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2010 ASAE Technology Conference & Expo - Making Your Online Community Thrive
- 1. 2010 Technology Conference & Expo Make Your Online Community Thrive December 14, 2010 ▪ 10:30 – 11:45 a.m. Heather McNair Vice President, Marketing and Social Media AANAC
- 22. Contact Information Heather McNair Vice President, Marketing and Social Media American Association of Nurse Assessment Coordination [email_address] 303.758.7647 www.aanac.org
Editor's Notes
- Why did community end up in membership instead of IT? Also had a very strong IT support
- Just to give you a little background first: Community just celebrated its 2-year anniversary. When I left, about 16,000 members were subscribed to at least one egroup. Some were auto-subscribed. We did migrate listservs over – 20 some groups, about 12,000 people
- When we launched the MGMA Member Community a couple of years ago, I truly thought within a couple of months I was going to be able to get back to my “regular” job of member retention and benefit development. I look back and laugh at how naïve that was. A year and a half after we launched, supporting the community was still almost 50% of my job and my “member retention” title had changed to “member engagement” to reflect a pretty profound shift in the organization that was driven, at least in part, by the member community: that “retention” needed to be more than a marketing function – by engaging members through the community, volunteering, benefit utilization, etc., we had a much better chance of retaining them, and so my job was changed to focus on finding ways to get members engaged. MGMA was the first association to launch the connected community platform, so our first six months to a year were spent largely on troubleshooting, working with HL to improve the platform, and coaching members. After those first several months, though, we got to spend more time on the fun stuff – how to get members using it, how to get the entire staff involved and invested in its success, and exploring new ways to use the community. Its success was based on finding the symbiotic relationships and making them apparent to those involved.
- Speaking with the Exec director of another association – her board was afraid community would compete with/cannibalize events. I told her it’s actually quite the opposite. They can help feed each other. Create online communities beforehand, make it live 6 or so weeks before the event. Automatically populate it as people register. Too early – not enough people. Too late, not enough traction. Forcing members into using the community – autosubscribing them, makes them learn it. Gives them exposure to it. One of the main benefits of attending an event is networking – meeting others who face the same challenges, people to share ideas with, problem-solve, etc. The community extends that in a big way – instead of three days at the conference, they now have three months. Keep it live for four weeks or so after the conference so people can stay in touch, ask follow up questions. If conversation is still going, extend the end date. Do this for webinars, too. One of our more successful communities was around a hot topic webinar.
- Use it for all of your attendee communications. We used to publish three LONG conference enewsletters to attendees with all the logistics. Instead, we broke them down into weekly messages on the egroup that were much shorter, easier to digest. Make a plan/schedule for posts. How/why to use the community. Upload your picture so others recognize you. Things to know about the event. Get staff, committee members, board members and speakers involved and posting. Finish posts with open-ended questions to get people talking. What are you looking forward to about the conference? Enlist a couple of attendees you know to answer the questions and get the discussion started. Most speakers like being the center of attention, so they are a great resource for you. Get them to post beforehand, “What do you want to learn in my session?” It’s great “marketing” for their session, good intelligence for them (and you), and can be very engaging. After the conference, get them to post follow-up materials, “homework”, answer questions they didn’t have the answers to during their session, etc. Keep the community live for four weeks or so afterward. Extend it if there’s still discussion going on. Use library for handouts – get people using (and used to) the same platform they use for networking so they get more familiar with it.
- Member community lounge: dedicated space in the exhibit hall with several computers, staffed with staff members/volunteers who can conduct impromptu tutorials. Make sure whoever is staffing the booth knows their stuff! Comfortable chairs/seating arrangement to encourage members to meet up in person. We’ll be doing this to launch AANAConnect. In my experience, more successful than holding sessions because you can do hands-on training. Still might be reason for a session – make more people aware. Hire a professional photographer for a day or two to take professional photos. Huge draw. We had a guy who brought a suit jacket halfway across the country just to have the photo taken. Make sure you publicize that you’ll have the photographer beforehand so attendees can plan. Give away free registration to next year’s conference for people who stop by to update their profiles. It didn’t end there. Right after the conference, we ran a campaign to get people to update their profiles. We compared the lists of the people who participated at the conference and those who updated their profile during the campaign, and a large percentage were on both lists. Residual effect, now that they were more comfortable.
