Association Field Report (March 18, 2020)

Transcript:
Hi, friends, it’s what is it Wednesday the 18th? Another update for you guys, I’m trying to give you real time information about what we’re seeing out in the association industry and in the field.
Couple of things.
As we’ve mentioned it’s very important to communicate with your industry, your members, your non-members, your sponsors, your vendors and suppliers. They want to hear from you. You have information to share that’s critical. Don’t take your foot off the gas on that. However, the is tone must be appropriate. Be of service to them, give them information that they may need. The right tone is going to be very important as you do this outbound communication.
The second thing that we’ve seen is many membership organizations are starting to drop their firewall and provide some of members only benefits to non-members, in particular information and education. You may think about that. Some are eliminating the firewall all together, some are offering certain services and programs that used to be exclusive to members and making it available to non-members as well. So, they can sustain their supply chain so they can continue to do business.
Third thing that’s happening is sponsorships are moving into different areas. For example, we’re actually filling insertion orders right now for magazines, for online newsletters, and we’re developing sponsorship packages for virtual events, specific programs for online webinars and things like that. One thing that you might want to consider is to loosen up the rules. Remember, in in-person meetings people had receptions, they had banners, they had booths, they had opportunities to meet with each other one-on-one. Those things are gone for now so you may need to loosen up your criteria and allow sponsors to speak. Allow them to introduce the webinar, maybe provide some content. If you want to provide that kind of inventory and opportunity for them, loosen up the rules. Then, it’s going to be very important moving forward.
The fourth thing is: trial everything. Practice it first. There’s a big move to online. I just finished a webinar. Let me tell you, it’s like a traffic jam out there. The infrastructure is getting clogged up. Logins are being slowed down. Make sure you got enough pipe to do this and run a test. We’re checking on it right now. There’s so much movement online. It’s affecting things a little bit.
That’s all for today. Thanks for watching.