Larry Romito spoke to the Michigan and Ohio AEs last week on the topic of quality of service, and how we as association managers can evaluate the service we offer our members.Well, wait a minute—“offer” isn’t the right word.There’s a whole lot of difference between what we say we’re going to do, and the actual level of support our members receive from the association office.
That’s Romito’s point, of course.How do we as AE’s actually KNOW what response our members receive when they call or email us?And more importantly, what do we do with the responses we do receive: how do we use that input to modify and adjust our service product?
I’ve always been a proponent of measuring results as a means of keeping self-deception out of the management decision.“Yes,” says the Board of Directors, “that was a good general membership meeting last week. We had 67 people there, the food was good, and everybody is smiling in the photos we took.”
“Of COURSE they’re smiling in the photos,” says the voice of the Devil Advocate.“You told people to say ‘cheese’ when you snapped the picture.Can you say ‘cheese’ with downturned lips???”And then Emily Evaluation says, “Of the 67 attendees, 40 were affiliates who are paid to be there.Twelve were the members of the Board of Directors, for whom the Association buys lunch.Four were staff members.That leaves 11 volunteers, and one of those was the wife of the President.That leaves 10 members out of 2,711 total Realtor members.
But the food WAS good.”
There’s another evaluation method —the financial analysis, or “Business Plan” method.It assumes that members will pay with their pocketbooks for voluntary services and products (forget all the offerings for which they have no choice about payment—that’s another story).My favorite illustration of this is one association’s summer outing.It was always a fun party—golf, steaks, music, beer, swimming and trail rides.Everybody wore casual clothes and a lot of smiley pictures testify to the fact that everyone was saying ‘cheese’.And then the expenses were totaled up and divided by the number of attendees. The whole shebang cost $57 per attendee, and again, only 30% of the attendees were dues-paying members.The cost per Realtor was over $200.
Did it matter where the funds came from? That much of it was contributed by affiliate member deep pockets?Not really.This was an event which didn’t interest members, even though a $200 value only cost them $10 per ticket—and that disinterest is an important indicator, no matter who pays for the function.
Another evaluation method might be to look at the organizational mission statement and see if the function even qualifies.If, for instance, the mission of the local association is “To ensure that our members have the support necessary for their professional success”, can one even pretend that the membership meeting or the summer outing described above are ‘necessary for professional successes?Apparently the members don’t think so.
“Hey, wait!” you say.“I evaluate our association performance all the time.Why, we always send out questionnaires.Just last week we had an education session on Social Media.Lots of people came, and the evaluation sheets we handed out were very positive.”
OK, let’s look at those evaluations.Here are some of the questions:
“Was the facility adequate?Could you see the screen?How was the room temperature? How was your check-in procedure?Were the handouts helpful?Was the speaker interesting?Did he/she encourage class participation?Was the presentation too long?Too short?Could you hear?How was the parking?”
Aha! You say your education director is also the meeting planner? How did I guess? Well, those questions were not written by those serious about education. In the blog “Acronym”, Lisa Junker says, “Right now most associations and most directors of education see the finish line as the end of the event or the end of the webinar….But all we've really done is get people trained for the race; the real race is back there in the workplace.”
The important questions have to do with this question: how applicable was the information you heard to what you do in your job? Or (asked at a later date) “what percentage of the information you gained do you remember? What information from the presentation are you using today?” Certainly retention of information and practical application of methods are important goals for our training efforts. And if we are gauging effectiveness based on those values, conveying those value measurements in advance to course writers and presenters will take your program a long way to success.
“Yes”, you can say, “I know our members will be interested in your high-tech demo of flip cameras and cell phone social networking. And that live broadcast you can do from your iPhone is awesome. I will, of course, be asking them to evaluate how they will use this shiny stuff selling real estate—perhaps you’ll be able to help them along with some practical applications.”
One of the most interesting jobs I remember in my own career was taking the generic information on non-profit association management and applying it to the specific profile of the Realtor organization. The subject areas of, say, advocacy or strategic planning for non-profits need considerable modification to be of real use to a membership based trade organization of competitive independent contractors. Perhaps suggesting a member practitioner as a liaison to your speakers might be a good plan to ensure that programs realistically address member needs.
And a final thought about evaluation that Mr. Romito left with me—just as I was patting myself on the back for the tricky little techniques I’d implemented to get member feedback, he said “Don’t always trust immediate response. That kind of feedback is subject to the ‘halo effect’. You know, right after you please someone, ask him how he feels about you. A good way to always get positive feedback. But it isn’t very credible.”
