Getting to the real answer
Any association executive can tell you it's important to know why those members who have left the organization did so.
At her general session at ASAE & The Center's Membership and Marketing Conference, Terri Langhans said there's only two answers to that question:
1. The right answer. And,
2. The one that sounds good.
You know what she means. For a long time, the king of the hill was "no time," perhaps superseded recently by "can't afford it."
It's an answer, it's easy, and it usually closes the topic.
As Langhans would say, don't even bother asking the question if you're going to allow those kinds of answers to close the topic. You have to dig deeper. You may or may not get to the real answer, but without the real answer, you have no new information to help you help your organization.
Langhans' suggestion--follow up with this question: "I hear you, but is that the real reason? What is that you know that I couldn't possibly know that, if you were me doing this job, you'd want to know?"
Not sure how well this will get to the real answer -- I'm curious to know how others think they get the real answer.
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Comments
Glad to hear you quote her verbatim--I hadn't thought about it much on-site, but there are a couple issues I had with this vignette.
An unavoidable one of course is that it was designed to be conversational to help dramatize the keynote--a nice verbal communications technique but presenting a vignette that we so infrequently have in real life. How often do you get to have a face to face with a disaffected member (or employee or spouse) after they have already decided to leave? I think it's always important to recognize that non-renewal is not really a binary variable, shifting from 1 to 0 at a fixed point in time, but rather it reflects a gradual reduction in affinity, perceived relevance, etc. that culminates in a perceived status change. By the time you meet or call to actually speak with someone who's 'leaving' you get remote, relatively unengaged answers because they already left quite some time ago. And most of the time we're really asking these questions through less personal means such as surveys since we lack the necessary personal contact to have a real dialogue.
The other issue is that this is (counterproductively) bad questioning. Yes, do need to get deeper than 'time & money' (which are always what I hear from associations as their key takeaways from all their exit interviews!). But to ask for 'the real reason' up front, you're starting by challening the candor of the responder. And of course the convoluted followup is 'all about me vs. you'--tell me what you'd want to know if you were me couches something in personal and somewhat self-centered terms when the focus should be on what would have improved the individual's experience. There's not much point at all in asking a former member or customer to put themselves in your shoes as a way to probe more deeply into their own perceptions and issues. And unfortunately putting what should be an objective assessment in highly personal terms also makes it more likely that you'll get a strategic answer that spares your feelings when the honest answer would be more productive.
For some reason it brings to mind an old Bette Midler line in a movie 'Okay, enough about me. Let's talk about You. What do YOU think of me?' We want to show less narcissism if possible and to keep focusing objectively on what might have made things better for that person, past tense since we're almost always asking after the fact.
Posted by: Kevin Whorton | May 6, 2009 2:46 AM