TheDemandPerspective

By Anna Caraveli

 What do you do when your membership drops from 19,000 to 15,000 in the course of 3 years?  Bruce Aldrich faced just such predicament, when he became Deputy CEO of Photo Marketing Association (PMA), a trade association with 16,000 members and a budget of $10 million.  His solution?   Go to the members rather than your association for answers.  Bruce engaged all staff in this discovery process.  By immersing themselves in members’ lives and perspectives, they were able to design programs and services that resonated with the market because they had developed the mindset of a customer rather than of association staff.  Looking at his association from the outside in, Bruce identified and set about to transform, what he saw as pivotal hurdles to his association’s ability to be relevant and competitive.  

•  Market orientation and mindset:  “Change,” Aldrich believes, “has to start at the top.”  He led by example. His “Aha!” moment came during a dinner with top retail executives. Their perception of the association’s value was a sharp wake-up call that drove home the extent of the decline of PMA’s relevance to industry. PMA was simply on the brink of becoming irrelevant.  This was a tough truth to hear. It required the CEO to fight the urge to leap to the association’s defense or take criticism personally and, instead, to commit to listening and learning with a sense of humility. This what he expected of staff as well. The message?  The association is not the center of the universe. Members’ success, rather than the association’s interests is our core business.
•  The tone and content of conversations with members.  To figure out how to help members solve problems and succeed, the standards for member interactions had to go beyond timely returns of phone calls and traditional customer service metrics. Any conversation, no matter how insignificant, had to be seen as an opportunity for increasing member engagement and gaining insights that could translate in relevant new products and solutions. 
•  New product development and service delivery:  How could the association, Bruce wanted to know, generate products and solutions that were indispensible to members’ success when staff was much more focused on the products themselves and their development than on the members? They could NOT engage members effectively because they were not engaged themselves with the world members inhabited.  Bruce closed the gap.
•  Opened up the sources of innovation:  No more “association think” and confining new product development to existing categories and legacy programs. Look to the best of the best across industries for models of effective service delivery.  The sky was the limit in product/service innovations as long as they delivered agreed upon outcomes to members
• Reframed the nature of the association’s business and measures of success:  the association re-defined its core business as one of providing strategic solutions to members’ critical problems rather than selling products and benefits.  All benefits had to be focused on specific rather than generic needs, and produce concrete outcomes. They were evaluated on the basis of value to members and the ROI for both the member and PMA.  
• Made continuous market/member discovery a part of daily routine and a shared responsibility for all staff   ”Market research” was no longer limited to occasional surveys and marketing specialists. On-going market discovery was part of the way of conducting business for everyone.  Staff had to personally call those who did not renew to understand the real reasons; get member feedback on their new ideas for programs and benefits; take a deeper look at member opinions, values, business, work life etc. to extrapolate needs that mattered to them the most; engage in extended discussions with supplier members to have a grasp of all pieces of the member value chain. 
•   Created market/member-driven systems. Aldrich discouraged the use of association-centric mechanisms, such as forming board or staff committees to evaluate and make decisions on current programs.  Instead of asking each other or debating the merits of one idea over another in staff or committee meetings, staff had to first test ideas with members. 
•  Staff roles and responsibilities 
• Staff members were empowered to innovate and make strategic decisions. They listened in on board conversations; were privy to all information and were given opportunities to become experts in, and advocates for, the member/market segments they were responsible for.
• Conversely, staff had new responsibilities. The first 3 performance evaluation criteria were changed, making staff accountable for measurable outcomes, including their contribution to retention, member satisfaction and the association’s profitability.  Staff reviewed monthly financial statement and member analysis and assessed performance against goals and results.
• Bruce backed his changes in culture and orientation with new staff roles, responsibilities, incentives and measures of success. For example, he re-defined the role of the “liaison” function. Previously, liaison functions did not have authority to solve problems for the member segments they were liaisons for. Their roles were now broadened to allow them real ownership of their segments.  Like other staff roles, they managed the entire product life cycle rather than a piece of it—from diagnosing customer needs and problems to crafting solutions and translating them into commercial products and profit. 
•  The way the association was structured and organized:   Like most associations, PMA was organized around products and functions. Bruce made members the drivers in re-organization. Staff roles and responsibilities were now arranged around the needs of member groups with new type of positions that were comparable to account executives. Far from being asked to “defend,” promote or push the association’s interests, Aldrich encouraged staff to become experts in, champions and advocates for, the member segments they were responsible for. 

 Paradoxically, my experience shows that it is fighting and advocating for members rather than for the association’s agenda and perceived interests that best serve the association’s interests.