So, let me try this. What did you discover in this blog post that might apply to the day-to-day management of your association? Did you like that idea of a member/expert liaison to your education presenters? Are you going to try a financial evaluation of cost per benefitting member for your products and services? Were these helpful ideas?
Jun. 25, 2009 - Is Your Newsletter a 98-lb Weakling?
Put the WAV group’s newsletter on your mailing list. Every AE needs a daily reading list, and in my estimation, this newsletter is one of them. By and large, the WAV group articles are about important industry stuff—trends, technology, economy. Articles are short, and bigger issues are addressed in helpful ‘white papers’ (which, by the way, are an effective communication tool for your members—if you don’t know about them, go to Wikipedia or click here). Anyway, today’s WAV group publication sparked a thought about a topic for this blog—newsletters.
What caught my attention was the following paragraph from WAVE (the name of the WAV group newsletter):
“The old consumer problem was Junk Mail in the Mail Box. The new and growing consumer problem is Junk eMail in the Inbox. As agents continue to SPAM consumers with drip marketing newsletters, they undermine their relationship with the very customer they worked so hard to attract. The customer, who may very well like the agent, blocks the agent's email address as spam. If this happens a lot, the agent's email address will get blacklisted. Click here to see if you are on any Blacklists.”
The issue that WAV is addressing is those (sometimes very awful) newsletters our members send out in the name of ‘marketing’. But the same observations can be true of our association newsletters as well: members look at them as spam, or perhaps their email hosts looks at them as spam (AOL has a reputation for blocking mass mailings and Yahoo mail is also pretty whimsical about how it defines ‘spam’). So if you’re thinking that you have taken care of your association communication by only sending out a weekly or monthly e-newsletter, think again. No matter how glorious the design and how important the content—don’t rely on one publication effort to do the job.
One social networking guru I read recently suggested that blogs will replace newsletters. I think that’s likely if we’re talking about the agent newsletters I mentioned earlier, but blogs would seem to me to be an enrichment, perhaps, of the association newsletter—not a replacement. An example comes from one association newsletter I receive: each issue is prefaced with 4-5 paragraphs from the CEO, commenting on organization activities or industry trends. This format may not be an effective practice because members generally want a quick read, not editorials or vanity photos, and they won’t even read through the chatty stuff to the hard news.
Our members would, I think, be better served by a blog format for a commentary kind of message. In the first place, a good blog allows for reader comment and dialog. Secondly, a blog can utilize video, sound, and pictures—can you imagine writing about the successful RPAC auction and including a 30-second clip of the grand prize winner happily taking possession of her prize? Finally, blogs do use 'push' technology: with the use of RSS, your readers will be notified of your blog updates quickly and without additional effort on your part.
For another dimension to your communications campaign, learn about using white papers for big issues or larger information blocks. Think of whitepapers as ‘term papers’ if you will—publications that explore an issue more deeply, and are a better way to educate members on a subject—for instance, what do members need to know about why the association is making a lockbox vendor change, or what they will need to do when the state moves to a single license format where everyone is a broker.
A word of warning, here, though—work hard to keep white papers interesting and informative. One of my favorite sources for whitepapers is a company called OneUpWeb. They’ve published a great new whitepaper titled “The Fusion of Search and Social Media” which will answer a lot of questions for you and your members about why using social media is becoming so important to internet marketing success. Have a look at OneUpWeb’s interesting website, and get an idea of what a good whitepaper can be. (And, by the way, wouldn’t it be helpful if NAR and state associations made excellent whitepapers available for local associations to incorporate into communications with members?)
As an aside I’ll add that in her excellent blog (another addition to your AE daily reading list), Cindy Butts called attention to the Mississippi Association’s explanation of its dues increase in a great video no AE should miss! Takeaway: OneUpWeb, Cindy, and the Mississippi Association all understand the value of humor and entertainment components in their publications.
Someone once said that if you’re going to make an impression on an audience, you’ve got to tell them something seven different ways before you’ve done your job. You’ve just encountered 4 of those ways: newsletters, blogs, whitepapers, and video. Fortunately, technology has made all of them inexpensive and easy to employ. The humor comes free. You’re limited only by your imagination!
One of my clients, a non-profit CEO, is having a rough time at his association: the members are angry, and threatening to impeach the entire board of directors. The directors, they say, are not managing money well, and have transgressed any number of by-law stipulations. “Let’s replace them all immediately,” these members screech! With anybody willing to run, their letter stipulates.
So here’s my friend, caught in the middle. The current leadership is facing a credibility crisis, and the louder opponents are organizing a takeover by anybody who has a complaint or concern—at best, questionable criteria for leadership
What to do? As most of us know, no matter how skilled we are as managers and how carefully we tread through the jungle of politics, we are employees at will, and the ‘will’ of our employers can sometimes be quirky, unpredictable, and even downright illegal. But it really doesn’t matter how good we are as managers, or how erratically our employers think: the fact of the matter is, we are vulnerable to losing our jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with competence or honesty.
