6 Counterintuitive Ideas for Associations

Jason Della Rocca and I presented a session at ASAE09 called CounterIntuitive Paths to Success: Upending the Status Quo, based on this article by Jason about some pretty radical stuff he did to grow membership during the nine years he was Executive Director of IGDA, the International Game Developers Association.

In our session,  Jason talked a bit about the ideas in his article, including the recurring theme at ASAE09 about how failing quickly and cheaply is totally ok and even valuable for associations.

We then asked our session participants to work in groups at their tables to share counterintuitive ideas they had seen in their travels.  Thank you to our table hosts who diligently took notes for us, which Jason will post to the ASAE wiki.  I’ll update this post with a link once I have it. [UPDATE: Here it is.]

I thought I would share my six favorite counterintuitive ideas here.  I hope you’ll be inspired to try some!

1. Ditch your committees. One group reduced their governance structure from several dozen to two committees, resulting in increased productivity and transparency.

2. Do your own thing. Everyone says start a Facebook group? Go Myspace.

3. Buy one, get one free for conference registrations.

4. National organization provides registration technology/management to local chapters – in exchange for owning the data. This allows them to collect key information about how members are behaving/engaging locally while alleviating a big burden for local volunteers. They are seen as the “white knights” and get the benefit of critical data.

5. Bring in the CEOs of your competitor organizations to your strategy development weekend.

6. Create a Wall of Feedback at your annual conference – give each attendee 12 post-its (6 critical, 6 nice to have).  Arrange post-it’s under topical areas, and use the closing general session to recap people’s comments.  Next year, report back on progress.

Do you notice a pattern here?  These are all about going against the grain.  Need to make money? Give stuff away for free.  Need to develop better strategy? Invite competitors, remove the chain of command/committee barriers – and open the doors to direct feedback.  Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

The final part of our session was a real-world problem, where a state association was being hit hard by the economy, needed to ramp up new member recruitment without a budget, and was being hamstrung by the dues policies and procedures of their national organization.  General consensus in the room?  Go rogue and ditch the national.   BIG lesson here for national associations with components, I think – don’t let your procedures and structures stop your components from innovating and fighting for their own survival. You think they need you… but maybe they don’t.

What do you think?  Have you undertaken anything at your association where everyone said, nah, that’ll never work – but then it did?  Have you ever tried going at a thorny problem from a completely unusual angle and gotten unexpectedly good results?  Have you had ideas but just haven’t tried them yet?  I think if there is a silver lining about this economic downturn we’re in, it’s that many associations have been forced to go back to their roots, to re-examine why they actually exist and for what purpose – and maybe to allow themselves to try some crazy things, now that they are no longer blinded and bound by their own success.

I’d love to hear more ideas like this.

Thanks again to everyone who attended our session!

Tagged as: ASAE09