The Association Renewal Blog

Why The Long Tail Matters to Associations (LONG POST)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Let me reiterate that this is a long post.  I apologize in advance for causing any undue eye strain.

In his recent Acronym post about the Long Tail, Ben Martin moves me with his very kind compliment and words of support for my argument that association leaders should not dismiss new but untested ideas, such as the Long Tail, out of hand. He also offers a very thoughtful explanation of his view that the Long Tail theory will not work for most associations. It is entirely possible Ben is right, but then again, Jamie and I also may be right. In truth, we don’t know, and won’t know, until a handful of strategically-aware and highly capable associations begin to put some of these ideas into practice. We hope that will happen in the near future, but until we have some learning laboratories willing to experiment, let me offer a few comments on the specifics of Ben’s excellent post.

Credit Cards are Not Community

In the May issue of Forum (Association Forum of Chicagoland), there is a brief article about membership retention. Strategy number two, in the article, is “promote community.”

This intrigues me! I’m hoping to find some examples of how associations are building community among members who are dispersed around the country. As an example, the article uses the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), which has a great retention rate of 98 percent. They attribute that, in part at least, to promoting a sense of community—of veterinarians helping veterinarians. Sounds good so far, but the only examples they gave were an insurance program and a credit card! I guess when they market these programs, they focus on the “we’re helping vets” theme.

Okay, it’s great that they market to the community “feeling.” But that is not the same as building community. You build community when veterinarians actually do help other veterinarians. I assume that this indeed happens at AVMA, but I would rather have read about that in the article.

Show me the trust

One of my favorite blogs, Business 2.0, pointed me to a post by media maven Jeff Jarvis that declared, provocatively, that content is NOT king. And neither is distribution of content. The king, he argues, is trust.

This caught my attention. Now, his commentary is focused on the “old” media, like newspapers and record labels, who attempt to “control” content or the distribution of content. He is arguing that in today’s hyper-connected world, that old model is starting to fail. His alternative is to simply get out of people’s way and let them create and distribute content themselves. Help people have conversations, and build enough trust so they want to come to YOU for those conversations.

He does not talk about associations in his post, but I think the topic is very relevant. Controlling content is central for many associations, but I don’t think that is sustainable. Associations may be able to control some content and its distribution, but I agree with Jarvis: there is another much larger batch of “value” to be created simply by letting people get together and generate their own content.

This is exactly what learning communities, or communities of practice, are about. In learning communities your members come together around specific domains and generate knowledge themselves, to be distributed through many channels, including traditional association content distribution channels. Some associations are starting to do this, but even those developing communities often overlook the issue Jarvis starts with: trust.

Trust is the engine that drives learning communities. Communities whose members do not fully trust each other will generate new knowledge that has less of an impact on the field, and they will do it more slowly. More time, less impact. If an association is not a solidly trusted convener, very few people will participate in the communities. When trust is high, controlling content or distribution channels becomes less important, because the people’s ownership and energy will be so high, content will be created and distributed faster than you can imagine. And the value you are providing—the value these members experience by actively participating in the creation and distribution of content that is meaningful to them—will be phenomenal.

Yet associations who want to start communities don’t start with trust—they actually revert back to their old model and focus on content (the domain of the community) and distribution (the electronic infrastructure of collaboration). The domain of the community is obviously important, as is a technology platform the community participants across the country can use to work with each other. But for some reason, these two issues become more important than trust. Associations insist on spending time, energy, and resources to establish these pillars without paying any attention to the pillar of trust. This is both unfortunate (the community’s long-term success is at risk without trust or the promise of trust at the foundation of the community) and unnecessary (because all three areas can be developed simultaneously).

I’ll post more later on how to actually build trust.

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Renewal and Community

Jeff and I attended the Association Forum of Chicagoland’s Annual meeting this week. It was a great one-day meeting, with the theme of Community. Jeff did a fabulous presentation on “the Social Architecture of Community,” and I was also impressed with the keynote speakers. Seth Kahan did one of them. He did a keynote at ASAE Minneapolis last year, and I’ve known him for some time. There was also a keynote by Robert Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone” and his more recent book, “Better Together.”

Putnam presented very interesting historical data that shows a clear trend in America (since 1965) away from activities that bring us together or create community. Fewer people join groups, there are fewer picnics, fewer dinner parties, etc. He said that America experienced a similar trend in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and reversed the trend by creating new organizations to help build community (like the Boys Club, for instance, and I think a large number of associations). What interested me the most, however, was an important point he made about these new organizations (that we now take for granted as a “standard” way to join in community): at the time, these new ideas seemed very odd to people.

They didn’t make sense. People knew that you built community by participating in quilting bees and the like (which were no longer working in an industrialized, more urban society). It took courage to stand out there ahead of the curve and advocate for a new way of meeting some universal needs. Putnam argues that we are in a similar situation. We need to identify some new models for connecting people, and this challenge hits the association community smack between the eyes.

The dominant association model seems very clearly rooted in the early industrial society. Who is willing to stand in distinction from the traditional model and offer some new ways for people to be and work together in your association? Who in this community has the courage to propose some ideas that many will initially see as odd? This is the only way to stay ahead of the curve. Can your organization handle that?

I feel like a lot of people love the thought of “staying ahead of the curve,” but they assume that doing so will yield adoration and praise. In fact, “praise” seems to be the key metric for determining whether or not what you are doing is right. That will likely ensure your obsolescence. Being “odd” does not guarantee success, of course, but organizationally you had better be doing something different to create space for such activities. It is a key piece, I think, of what Jeff and I are talking about in terms of “renewal” in associations.