It’s good to know when to cut your losses.
That was my advice to my client. We’ll work through his problems as best we can, trying to mend and heal his association, but he needs to develop his alternatives, his “Plan B”. If the worst case scenario actually occurs, and he finds himself in the office parking lot with a cardboard box filled with his personal belongings, what does he do next?
I have a very dear friend, now retired as an association exec, who always kept his resignation letter in the top drawer of his desk. He would tell his directors that it was there, and all they had to do was get a majority of board members to agree to sign and date the letter, and he was out of there. A little drastic perhaps, but he was recognizing the inevitable possibility and controlling the situation.
I don’t recommend that position, though it does have some merit. But to my client, I did recommend the following:
1.Keep a copy of relevant documents on file at home or in your safety deposit box. Those documents include your employment contract, performance evaluations, your benefits and insurance papers, and any agreements you may have signed when you were hired—perhaps a non-compete clause, or some other stipulations. Be familiar with all of those papers.
2.Keep copies of any personal papers or correspondence from work on a separate disk or thumb drive and carry it with you when you are not in the office. Keep your computer and desk clear of anything which could be misinterpreted by some rabid critic or in some way used to discredit you in the future.
3.Don’t keep any office equipment or supplies at home—or if you must, say, borrow the association camera, leave a paper trail that says you checked it out and specifies when you expect to return it.
4.Read this article: “Getting Fired”. Even if you’re very secure in your job, this is a good introduction to the process, important for any ‘Plan B’. Pay particular attention to legal issues you may need to consider. Note that termination of employment has financial implications that stretch beyond the loss of regular income: what happens to your benefits, severance pay, insurance, and retirement funds? And after you read this article, go back and look at your employment contract and compare it to those items mentioned in the article.
5.In your support system, include a personal attorney (not your employer’s), a counselor or coach, and a plan for where you will find your next employment. Or, if you’re not going to go back to work, think about how you will fill your time in ways that are healthful and meaningful to you.
6.Be prepared for loss. I found out that as a Realtor association executive, many of my friendships were my peers in organization management. Those relationships will disappear, and can leave a large hole in your life.
Of course nobody wants to think about these things. But even the best of us get axed—we all know horror stories of someone who came back from vacation and found his desk emptied or was told that her contract would not be renewed by the newly-elected board of directors. The point here is not to act in panic, desperation, or anger—but do understand your all options and prepare for the next phase of your life.
Jun. 12, 2009 - Dorothy, We Aren't in Vermont Anymore...
Your association have a problem? An over-riding concern that needs to be discussed and examined by the membership as a whole? Let’s say it’s an issue of whether or not the association should take a position on the location a proposed new highway in your community. There’s lots of public discussion about it, and the issue directly affects property values and development in your city. Some of your members think the association needs to have its voice heard, and other members cringe at the thought of speaking up and potentially offending future buyers and sellers. The association’s Board of Directors can’t make up its mind, and the media is at your door. Clearly, this is discussion time.
The Board proposes a questionnaire to the members (“Let’s survey the troops!”). Sigh. You know that most people won’t answer a survey, and even if they did, compiling and interpreting the results is a labor-intensive staff job which will result in very little real help to the decision makers. You think that a live discussion would be more meaningful, but you know that many members will not drop everything and drive a half hour one way to a meeting—even if you promise free food.
What to do?
Technology presents you with options. And technology now is cheap or free. Let’s have a look.
1.Find out about Ustream. Basically, you can broadcast live streaming video, for free, using your cell phone if you wish (or something more sophisticated.) Viewers can watch on computers, cell phones, and wireless handheld devices simply by logging in to the Ustream video channel. It’s easy to use: the site tells you that anyone can do it in less than two minutes. (Hmmmm). So, you decide to hold an open forum about this highway project, complete with guest panelists. ‘Ustream’ it so your members can be informed, and ask them to email or phone in comments after the show.
2.Use YouTube. Perhaps you’d rather not go live (always a leap of faith). Perhaps a better way of holding a forum might be to ask members for comment or questions, and then do a video recording (using your new flip video camera purchased for under $60). Upload the recorded answers to YouTube and broadcast the link to the members (or hotlink it in your newsletter. Or both.).
3.Write a blog, using member questions. The question-answer format is always a popular one: it’s easy to read and get straight to the point that’s on someone’s mind. Caution: keep your answers short and to–the-point, objective and informational. And note: it’s ok for the association exec to blog—don’t just leave it up to the president. Let members know that you are an information source.
