With Kelly McKelvey, Marketing Account Executive

When planning your Annual Conference or any association event, it’s easy to get wrapped up in handling the logistics like hotel room blocks or programming issues like the call for speakers. One critical element that sometimes becomes an afterthought is the marketing and promotions of the event. Without a strategic approach to your event marketing, you might see attendance and exhibitor participation drop. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when putting together your marketing plan.

Start early. Ideally, we could all start planning our next conference right after this year’s conference wraps up. While that might be a bit unrealistic, it helps to establish your conference theme and visual branding six to nine months in advance of your event so you have time to develop the key marketing materials you need to promote the event to attendees as well as sponsors. Having your materials ready well in advance will be a big help when reaching out to sponsors to fund different aspects of your event.

Be consistent. Having an established branding look for all of the marketing materials for your event will help your communications stand out from the crowd. By incorporating your organizational branding with a specific marketing look for your event, prospective attendees will know what you are promoting the moment that they receive your marketing materials. This consistent look should be extended to your save the date card, all digital promotions, registration materials and even the on-site signage and brochures.

With the economy’s continuous unpredictability, many associations have been forced to take a closer look at their operations and evaluate how they can work more efficiently. While some choose to hire a staff to run their organizations, others choose to outsource their management solutions to an association management company (AMC).

AMCs serve as strategic advisors and consultants, providing management and headquarters services to thousands of international, national, regional, state and local non-profit organizations. The employees at these companies provide the leadership and governance needed to help association Boards maintain a strategic focus, while managing day-to-day operations. AMCs provide association clients with a variety of services from executive, administrative and financial management to membership and educational development to strategic planning and website support.

According to the AMC Institute, a worldwide trade association, utilizing an AMC: 

1. Allows association leaders to concentrate on policy issues instead of administrative tasks

2. Provides an affordable, high degree of professionalism, management expertise and technology through the concept of shared resources

3. Customizes staff activity to meet association needs

4. Maintains continuity of business operation during changes in leadership and staff

5. Provides cost-effective solutions to personnel, equipment, facilities and budget considerations

As one of only 68 AMCs accredited by the AMC Institute, CMA’s association clients see value in our holistic approach to provide them with a broad range of services including public relations, event management, leadership and governance support and strategic marketing, all managed by a dedicated team of professionals trained to handle each task efficiently and effectively. At the end of the day, our success is your success so we are focused on providing solutions that will help your association achieve growth.

Interested in how we can help your association grow? Email us today.

Jeffrey Barnhart
President and CEO
jbarnhart@cmasolutions.com

With Jennifer Thayer, Association Manager

An association’s Board is the backbone of the organization tasked with the dual mission of dealing with today’s challenges while keeping an eye on future opportunities. A Board is only as strong as the individual commitment of its members.  As an association management company, CMA has worked with a variety of Boards and has found these strategies effective for keeping a Board engaged:

Make sure the mission is front and center. Having a passion for your association’s mission creates excitement among Board members and helps everyone keep their focus on why everyone joined the organization in the first place.  It can be helpful to use the mission as a touchstone year round.

Create a structure with clear accountabilities. Board members have full time jobs, as well as personal lives, that demand their attention and can often conflict with their volunteer work with the Board.  To make sure their Board duties stay near the top of their list, it helps to have clear responsibilities and establish deliverables that everyone agrees to as a Board.  When people know what is expected of them, they usually deliver on it or at least can speak up if they can’t make that commitment.  Your Board’s Chairman or President is crucial in the process.

Make it a team sport. Having everyone reading from the same playbook and going in the same direction can really make the difference when it comes to a Board’s overall success.  While you don’t want stifle differing opinions or new ideas, make sure to remind everyone they are all on the same team and involved for the same core reasons. Getting the most out of your Board members requires having a good understanding of the individual personalities and the overall group dynamic. The more you know about each Board member, the easier it will be to know who should champion which project.

The entertainment industry’s award season is in full swing and aside from the glamour of the actual ceremony, you need to first make sure the foundation of the awards program is solid and communicates with members’ needs. Typically recognizing either service to an industry or award competitions centered on an industry’s products or services, awards programs can distinguish an association as an industry leader and be an excellent source of non-dues revenue and publicity. Consider these tips for keeping your association’s awards program fresh.

Introduce new categories. Your association’s industry is constantly changing, so it’s important to evaluate your awards program’s categories to ensure they remain relevant or if any new categories need to be introduced. This shows your members you are keeping up with industry trends as well as ensuring their awards program remains fresh and effectively captures their industries’ market segments.

Establish judging criteria. Having set judging criteria in place helps members understand how their entries are being judged, enabling them to better determine how their materials measure up and effectively select which ones they should enter. This will also help your judges better understand what they should be looking for when judging the entries.

