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Suzanne Carawan

By: Suzanne Carawan on January 8th, 2016

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2016 Top Trend in Association Marketing: Embrace Digital Disruption

Association Industry Commentary | Workforce & Human Capital | Professional Development & Education

mailto:demo@example.com?Subject=HighRoad Solutions - interesting article

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The theme of ASAE's 2015 Tech Conference was digital disruption. Everyone seems to be talking digital, change management and now  the word, the process and the people who can cause disruption are hot, hot, hot. I've been the leading disruptor here at HighRoad for the last two years and responsible for not just evolving our own organization through the addition of our Inbound Digital practice, but also in working firsthand with clients to evolve digital communications and association marketing programs. 

Through my career, I've seen digital continuously disrupt and in this case, let's use the word "digital" in its broadest sense. I remember when content managment systems came in and disrupted organizations because now the staff needed to expose their content and thereby, their processes. This was followed by email and all of the backroom dealings in negotiating which department gets which block on the newsletter and on what day. Social media came in as another disruptor to push associations to realize that members have a voice and could vote not just with their feet, but with their public commentary. Then there was the abstract Cloud that came to disrupt our desktops and LAN/WAN thinking and software went subscription-based and user interfaces got (or should have got) pretty and easy-to-use. Mobile helped push that even further along so that the overall typical user expectation for a member of an association is the same for content as a Starbucks customer.

So while none of these digital technologies are new, the sands have shifted and there is a buzz of energy in the association world around digital disruption. Why now? 

It's the people part that's new. While the technologies have been here and actively in use, what's changed is that people have evolved past the adoption period and have entered in the application period. People are now asking "how can we use these tools better?", "how can we use these tools to solve x, y and z?" and "the tools got us the efficiencies we need so that now we want to go to the next step".

As we all know, the hardest part of change management is the people part. For HighRoad, we just returned from a first-ever, offsite all hands meeting in Orange Beach, Alabama (and hey--we had some skeptics, too, on going to Orange Beach, Alabama in January, but now those haters have firmly been turned into celebrators). We've undergone a tremendous amount of change at HighRoad in a relatively short amount of time and have greatly expanded our organization in every way--from staff to product offerings to services and we did this because the association market has been telling us that the piece that they really need is People.

Sure, you need the technology to be able to power the solution, but what you really need in a partner is an extension of your own organization who can bring new ideas and methodologies to the table. The big shift in digital that I've seen in the association market is the end of the Do It Yourself Era where associations' approach is to try and hire and/or build capacity internally to put together digital ecosystems and programs. While the DIY approach is so entrenched in the typical association mindset and the last decade has been dominated by tech purchases where the promise was that the tool would deliver the benefit and association staffers could just utilize the tool to obtain amazing results, we're seeing the sands shift in this area.

Smart organizations are realizing that the nature of digital knowledge needed to take the organization to the next step is very hard to find. HubSpot noted that only 20% of marketers in the field have the knowledge to practice inbound which is basically the methodology of combining all of the digital channels together in such a way as to grow your organization in a comprehensive manner that spans the full buyer's journey that goes from lead-to-revenue-to-evangelist.

People that really are digital marketers are a couple of things: 1) multi-disciplinary, 2) intensely curious, 3) self-driven and 4) require a lot of latitude to explore and experiment. Continual change and appreciation for change is in the DNA of every digital marketer, as is the appreciation and adoption of a continuously changing set of software products and technology environments that can be used as the channels for distributing content.

The top reason that clients choose HighRoad is because of our People and the fact that we're more than a tools company. Associations are sick of vendors who are pushing product-they want a solution and they don't want to have to write their own standard operating procedures and don't want to have to do it all themselves anymore. The biggest change I've seen in the association market in the last few years is a return to partnering with an outside organization to create new solutions. Unlike the early days of digital when associations were beholden to some fly-by-night web firm that controlled your website and were the only people that knew how to manage your DNS, modern day partnerships have evolved.

Our clients that have won awards this year have embraced us as an agency partner to use to quickly leapfrog their evolution instead of trying to hire within and build capacity within and learn on their own. Our clients see us as change agents that they can leverage to help take their staff and communications to a whole new level in a short timeframe.

We've evolved our staff to keep adding great talent and investing in our current staff to be able to provide innovative solutions that are founded in business strategy and delivered through technology. In fact, every single person at HighRoad, regardless of role, is HubSpot Inbound Certified and we did this as a way to open up to the staff all of the channels and thinking that is required to effectively participate in the modern marketplace.

This means associations, too. We spent 2015 going out into the North American association market to spread the word on what we mean by the modern marketplace and what today's consumers expect. We have been beating the drum to let associations know that buying a new technology platform is not going to provide the magic fixes that it might have delivered even five years ago. 

And why not?

People.

The modern marketplace is all about user experience which means that we need to understand the people and then drive the right experience to get the right results that we seek. Does your association actively seek out better understanding of its membership? Do you have initiatives to overhaul your annual event or newsletter or website to base it on user experience first? Are you investing in the solutions that will get you the analytics you need to allow you to read your membership and event attendee population? Have you disrupted your own organizational structure and budgets and goals to align with your membership? 

It's time to recognize that the sands of time have shifted as they inevitably will. Free your organization up to evolve, look to the sky and make 2016 your year of disruption.