Check out the latest McKinsey Global Study on Digital Business.  There’s so much good stuff in here, I’m just going to quote liberally from it. My bold…

Executives expect that new digital technologies will transform their businesses, but many admit their companies are far from prepared in developing capabilities and meeting challenges.

Most C-level executives say the three key trends in digital business—namely, big data and analytics, digital marketing and social-media tools, and the use of new delivery platforms such as cloud computing and mobility—are strategic priorities at their companies, according to McKinsey’s first annual survey on the topic.  The survey asked executives in the C-suite about their companies’ adoption of these trends; the extent to which their companies are investing in new digital technologies; the value that they expect to reap from these investments; and the role the IT function plays in driving digital business initiatives forward.

These executives have high expectations for the potential value their companies can generate from the three trends, and one-third even expect digital business to increase operating income by more than 10 percent over the next three years. However, they also report some tough challenges. Nearly half of respondents say their companies’ investments in digital initiatives are too small to deliver on their goals. Many executives also cite overall organizational shortcomings and a lack of IT capabilities as barriers to meeting their companies’ technology priorities.

Tons of interesting data in this survey. And here’s the thing:

Tough challenges ahead

Despite their optimism, executives consistently cite two challenges in fulfilling the promise of digital technologies: organizational structures and shortcomings in their infrastructure and IT systems, which can be too inflexible or ill equipped to take advantage of a data-rich world. In part, the technology infrastructure challenge explains why the CIOs are much likelier than all other executives to believe more investment will be required to deliver on their organizations’ priorities.

The results also reveal some interesting findings about the role the CIO and the IT function play in moving digital initiatives forward. More than half of executives say their CIOs are supportive and directly engaged in these initiatives, though one-quarter say these executives are not engaged at all. Responses about the broader IT organization reveal even less involvement at the functional level: only 14 percent say their companies’ IT functions are spearheading new digital-business efforts. While 39 percent say their IT functions actively engage with or support these efforts, nearly one-third say the function is supportive but lacks the capabilities to deliver on goals.

So what’s up with that?  IT departments and CIOs – what’s going on here?  Are you afraid of change? Are you battening down the hatches?  Do you not have enough resources to overhaul old processes?  Or something else entirely? Does these issues in the chart above reflect YOUR issues?  Enquiring minds want to know.

More:

• The broader organizational issues identified in the question about challenges indicate that executives must think carefully about how to carry out digital business initiatives in their organizations. This challenge may be the most revealing, as it speaks to the potential need for a different operating paradigm—and the fact that traditionally siloed functions (for example, marketing, product development, or IT) could obstruct a dynamic approach to digital business that requires speed and flexibility to create the most value. Also required is a new approach to managing talent by utilizing flexible team structures, engaging outside collaborators, and increasing corporate tolerance for failure.

Do you work in the Meetings or Conferences department of your association?

Social media and conferences, just like chocolate and peanut butter are better together. When it comes to engaging conference participants before, during, and after, a face-to-face event, social media is a remarkably effective tool. It gives your participants another chance to share their delight in the experience you’ve created, connect with colleagues, make new friends and learn and grow as professionals. Social media can make your job more rewarding too, especially when you build a deep connection between the conference experience and the online social experience. It’s something that your social-media-savvy participants are starving for. And no one can do it as well or as meaningfully as you can.

Every time you create a remarkable and memorable experience for your participants, you add  fuel to the social media fire that is essential for keeping your association strong. The key is to collaborate with your colleagues to draw your participants into the online community that thrives all year round in your association. You’ll be a Social CRM Hero by sparking the engagement that leads to a deeper understanding of members, and your social media skills will be important for your career and your success. Given all of that, what can the conferences team actually DO with social? What can YOU do to help your association get the most out of social? Everybody says you should be using social, but nobody tell you how. This is how.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE FULL “BE A SOCIAL CRM HERO” SERIES HERE.  These are short, checklist-style handy guides that take you step-by-step through the steps to rock your social media activities for your particular department.  

Here’s a taster from the Conferences guide.

1. Share conference information early and often to build buzz and capture leads. Gone are the days of waiting for the formal press release before sharing information about keynoters. And forget about waiting for the conference brochure before sharing program details, or hiding your registration list altogether. You have information people want. Use it wisely and use it early. For example: add registrants to a new group on your private community.  Give your Facebook, Twitter and Linked admins key information to post – like early bird deadlines, keynote speaker announcements, and special reg discounts.  Set up the conference hashtag early and promote it often.

