Why association marketing stinks
"You need to share with people what they want to hear, not what you want to shout at them."
That was said by Charlene Li in her general session at the annual meeting. If you have just a moment, skip down to the bottom of this post and watch the 2 minute, 41-second video from the last Marketing & Membership Conference.
I used to hold the opinion that just about everyone in an organization was part marketer. I'm ready to abandon that now. Oh, I still believe in the sentiment, but there doesn't appear to be any real change on the horizon. Associations are still supremely guilty of shouting out what they want their public to hear, rather than entering into dialog and informing. The term marketing has a bad connotation—it is the shouting, the blah, blah blah, the interruption, and it all wreaks of desperation. So now I'm ready to jettison the term. Just lose it from the vocabulary. While we're at it, if there is any product or service that needs marketing, then get rid of that, too.
It's time to stop thinking about marketing, replacing it with informing and engaging in dialog. It's what our members want from us. They didn't join to be marketed to; they didn't join to be sold to. They joined to be part of community. If you need more marketing than that, it's time to rethink what you're doing.
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Comments
But people also join to access the information and knowledge that will help them do their job. Appropriate marketing can help pojnt us in the direction of those materials.
But as you note, too often the price of getting the one marketing piece that contains something you really want or need is to wade through many others that are completely irrelevant.
ASAE is a classic example. The Gov Relations and Finance materials have no relevance for me and my work, but I can't (as far as I can tell) unsubscribe to getting those materials without losing access to emails and brochures for other publications that might be of interest.
Why is it so difficult for organizations to have a checkbox system where members can say :Do tell me about this, but don't tell me about this"? Are people afraid we'll just completely unsubscribe from everything?
Posted by: Jeffrey Cufaude | August 22, 2009 10:32 AM
Jeffrey, you raise a good point. Associations should strive to segment their email messaging so that members may opt out of *some* email without opting out of all of it.
While some of my clients do this well, most associations struggle with this for three reasons:
1) it requires thinking about and creating the appropriate segments
2) it requires having the right technology and using it correctly and
3) it requires the association to admit to themselves that there are things the association produces that some members don't care about. (This may be the toughest one, psychologically.)
Wes Trochlil
Author, Put Your Data to Work: 52 Tips and Techniques for Effectively Managing Your Database, published by ASAE
Posted by: Wes Trochlil | August 22, 2009 3:33 PM