Read this now, or maybe when you have time
"Maybe we should start a book club."
Have you found yourself saying this, or hearing it? Just recently I heard these words in a meeting, met with a positive response by all in the room.
Today in the session "Using Ambassadors to Increase Membership," staff of the Alliance for Innovation discussed the book club that they created for their member ambassadors (the spokespeople of their organization among colleagues), part of an overall effort to increase engagement. After a while, the Alliance for Innovation did a survey of how the ambassador program was progressing and the value of their benefit offerings--their blog, e-learning, and book club.
And as it turns out, the book club was competing with a very valuable member asset: time. The ambassadors said they have no time to read the books. So instead of scrapping the book club plan altogether, Alliance for Innovation decided to increase engagement with ambassadors by finding out their favorite reads on innovation and making a reading list from those titles. They also decided to invite more guest speakers to discuss the books and create webinars around the revamped list.
There are two things that stood out to me with their book club revamp. One is that they listened to members, made the survey public, and are showing an effort to change to reflect the feedback received, a major theme throughout the sessions I've been to so far.
The second point is the idea of competing with, basically anything and everything, for members' time. Working on the magazine and newsletters, we know that our audience is a busy group of people and between work and personal life have little time to spare. One of the most important things about member offerings is proving that they're worth members' time. What makes your association worthy of a member's time?
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Comments
Or how about the idea of asking members to write one page summaries of the key learnings from the books they put on the recommended list and sharing those with the community that is too busy to read the original?
Posted by: Mark J. Golden, CAE | March 8, 2010 5:37 PM
Thanks for the comment, Mark. When dealing with volunteers, I think that association professionals need to take a minute to consider how time consuming a project may be. That's why getting feedback from those volunteers is so valuable, so you can really tailor what you offer to suit their needs. In this particular instance, I viewed it as making flexible options available for participation while making members feel ownership by including them in the decision-making process. I agree that there's only so much you can ask from someone, especially a volunteer.
Posted by: Summer Faust | March 8, 2010 8:14 PM