Once more my notes from the Avectra Users & Developers Conference (AUDC) reveal interesting nuggets of share-worthy insight from speakers like David Nour. I attended two of David’s sessions: the keynote based on his latest book Return on Impact: Leadership Strategies for the Age of Connected Relationships, and a session based on his earlier book, Relationships Economics.

David asks tough questions that all associations should regularly ask themselves:

• How are your members better off because of the value you provide?
• What do you provide that your members need and cannot get elsewhere?

If members don’t need what you offer, you’re noise, says David. You’re not relevant. What do we do when there’s too much noise? We tune out or hit the “delete” button.

If they can get what you offer elsewhere, you’re a commodity. Can they get that need satisfied elsewhere for a better price or in a more convenient format?

If you don’t provide what they need, you miss a huge opportunity. How well do you listen to your members and prospects?

Be a social organization of member experts.

David encourages associations to become experts in their members by capturing and making sense of the increasing data available about them. This is much easier now with social analytics tools like Avectra Social Console, Avectra A-Score, CRM systems and social dashboards.

Associations must be “ambient aware.” The more you learn about your members’ world, the more you can help them. Look beyond just industry trends to consumer trends too – that’s the world your members live in. They come to your association with expectations, habits and preferences that are influenced by their consumer experiences.

Be a relationship and transformation enabler.

Yes, your board admits, our members access professional development resources elsewhere, but they still rely on us for professional networking. “Forget it,” David warns. “That’s not enough. They can get connections from LinkedIn.”

Associations are less dispensable when they’re enablers and enhancers of relationships, not contacts. David says, “Networking is transactional, relationships are transformational.”

State and local associations have an advantage here. They host or facilitate face-to-face opportunities that turbocharge member relationships. What’s a national association to do when its members are dispersed across the U.S. or the globe? How about providing online communities, video and web events, local chapter events or informal local meet-ups so members have opportunities to break the ice, share peer-to-peer insight and develop relationships.

David talked about three types of relationships:

• Personal relationships: Friends you choose who aren’t necessarily relevant to your professional world.
• Functional relationships: Co-workers and other professional connections who are relevant to your work day.
• Strategic relationships: People who elevate your thinking. They help you uncover future opportunities and challenges. They believe in you and want to see you succeed, yet are brutally honest.

Because most people don’t have strategic relationships, David believes associations have the opportunity to facilitate them. But even here, they have competition. My professional network includes friends who “elevate my thinking,” push me in new directions and “uncover future opportunities.” I met and developed these relationships online, not through an association. However, because I live far from them, I attend association events so I can spend time with them. What if I lived closer to them? Would I need that association and its events?

David encourages associations to move beyond social networking to purpose networking – the same concept that Avectra president Sterling Raphael talked about in his AUDC session on community engagement. A sign of social leadership, says David, is a focus on purpose and transformation (member-centric), not transaction and activities (association-centric).

He ended the session with an apt quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall: “Attend to their aspirations and grievances, and they will flourish and grow, and join together to form a more perfect union.”

A. I believe Assoc. have to start thinking very differently about how they define membership and dues. Start by building a great deal of value for anyone who is interested in your space. Put up a blog with a ton of content and articles, videos, a free newsletter subscription – all on your website for everyone, as sources of credibility, knowledge and intellectual depth. Tell them the “what,” not the “how” – if they get value from the “what” you share, they’ll seek out and will be wiling to pay a premium for the “how.” There lies the value of membership. Anyone can attend one of your webinars, but if they want access to the digital recording as a download or access to the community to discuss the topic with the member or thought leader you invited after the event, they’ll need to become members. They can download all the articles they want for free. But if they want to really grow, personally and professionally, they’ll need to become members to participate in your various paid events. Bottom line – Immerse the entire market in your value add and build such a strong market gravity / pull, that they see value in paying for premium products and services.

Q. Should dues paying, member-based associations accept the reality a greater percentage of companies or professionals will decide not to join now than in the recent past (say 10 years ago) no matter how much you improve the membership value?