2. Get involved in the work of monitoring and responding on the social web. Your organization might have a communications team or a PR agency monitoring for mentions of the association. That kind of monitoring is great, but you can take things a step further when conference time rolls around. Be sure to coordinate with the communications team to make sure you’re not duplicating efforts and that everyone is staying on message.  Are you finding and following presenters and industry thought leaders? Are your outpost admins clear on who to send questions to about the conference for speedy responses? Have you set up Google Alerts for your conference and your competitor conferences, to see what they are up to and maybe borrow some creative ideas?

3. Build social media into the on-site experience. The ultimate success for association social media is when a digital conversation transforms into a real-life relationship. A few thoughtful innovations in the way you design your event can ensure that all the work your organization puts in to social media actually pays off for everyone on-site and afterwards.  Some examples: creating a social media guide for conference participants; making sure all slide templates have hashtag information and speakers’ Twitter handles; including Twitter handles on attendee nametags…

4. Capture and share the on-site experience. Give on-site participants something special to share with those who could not attend–something that will make everyone want to attend next year. Capturing the content and using it to gather leads will also give your marketing department more to work with when it comes time to promote the conference next year. Are you thinking about… Livestreaming a keynote (and showcasing the Twitter activity around it)?  The posting of photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube and slides to Slideshare?  Inviting guest bloggers to live-blog the conference?

Is your appetite whetted?  The Social CRM Hero Guide for Conferences can be downloaded here, and is chock full of tactical goodness to help you rock the social media house.

It’s never too late to start applying social media to conferences. You may already be doing some of this. And with a little planning and collaboration with your colleagues, you can keep building the online experience around your conferences to reflect the wonderful face-to-face experience you work so hard to achieve. Good luck, and have fun getting to know your participants in all new ways.

I’ve explored the similarities between building community and risk management before on this blog. First, I penned Community, Social  Media and Risk Perceptions and then Risk Management and Open Community: More Similar than You Think. My basic premise is that both social media and risk management are association-wide activities.

While speaking at the Maryland Governor’s Office on Service and Volunteerism and Maryland Council of Directors of Volunteer Services’ Power Up! A Conference for Volunteer Management Professionals, a participant raised the question of who owns social media. In her nonprofit, the Marketing Department controls all social media efforts and anything the volunteer manager wants to post has to go through Marketing.

So who owns social media in your association? Responsibility for social media can reside anywhere; information technology, public relations, marketing, communication, public affairs/policy or even membership. The challenge is to make sure the owner knows how to share and play well with others. Regardless of who owns social media, all employees, members and volunteers should be able to participate.

The importance of being a social organization is gaining traction within the business world. Even IBM has studied the value of being social, IBM Study: If You Don’t Have a Social CEO, You’re Going to be Less Competitive. “Being social” is the new imperative for success. Read Humanize, it you’re not convinced.

Innovation is another popular business topic and it gets people talking about risk taking but we need to increase people’s risk awareness. People focus on risk intermittently usually as an argument against a new initiative (“it’s too risky”). Risk is a part of life but few people or organizations have a system or technique to identify and analyze it. The discipline of risk management provides such a process. To be successful, like social media, someone needs to own risk management.

Most people agree you should manage risks but few associations have a risk manager or even a position assigned responsibility for managing risk. Many don’t know where to start to structure their risk management activities. So I’ll help – adopt a risk management policy and strategy.

Every association should have a risk management strategy. A risk management policy explains the role of risk within the organization. The policy states how much risk the organization is willing to accept in pursuit of its strategic objectives. Once you know your risk appetite it is easier to decide which risks to take and which to avoid.

Establish a system to identify and analyze the risks associated with your business activities as a part of your decision-making. Identifying risks is tricky since you don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s why I have written many articles and given lots of presentations on social media risks. This is also a reason to include as many people as possible in the risk analysis process.

Associations’ social media programs are further along the evolutionary chain than risk management. Many associations have at least one staff person (full- or part-time) dedicated to their social efforts while enabling others to participate. Similarly someone has to be responsible for risk management activities within your association. And all employees, members and volunteers need to be involved – managing risk is everyone’s job. Therefore, both risk management and social media should be embedded in your culture with everyone playing a role.

Establishing a risk management strategy is similar to creating your social media strategy. Determine:

• What you want to accomplish;
• Your goals and objectives;
• What you are already doing;
• How to accomplish these goals;
• Train your staff how to manage risk; and
• Monitor your activities and results.

As I said, social media and risk management have a lot in common. Use the lessons learned from your social media journey to embark on your risk management odyssey.

