Chapter One Summary

1. Your members are expecting you to be digital-first. Especially your new and future members who will measure their experience against their other digital and social media experiences.
2. Digital associations have databases linked throughout the organization that are updated in real time.
3. A digital association tries new tactics and strategies and adopts successes quickly and discards failures even faster.
4. An association leader of a digital-first association is bold open and curious.
5. Your website is the hub for everything. All other digital channels are used to funnel the user back to the website for a controlled brand experience where it is simple to find, consume and act on content that members (and prospective members) need.
6. Digital associations have a constant flow of great multimedia (video, podcast, webinar, document) content and use a platform integrated into their website to keep the experience on brand while allowing for the distribution and measurement of each content piece.
7. A digital association is positioning their technology and data management with AI to personalize the experience for members as appropriate.
8. The board supports rapid experimentation, learning and adoption.
9. Becoming a digital-first association is more of a cultural change rather than a technical one. Why first, how second.

Chapter Two Summary

1. Understanding the why of your association is the key to engaging and inspiring members.
2. If the why is not clear to you, it won’t be clear to your members.
3. How content is presented about your why will determine the member’s buy in.
4. Members consume content by, scanning, deciding, consuming, and finally, acting on that content.
5. Where do you rank on Google when you search for your why?
6. Members join your association for educational content that delivers on the why.
7. Deliver a variety of multimedia content formats on your very best content and use omnichannel distribution to make it easy for members and prospects to find, consume, engage and act. Give “read, watch and listen” formats to appeal to all members’ tastes and preferences.
8. Measure your engagement and incorporate member feedback in your content planning for continual improvement and watch your engagement grow. When engagement grows, so do the 3 R’s - retention, recruitment and revenues.

Chapter Three Summary

1. NexGen is defined as generations X, Y, and Z.
2. They expect a mobile-first experience.
3. The Internet is about giving first and asking second.
4. Content needs to be visual and entertaining.
5. Only post micro-marketing content on social platforms that drive viewers back to your site – or risk social media making you irrelevant.

6. Make your website a hub of free micro-learning content. Then deliver long-form or specialized content as member-only or subscription-based (or both).
7. Because free is expected, leverage sponsors who are looking to sponsor content your members are consuming.

Chapter Five Summary

1. Social media should be measured in conversions, not likes.
2. Your social media strategy needs to align with your overall content strategy. Social media is not about posting content – it is the marketing of your real content on your website.
3. Social media platforms use Artificial Intelligence to learn about your members habits and preferences.
4. Social media platforms will serve content to your members that is competitive to your message and brand.
5. Social media platforms redirect your members by serving up advertisements around and after your posts.
6. Post micro-marketing content on social that drives your member/prospect back to your website where you can control the user experience.
7. Make the experience on your website rich with natural “next steps” the way social media does – and watch engagement grow.

Many associations share too much of their full content on social media, allowing artificial intelligence to learn more about their members then they do. By doing this, they are funding their competitor. Realizing this, but also understanding that they shouldn’t ignore social media as a recruitment tool, the American Society for Quality (ASQ) releases a short (30-seconds or less) episode to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This post drives traffic to a micro-learning (3 to 5-minute educational episode) that they post on their website. The social media, or “micro-marketing,” releases have created awareness and traffic back to ASQ’s environment where prospective members can learn and engage with them directly.

Chapter Six Summary

1. Understand the difference between member benefits and the benefits that are the primary drivers of membership.
2. Survey members and analyze data to find out what the drivers are.
3. Only 15% of your members are attending your conferences.
4. Capture your conference digitally and repurpose it appropriately for digital engagement to offer content to members that don’t attend.
5. Give existing members the same if not better content experience compared to prospects.
6. Measure your content consumption and adjust continually.
7. Centralize content planning by engaging all departments to create one content calendar based on a larger strategy.
8. It takes more than four times the resources to get a new member than to retain one.
9. Long-term members spend more than new members.

Chapter Seven Summary

1. Marketing departments are now controlling sponsorships.
2. Sponsors now have to show a return on investment and be measurable.
3. Sponsors want to be known as experts to your members.
4. Your sponsor’s marketing departments are looking to you as content creators and content distribution experts. If you don’t offer this, they will turn to the Internet to find other means to reach your members.
5. Negotiating an annual sponsorship buy over multiple events is just as easy as negotiating for one event. Make it easy for sponsors to plan with you for an entire year or more.
6. By planning to video appropriate content at a conference or event, you can save money on filming, production and content versioning. This content plan can be pre-sold to sponsors in advance or forecasted as subscription or pay-per-view revenue, to turn your video and multimedia offerings from a cost-center into a profit-center.

Chapter Eight Summary

1. Members want individualized content choices like they get with Netflix.
2. Content choices should include length, media type, and category.
3. Enough content programming must be offered so the member finds the service worthy of their monthly or annual fee.
4. Once a member chooses a category, send them visually stimulating emails promoting new content within that space.
5. Niche content production means that same content can be repurposed for segmented recruitment.

Chapter Nine Summary

1. Instill a culture that embraces constant change.
2. Add vendor partners as co-owners of major change initiatives to insulate from employee turnover and continual delays.
3. Use vendors to help educate your boards to avoid delays in decision making. It will demonstrate to your board that although new and cutting edge, multimedia is probably not the first change implementation and is less risky when seen in this context.
4. Create centralized content that has buy-in and input from all departments.
5. If you don’t have internal resources to leverage content capture and production from your conferences, then partner with a vendor to assist with content development, production and deployment.

Next Steps

We have provided a free tool to help organizations shift from departmental and medium-centric planning to holistic and association wide content strategy. This tool is called the Association TV Online Playbook and takes less than 30 minutes for you and your colleagues to identify content opportunities in each department. A video-first planning model lowers the overall cost of production, drives multimedia assets and allows for omnichannel distribution and mobile consumption.

We hope this inspires your organization to move from Analog to Digital and leverage the practices that will improve your 3R’s - retention, recruitment and revenue.