- A LOT of promotion beforehand
- Use the approach that it will improve their networking by helping other members find them. That incentivizes them…if they know it’s for marketing purposes, many won’t do it, and many people see through the “so we know how to serve you better” tactic. In training sessions with members, I was a broken record – profiles are the heart of the community. People belong to an association, at least in part, to be part of a group of people like them. Simple incentives work -- $100 amex gift card, iPads, etc. People who join associations tend to be committed to their field – want to be the best? Competitive? Short amount of time – leave it out there too long and people forget. Cross-promote it in every channel you have. On the egroups (chicklet ads), printed publications, e-newsletters. Profile meter was a huge addition. Type a personalities couldn’t stand it not being complete. Members discovered an issue in our algorithm that was never letting them get to 100% -- which drove them nuts. Create a campaign around that? Incentives to those who get it up to 100%? Type a personalities couldn’t stand it not being complete. Members discovered an issue in our algorithm that was never letting them get to 100% -- which drove them nuts. Create a campaign around that? Incentives to those who get it up to 100%?
- One of my struggles at MGMA was getting other staff involved in the community, and I’ve heard from other association management professionals that they are encountering the same thing. It took a long time to get rid of the notion that the community was “Heather’s project”. One of the most successful ways I found to break down that barrier is to show staff how the community could help them. It’s like the old “what’s in it for me?” marketing principal. Our government affairs department created several workgroups where they could solicit the opinions of our members. Our certification organization found new, easier ways to send papers out for review. Our communications department used a community to get feedback about upcoming content for the magazine. They also monitored several of the more active egroups to find out what members were talking about – what issues kept coming up, etc., and they used that information to drive decisions about future topics in our publications. Regarding committees, though, I will say the majority of the committee groups that were formed for long-standing committees never really took off. Shortly before I left, we created a staff-only community, and encouraged all staff members to start posting updates out there rather than using the “everyone” email. That way, the messages lived on, any attachments were added to the library making them easier to find later. It helped the staff get used to using the community, so they in turn to help members better. I’d recommend doing this MUCH earlier in the process.
- There are many obvious ways that staff can help support the community – assisting members in using it, helping to troubleshoot, that kind of thing. But we discovered other ways that also benefitted the staff. MGMA is known for their industry surveys. Those surveys provide benchmarking data for physicians and their practices across the nation. But there is A LOT of data in them and they can be tricky to navigate. So our survey team created the Benchmarking rookies community. They would regularly post tips on how to use the information to run a better medical practice and answer members’ questions. This provided exposure for the data which helped with marketing efforts. And by ensuring members understood how to use all the data, the chances of them being return purchasers increased. Also great exposure for staff as “subject matter experts”. Use content in the magazine/enewsletters. Top 10 lists – most popular threads, busiest egroups, helpful egroups you may not know about. EHR user groups. AANAC Q&As – lifted from the listservs, published in the weekly enewsletter with expert answers. Tied it back to the listservs. Created a new campaign – are you missing out? 50% increase in subscribers in 4 months. Goal to have a large list to convert over from the get-go. We also implemented a balanced score card for the organization. I mentioned earlier that member engagement had become a focus for the association. That importance was reflected on the scorecard – one quadrant – a quarter of the BSC – was engagement. And some of those engagement metrics were directly tied to the community – number of unique subscribers, number of members with updated profiles, # egroup posts, documents in the library/downloads. Part of staff’s yearly merit increases are tied to the BSC, so if none of the other efforts to incentivize them to care about the community worked, they now had financial motivation.
- Doubled in size since April with pretty simple advertising/cross-pollinating. In the coming year, we’re also planning to run a series of articles in our publication, and ask for feedback on the discussion groups. Then when the next article in the series runs, we’ll include a sidebar with highlights from the discussion about the previous article.
- Huge opportunity to engage more volunteers. Staff can’t do it alone – and some things are better coming from a colleague. Members who were not part of our formal volunteer program have risen to the surface through their community participation. This has been great not only for the social network, but we’ve found other ways to use them in the organization – from serving as subject-matter experts to serving on task forces.
- Controversy: healthcare reform, medical marijuana, palliative sedation – even just launching the community