as AVA Living has gone. But associations have supplier members that are interested in the core membership for purely commercial reasons. Professional associations of all sorts try to help consumers find reputable, qualified practitioners. If associations thought of themselves more as a marketplace of goods and services and less of an idea bazaar, their value propositions would become a lot more compelling. And they would open themselves up to new ideas about business models that are sustainable in a new reinvented future.
Forward March-April 2009
25 Mar 2009
by Michelle O'Hagan
The March/April 2009 issue of Forward magazine hits mailboxes next week. Forward is a trade association magazine from Association Growth Partners that provides a global perspective on the metals industry for members of MSCI. The March/April issue focuses on confidence and the economy.
Forward Magazine, March/April 2009
