The non-profit design association, SEGD – Te Society for Experiential Graphic Design, was going bankrupt when I joined it as CEO in 2012. I was warned that they were in trouble, but not how quickly this was unfolding. The membership was down to its lowest level in 10 years. Participation in events was dropping and the chapters were hardly functioning. The staff were demotivated and the (aging) membership unhappy with changes that had been made to the association. The sponsors were walking away from the association. Something needed to be done that would make a difference – fast.
In a previous association leadership role, I had had the opportunity to explore the opportunities that seemed to be possible by changing an associations digital platform from a bespoke association website to open source Drupal. I had spent time figuring out how Drupal worked and how you could use it to create new features and benefits. The mechanics were now easy, the challenge was how to create greater relevance for the association through it’s digital platform as all associations relevance had been eroded since the introduction of the internet and easier, cheaper dissemination of information in the mid 90’s.
The first step was to take a good hard look at the SEGD website. Essentially it was a digital brochure for the association. Promoting the events, awards, some courses and member news. Not very exciting or member centric. Strange I thought when the association said that it WAS its members? It was so bad that I could not even find a headshot of the association president! iIn fact, no images of people were present on the website. Who were these fancy Fellows the site talked about and what did they do to become a fellow?
What followed was a classic Design Thinking approach. I started to talk to the associations customers, the members, the chapter leaders, the board and the sponsors and even to non-members in the Experiential Graphic Design field. The main insight I discovered was that everyone wanted to contribute to their association in some meaningful way. It was also clear that the traffic that was visiting the site exceeded the membership by almost 100% – 99.7% to be precise! Apparently there were many people who were interested in what SEGD’s (the Society for Experiential Graphic Design) members did. However, their association website was not where they would be able to find that! What a lost opportunity.
The insight or ah-ha moment came when I realized that if the association was its members, then the website should be mainly about the members, their firms and the great work they did. It needed to be considered the channel through which the world could understand and appreciate the people, firms and projects of the profession. Changing the focus of the website was the start of SEGD – the organizations (digital) transformation.
Over the next few years we identified and built so many great opportunities to increase our digital value to members. We built out a great awards gallery that became the reference point for good design in the profession, inspiring young and old alike. It is an obvious idea, but surprising how many associations do not have a strong visual gallery of past winners. It was the most popular part of the website within a very short time. We were also able to shine a light on the chapter chairs, and every association member with full bio pages that integrated all their contributions to the association on a single page. This provided real promotional value for volunteering. We developed a full chapter section on the main site that resulted in our chapters growing from 11 to 44 because people could see all the great stuff happening in other cities and wanted to organize the same for their own city. The changed focus of the website drove membership (double in 5 years), especially among the Millennials and Gen Z and helped us to reduce churn.
While all of this was fantastic, it was the work on the back end of the website that we made the most difference. Integrating the association membership system, financial reporting and store all into the web platform streamlined our operations, ensuring everything could be controlled and edited from the cloud, for all staff, from anywhere. This had multiple benefits, not least of which was that the staff were able to see members and read about them everyday. It drove recognition and a personalization in our outreach not possible before.
Most associations understand very little about how to use digital technologies and content to create vastly better member benefits and value. I’d be happy to help you create more relevance for your association and satisfy and retain more of your members.
You could start by buying my book: Creating Digital Value for Members: The First Stop on the Road to Relevance for Non-profits and Associations.