A. Yes. Break up the “membership value.” Instead of an annual fee, give them options – all inclusive or a la carte! Members are customers and customers want choices. Option one – you get X; option two – you get X+Y; option three – you get X+Y+Z. Member-based associations also have to get a lot savvier about segmenting and targeting current and future audiences. Not everyone is a right fit for you at any point in time. Associations must create an accelerant curve of value – from competitive offerings, to distinct, to breakthrough – which elevate an individual’s intimate relationship with the association, perceived value, and premium.

Q. Where does the association draw the line between its use for members only, as ASAE is doing with Collaborate, and include everyone, both members and nonmembers, for the industry or profession that your association represents?

A. The options I outlined in the previous question are NOT more of the same, but a deeper value add. The only way you’ll be able to distinguish truly differentiated value between what individuals or organizations get access to for free vs. a premium is to understand their needs (vs. wants) and gain conceptual agreement on THEIR objectives, measures and value. If I can meet others in my industry through social media and gain similar education that you offer through other resources, why do I need your association? Conversely, if you provide so much great content that a) I see you as the undisputed source of credible info, b) you get me – really understand my challenges and opportunities, and c) you become a purveyor of relationships between like-minded people (hence the Collaborate community by ASAE), I will be much more open to paying for your unique value-add.

Associations MUST change their lens from being internally focused on themselves, what they offer, their internal capabilities, which are all INPUT, to how are individuals, teams, and organizations better off because of them, i.e. how are their situations improved, enhanced, or otherwise elevated which is OUTPUT or outcome! They must become an expert in all things their products: their member profiles!

One last comment I want to reinforce from the Thursday breakfast session: when the rate of change external to to the organization is faster than the rate of change inside it, the end is near!

1. Why are you thinking of social media as little more than a customer-service tool? ”Letting the tool determing your social strategy is like letting the tail wag the dog,” Nour said at the very beginning of his talk. By that, he meant that too often organizations establish Twitter and Facebook presences and call that a social-media strategy. A true social strategy, Nour argued, is one that uses the behaviors of members on social media as an opportunity to move from one-to-many relationships to one-one-relationships. Though associations are good at gathering demographic data, he said, they need to improve at gathering psychographic data.

2. How good are you at telling your association’s story? Nour presented a powerful video from the nonprofit Charity: Water, which helps deliver drinkable water to developing countries. Though social media plays a critical role in its fundraising, Nour said, that was never mentioned during the video. Instead, stories about how it met its mission are put up front. How many associations are good at explaining its mission to members (and potential members) without gunking it up with jargon or explicit calls to purchase? “Charity: Water has become incredible storytellers to show what the impact is,” Nour said.

3. What makes you think members will stick around? While writing Return on Impact, Nour interviewed dozens of association leaders, and one of the questions he asked them is, “How are your members better off because they’re your members?” The question is meant to force people to think about how member-centric their work is, because members are increasingly demanding more of their associations, and increasingly willing to take their business elsewhere. “Your association is going to go through a Yelp-ification,” he said, referring to the community-review site. How does your association need to change when you know that practically every member interaction you have will be publicly scrutinized?

That’s just what hit me. How about you?

If members and customers are not sharing their concerns with you, they’re certainly thinking about them and perhaps sharing them in social forums. Here are just some of the comments from members and customers in LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Fan Pages, on Twitter, and Yelp:

• “The networking, educational opportunities, and the annual meeting they bundle as my membership ‘value-add’ are just not doing anything to help me grow my business.”
• “I know the players in my own industry; I’m looking for prospective customers and suppliers who can help me launch new products and enter new markets.”
• “I can get a much stronger leadership development program at the executive education course offered by (a local) university.”
• “The annual meeting is the same stale format it has been for the past two decades and if I attend at all, I’m usually gone by the second or third day.”
• “I’m looking for best practices—and best practitioners, in how to use their solution; they offer this roundtable discussion and customer-advisory board meetings that get the same few people talking about the same way they’ve done things for the past hundred years.”
• “I’m looking for the next ‘iPhone’-like innovations in our industry and I can’t see it in the meetings they keep inviting me to.”
• “I’m a 34-year-old president of our company and one of the youngest members of this organization; they’ve been around for so long and just don’t get people like me, how my team and I work, or what we need from them. More frustrating is that they’re either unwilling or unable to listen!”