Enhance the way you display entries. Every association’s awards program structure is different, but it’s important to make sure your member’s entries receive the visibility and recognition they deserve. Ensure their entries are clearly and prominently displayed and in a format that is easy to read. This enables members to easily view all of the companies that entered the competition, creates a sense of pride and accomplishment for those members that entered and encourages those that didn’t enter to participate next year.

Need help taking your awards program to the next level? Email us today.

Diane Webster
Meeting Planner
dwebster@cmasolutions.com

With Lynn McCullough, Director of Association Management

For associations developing, launching and managing an industry-wide accreditation program is an effective means of adding member value, generating revenue and strengthening an association’s mission and industry stature.  Here are a few tips to getting a new program off the ground:

Define the Goals. Accreditation programs can serve many purposes such as establishing recognized industry benchmarks for professional knowledge, skill levels, performance standards and ethical practices or providing the individual with a sense of pride, accomplishment and enhanced business and professional stature.  Take the time to determine why your members or prospective members would participate in an accreditation program and use that as a jumping off point for your planning.

Establish the Structure.  Accreditation programs are an effective differentiator for an association, but only if the programs are strong and credible. Creating a governance structure to develop valid and reliable accreditation criteria, eligibility parameters, standards and testing procedures as well as ongoing monitoring, oversight and promotion is essential to an accreditation program’s success.

Identify the Member Benefits. If the association has done its work establishing the program as an accepted standard of industry expertise, it gives those who earn the accreditation a distinct professional advantage. Association members who achieve accreditation can enjoy an enhanced profile in the industry. They can use the appropriate designation after their names by imprinting the official designation logo on their business cards, stationery and marketing materials, and are symbolically more prequalified for greater job opportunities.

The Event Service Professionals Association (ESPA) turned to the event planners and PR team at CMA to help make a big splash with social media at their recent Annual Conference in early January. CMA developed ESPA’s “Seek & Tweet” contest which offered a new way for attendees to get to know the Conference destination (San Diego) and each other through Twitter. This scavenger hunt-style activity required them to snap photos of themselves with landmarks, different members and signage and post them to Twitter using the hashtag #ESPA2012. The participants were entered into a drawing to win a complimentary hotel stay for ESPA’s 2013 Conference and complimentary attendance to ESPA’s 2012 webinars.

The contest was promoted heavily in pre-Conference brochures and e-mail blasts. CMA also mobilized the association’s Board in the hopes they would inspire other attendees to participate. While on-site at the Conference, the PR team helped attendees with any questions and monitored participation. The team even gave a Twitter tutorial to the ESPA Board of Directors to help maximize their Twitter experience. As a result of this contest and other Twitter participation, tweets using the hashtag #ESPA2012, reached over 20,000 people and yielded over 80,000 impressions, helping to increase awareness of the association and its activities.

Meghan Higgins
PR Account Executive
mhiggins@cmasolutions.com

With the ever-changing economy, it’s important for associations to consider other ways to bring in revenue. Sponsorships are great drivers of non-dues revenue enabling associations to utilize this income to implement new programs and benefits for their members. Consider these three ways to use sponsorships to generate non-dues revenue.

1. Develop sponsorships that are tied to your event. Is your association having an upcoming conference or annual meeting? Create a sponsorship kit tied to your event. This is a great way to provide sponsors with an opportunity to promote their products and services to a larger audience while giving them direct face-to-face contact with their target customers. Give sponsors an opportunity to have fun with it too – offer a creative event for them to sponsor such as a margarita station or a sun-survival kit if your event is located in a warm climate.
2. Utilize your association’s educational programs. Does your association hold monthly webinars or develop an industry whitepaper every year? Utilize these educational tools and offer sponsors an opportunity to get involved. This will help you continue to provide your members with educational programs while providing additional value to your sponsors.
3. Offer visibility in your member communications. Your association’s website, e-newsletter or magazine are all resources members look to on a consistent basis to help them stay up to date on the association and industry trends. Giving vendors an opportunity to sponsor these communications guarantees their message will be seen by their target audience and gives them an opportunity to stay top of mind with members all year around.

On January 26^th, members of the CMA association management team oversaw the on-site logistics for the International Card Manufacturing Association’s first-ever Personalization & Fulfillment Symposium. But the CMA team’s involvement was not just on-site—this event was the product of months of planning and collaboration with ICMA members to bring a concept like this to life.

Starting at the 2011 ICMA EXPO, the association’s largest event, the CMA team began to formulate a way to respond to members’ suggestions to include more of a specific focus on the sector of card manufacturing that ultimately brings the card to the consumer—personalization and fulfillment. While this sector is very much a part of ICMA’s membership make-up, the association had never embarked on providing an educational program specifically dealing with issues and challenges these members face.

The CMA account team formed the Personalization and Fulfillment Task Force (PFTF) and invited four active ICMA members to create a path forward for this project through bi-weekly conference calls. In July, the team decided a kick-off educational event in January was necessary as a way to gauge how valuable this initiative would be long term.