4.Chat room. Attach a chat room to your blog or association website. Start with FlashChat if you’ve never used this software before—it’s easy and flexible, and almost free (starts at $5). You don’t have to add any software—the functions are hosted on the company website, and you can tell your members that the chat function will be available at a certain time—you decide. Mondays at noon, maybe. If you find your needs are getting more sophisticated, there’s lots of software out there to do this job (it’s also good for support functions) at a variety of prices. ParaChat offers a large variety of hosted chat options including live video, and the price is reasonable.
5.Twitter. Set up a Twitter hashtag in advance of a community discussion or event, and let members know what it is. For the highway discussion in the example above, the hashtag might be #hiway. Anyone who has a contribution to the discussion or wants to add information uses the hashtag with every post…and anyone wanting to follow the hashtag uses Twitter search or one of the many user programs available to follow hashtags or you can go to www.hashtag.org and you’ll find the topics organized and indexed. You can follow them online, or set up a feed directly into your computer.
These are pretty exciting applications, aren’t they? They allow the association to communicate with members, even in interactive dialogue, with video and voice, in real time. The applications are free or extremely low cost, and more become available at every minute. (I try to keep my Twitter followers updated: check JWLConsulting on Twitter).
The point is, no matter how large or small your organization, you can indeed do something now about increasing member communication and involvement. And when an association ‘hot issue’ surfaces, encourage transparency and participation through new communication models.
You can have your association town meeting wherever you are.
"I have a question," my friend wrote. "Our association board of directors just voted to merge our MLS with the MLS of the kingdom next door. My question is, what's the future of an MLS-less association like mine (small, with 400-500 members)? What does the future hold for us?"
Well, of course it's time for some group visioning, I am thinking. This association is losing a significant part of its income and of its daily activity-no tours, lockboxes, MLS rule enforcement and education. Financial statements will look a lot simpler, and some staff responsibilities will disappear. What the association becomes after that liposuction will depend on a new vision and some pretty vigorous muscle-building workouts.
I've been saying for a long time that the MLS is going to disappear. A 'long time' is probably fifteen years-I think I made the prediction in the same year I told a bunch of skeptical AEs that every office would have a fax machine before the year is out. Obviously, the fax machine has come and gone-and the MLS is still gasping away. But the latter is looking a lot different now than it once did, and my own prediction is still that it will go away-soon.
And that's not a bad thing, either, I tell my MLS-less friend. For years, Realtor associations have been spending huge amounts of money, staff, and volunteer resources on the MLS. And, we've been neglecting things like development of core programs, recruitment and retention of members, and cultivation of a diverse income base. The MLS masked the symptoms of some organizational ineffectiveness, and it's beyond time to take care of the diseased parts.
So, I say to my friend, celebrate your association's divorce from what is really a toxic relationship called 'MLS'. Here's what you get to do as a newly single entity:
1. Focus on yourself. That means "your members". Aside from the MLS, what do they really need (as distinct from what you think they OUGHT to need)? Ask them! Now that they don't have to get their answers all twisted up in concerns about property search criteria or the number of digits in the property tax fields, they can answer you more directly and more honestly.
2. Most importantly, concentrate on developing 'localism'. Local market areas, local business practices, local information, a local real estate community of buyers, sellers, real estate businesses and supportive adjunct organizations. How can you develop a more robust real estate business environment for everyone?
Here are some specific ideas:
A. Build a website that makes your association the "Voice for Real Estate" in your community-with the public as well as with your members;
B. Become a power player on the local legislative and advocacy scene;
C. Embrace inclusiveness-buyers, sellers, consumers, providers of auxiliary services. Find new members with affiliated interests-developers, investors, suppliers of services.
D. Find partners, not adversaries. Without an MLS, you don't have to fight with the newspapers or compete with other 'wannabe' websites. Build relationships with government, media, the chamber of commerce, the economic development corporation, the community college.
E. Join the world of social media/marketing to build the professional image of your members. Use blogging, online questions and answers, instant messaging, twittering, and social websites to build rapport with your members and the public at large.
In short, forget what you lost and capitalize on your abundance as a local association: you have a collection of skilled and trained professionals, an aggregation of knowledge, and a business interest that is the lifeblood of your community-property ownership. And this abundance can be turned into income, of course-more members of various types, more services and more support products all translate into making your association more valuable to a broader range of people, from consumers of your offerings to advertisers who want to reach out to your community.
A behind the scenes look at organized real estate--what works in an association, what doesn't, and what a long time AE sees as challenges facing the industry from the viewpoint of its professional organization.
RSS Blog Feed