Any of them sound familiar?

In the late 1990s, I worked for Bruce Kasanoff, CEO of Accelerating 1 to 1 and former non-founding partner at Peppers and Rogers Group (PRG). Don Peppers and Martha Rogers are considered the parents of one-to-one marketing. In many ways, they were ahead of their time because they saw the one-to-one future that social and mobile technologies would empower. Bruce, currently CEO of NowPossible, has evolved his thinking into a particularly interesting and relevant model for member-based organizations: 1 to Everything.

The 1 stands for the member or customer. Everything is every other person, device, element, and piece of information on the planet. For example, a cell phone is a device used to differentiate many things. It can be used to identify songs that we just heard on the radio. Using integrated Google maps and augmented reality, cell phones can show which houses are for sale on any given street and include social insights about them. Phones are used to photograph products and get instant reviews and price comparisons both in physical retailers nearby or anywhere a product is sold online. The shift in the customer-centric balance of powers is no longer just organizations’ segmenting customers but individual consumers differentiating for themselves restaurants, merchants, friends, experts, media, entertainment, just about everything.

Over a decade ago, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers developed a marketing framework to Identify, Differentiate, Interact, and Customize (IDIC). It advocates the need to identify members or customers individually, differentiate your treatment of them based on their unique needs and value-seek, interact individually with members and customers, then customize products and services for each profitable member or customer. It struck Bruce that he could turn IDIC around and use it to predict how members or customers are likely to leverage the interactive technologies that are now part of our daily lives. One-to-one is about looking at individual members or customers through the organization’s lens.

This framework makes it easier to predict emerging services that organizations could offer in the age of connected relationships. Nearly anything you see out your window—cars, office buildings, people, the weather, birds, restaurants, or billions of other possibilities—can and will be differentiated on your behalf by applications that haven’t yet come to market. Visionary organizations could leverage 1 to Everything to segment their members or customers one by one and use IDIC to create a portfolio of products and services particularly useful to each segment.

Corporations are pouring an enormous amount of resources into understanding and implementing relevant social media. Nonprofit boards are (or should be) more or less still at the inquiry phase, asking whether or not this seemingly revolutionary platform will dramatically affect every aspect of the organization, from membership models to product and service development and digital delivery, or whether it’s just another marketing fad propagated by vendors with self-serving purposes.

Associations and member-based organizations have an enormously untapped resource of amazing stories, as do companies. The stories are not about themselves, but of members and customers, employees and suppliers, all who dramatically altered their paths because of the impact of the organization. Our lives revolve around stories. We think narratively and record our history through narrative; where were you on 9/11? Our culture is, in essence, a story; stories teach us values, and we create and share bonds through them. Stories are especially effective in communicating ideas, and very often there are people who “get it” through stories.

That’s a question I asked more than 100 association executives this year. Similarly, I asked corporate leaders, “How are customer situations dramatically improved because of your value-add?” Many automatically referred to their portfolio of products and services. One confident executive replied, “We have a monthly magazine, an annual convention, and educational resources we sell them.”  Unfortunately, that didn’t answer the question I asked. How are they better off because of the organization you’ve built, the products and services you market, the network of niche constituents you gather, and the educational sessions you provide? If you’ve ever analyzed the total addressable market, what percentage are members? What’s your market share? Unless you have garnered an overwhelming percentage of the total market or serve a very unique niche market with limited players, what are all the other members or customers doing in lieu of your value-add? How else are they getting the same information, education, and networking opportunities? All too often the answer was, “They’re not,” an uninformed—if not intel­lectually lazy—response.

When I inquired further about the competitive landscape, the resound­ing response was, “No one else does what we do!” Really? Your members are skipping your annual meeting and your magazine is one of 50 on their desks. Okay, so they’re talking about you on Twitter, chatting with you on Facebook, and searching for you on Google. In a world that is increasingly empowered by social media and connected screens, out of your control, and enthralled by innovation, how can you be sure you are still relevant? I respectfully suggest that all that matters is the story your members or customers tell about your brand or your brand’s value, in 140 characters or less. Is it a compelling story, a disappointing story, or no story at all?