The result confirmed the need for this type of special event. Through an e-mail marketing campaign, promotional brochure and public relations initiative, CMA was able to draw in enough attendees to surpass the initial goal of 50 attendees. Sixty five attendees not only filled the room on January 26^th, but the educational agenda held their attention the entire day—not exactly an easy feat to accomplish with the tendency of attendees to want to dash out to make phone calls, check e-mails, etc. nowadays.

Most attendees also commented they would attend future events focused specifically on this area of the card industry this year. The ICMA Board of Directors later commended CMA for their leadership on this initiative and the efforts of the team to make it a true success.

Lynn McCullough
Director of Association Management
lmccullough@cmasolutions.com

With Kaitlin Friedmann, PR Manager

At the heart of a good public relations program is a network of media relationships that need to be nurtured with the right best practices. Journalists need publicists, and vice versa, to keep the media cycle going. Work with a publicist that has demonstrated the ability to be a resource for the media in the following ways and reap the benefits of increased visibility.

Determine their needs first. My first question in a response to a media inquiry or request for interview is “when is your deadline?” It is important to prioritize journalists’ needs—their schedules are tight and if you don’t give them the attention they need when they need it, they will move on to someone else.

Offer additional links and background. A reporter always appreciates additional statistics, bios or photos that they might be able to use in their story. Before they even ask, offer these types of resources to show you are an ally in their job. They will remember it next time they need information on your industry or target audience.

When pitching, be considerate. When pitching a story idea by phone, I always ask if the reporter has a few minutes to talk or if they are on deadline. It’s all about being conscious of their time and not about pushing your own personal agenda. Follow up with an email if your pitch really deserves a long explanation.

Wikipedia was one of many sites that "blacked out" in protest of SOPA and PIPA on January 18.

Because all associations rely so much on the Internet for simple to complex tasks, last Wednesday’s blackout in protest of proposed new laws made a huge, lasting impression. So much that Congress postponed their vote on the bills, citing they would like to wait until there is wider agreement on a solution.

But what did all of it really mean? Let’s look at what SOPA and PIPA mean to your use of the Internet.

Last week, a number of Internet sites such as Google and Wikipedia protested The Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—both of which seek to combat Internet piracy—by “blacking out” content that would be restricted through the passage of these bills. You might ask yourself, why are these trusted brands protesting if this is about preventing piracy? Isn’t that a good thing?

The Tools You Use

Consider this scenario, offered by Todd Drake on Forbes.com. If someone posted a video of their TV screen showing NBC content to Yahoo.co.uk, an Attorney General could order Reddit, for example, to remove every link to Yahoo.co.uk from everywhere on Reddit. Reddit would also need to implement monitoring to make sure no links to Yahoo show up again. Bing would need to drop Yahoo links from results, which would probably be strange, since Yahoo provides the search results. If YouTube was in violation, would embedded clips in pages and search results exist? Finally, it’s completely unclear whether Skype, or other P2P systems like Tor, are covered or not. Search engines (and, probably URL shorteners and anyone with a search box) would be required to drop your links from their results, ad networks stop serving you (or your ads), and your payment provider stops working with you. It’s unclear how you get back online, as well. Would the legal risks now outweigh doing anything at all social online?

Free Speech Violations

Aside from the inconvenience of it all, SOPA and PIPA also have people comparing this type of censorship to that of communist China, which uses a tool called Websense as an Internet filter driving out external news sources. The bills are terribly vague, which creates a major issue for websites like Wikipedia, which provide information on an array of topics, some of which are viewed as controversial. While this act appears benign on the outside, it creates the capacity to institute severe encroachments on free speech rights in the United States.

Open Source…Closed?

Over the years, modification of copy-written material has created products vastly superior to those made by industry executives. The operating system Linux, database manager MySQL and internet domain generator BIND have all been the result of open source projects. It is very possible that if this legislation was to pass, then innovative projects such as these would be deemed illegal. The Creative Commons license that currently provides a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists and educators would be paralyzed by legal concerns.

The Google home page, the first thing many people see when they open their web browsers, looked like this on January 18.

While both bills seem unpopular with the titans of the Internet, they are popular with many in the film and recording industry. The Motion Picture Association of America has labeled the protests by Google and other sites as “irresponsible’ and “a stunt.” Don’t forget, these comments come from an industry that has lost an estimated $6 billion to piracy, which is still a real problem robbing dollars out of the pockets of hard-working Americans.

For now…

For now, voting on the bills has been postponed and the blackout protest has been deemed a success, with Wikipedia executives saying “A breathtaking majority supported the blackout.” With the bills still alive, it is now up to the federal government to create a streamlined law to combat piracy while still facilitating the freedom and access businesses and every common American has come to expect and rely upon. We’ll be following the situation closely on this blog and will alert you to any new developments.

Jeff Barnhart

President & CEO
@JeffBarnhartCMA