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.
Rebecca,
Great insight. With a publication background and a deep love of print I can understand the reluctance to look up and see whats coming. While I am not sure print is ready to go away, there are so many opportunities for evolution and integration with new and conversational media.
Like you I work in the association and membership marketing areana. It will be interesting to see what the future brings.
The Rotary editors were fascinating and many of them from countries where print is very much alive and well and paying for itself. I hope they can take lessons from the pain association print publications in the US are enduring and plan for the digital integration that will make all the difference to the next generation of members.