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Here’s the latest post in our “INDUSTRY INSIDERS” column.  Every Monday, we’ll be bringing you the inside scoop from several awesome association technology vendors and consultants who will share the insights they have gleaned from years of working in our association industry.  Our columnists include Ann Yoders of Terpsys, Chris Bonney and Ray Van Hilst of Vanguard Technology, Midori Connelly of Pulse Staging, Patrick Dorsey, Carlos Restrepo and Ben Martin of Avectra, Bryan Kelly and Amith Nagarajan of Aptify, Garry Polmateer of Red Argyle, Christina Smith of YourMembership.com, Kevin Jackson of Biz-Zone, and Paul Schneider of Socious.  All of them are  smart and savvy bloggers, and we know you’ll enjoy what they have to say!

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The topic of gamification has moved away from the category of “newfangled craziness” to the subject agendas are made of. Although it lost some time garnering executive buy-in (partly, I think because gamification supporters tend to make up words when describing it – enter “gamified system”), gamification is not a new idea. It’s the premise upon which our education system was originally based – leveling up, mastering skills/assessments, value attributed to becoming a master, certificates and competition to drive action.

Recently Pew Internet & American Life Project (Pew) released a study entitled “The Future of Gamification.”   It’s worth the read and for those of you who have to hear from neuroscientists before you believe in the value of something, they include that too. Apparently, interactive design elements stimulate our pleasure reactors and alter our behavior responses improving things like reaction times.

Pew is not the only one watching gamification. Gartner analysts predict 50% of corporate innovation will be “gamified” by 2015. Will associations move in this direction as well?

Deciding if gamification will work for your association is much less of a daunting task than you might think (and you may already be employing a few game mechanics. A deeper dive into the topic is required.)

The pros behind gamification are more than just the brain stimulating fun mentioned above. Game mechanics help your association harvest more business intelligence. Plus it requires you to begin thinking about what makes a successful member (from the association’s standpoint). Are there certain actions that your most loyal members perform on a regular basis? What is that frequency? Once you understand your “ideal” member experience and activities, you can make sure you encourage new members in your online community to check out those activities. At the risk of oversimplification and pigeon-holing, knowing your definition of an engaged member is important, if as nothing more than a guideline or base level from which to measure and introduce offerings.

Gamification is just as much about game-thinking as it is a platform. When the term “gamification” is used, many envision a highly technical system of levels and badges and that can be done. Companies like Badgeville can help you with that. But it doesn’t have to be that involved. “Gamifying” (see there’s that word again) your association can be as easy as adopting a process that encourages specified activity and rewards. Game thinking is simply a way of looking at your association from a different perspective. It may not even involve new tools. It may just mean using them differently. Embracing game thinking helps you inspire and engage members in new ways, stimulating those areas of their brains that create pleasurable reactions and thus driving them to do more on your site. You do not have to have a true gamification platform to use game mechanics and thinking at your association.

Through simple game mechanics you can:

1. Recognize your top performers (and thusly reward them accordingly).
2. Assess what your loyal members most use/want and offer more of that. You can also employ that business intelligence to target potential members and enhance a new members’ onboarding experience.
3. Introduce or reinvigorate a mentor program through your association. If you chose to make your list of your most active members available to all members your newest will know quickly who your “gurus” are and can seek advice accordingly.
4. Identify those members who are not contributing and begin to have discussions around whether they are “lurkers” or disengaged. Identifying and differentiating between these two classifications can help open communication about that member’s needs prior to dues renewal.
5. Encourage continued learning. Employing a form of visual measurement to a learning goal helps members understand what is required of them with a quick glance. It also allows them to chart their progress. For instance, knowing that they are ¾ of the way through completion, whether it be a quiz or an education series, is satisfying.

If after consideration you decide game-thinking is something your association could benefit from, take your time rolling it out. Consider the capabilities of the reporting system in your AMS. You may already have top poster (and other most-active descriptors) reports. Experiment with using the data derived from these reports to drive action and enhance your own offerings.

Gamification, game-thinking and game mechanics will continue to shape software, services and events in the future. As more groups compete for your members’ time and attention, offering something that others are not is essential to standing out. Content is a good start; constructing a creative user experience is a good finish.

Christina G. Smith is the Director, Inbound Marketing at YourMembership.com. When she’s not thinking about social media’s continued effects on member-based organizations, she’s contemplating whether 40 really is the new 30. What do you think?

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Just wanted to point you guys to my podcast I recently recorded with Matthew Grant for Marketing Profs. I think you will enjoy it.  Here’s a little excerpt from Matt’s accompanying blog post:

Becoming Human

Social media, Maddie told me, is “powered by human attributes: the desire to be social, to connect with other people; the desire to solve problems; the desire to create and to share what we’re doing.” By enabling the fulfillment of these very human impulses, the social media have brought about a “paradigm shift in how we communicate as a society.”

As a result, people now expect organizations to communicate with them in a more human way: spontaneous, flexible, thoughtful, responsive. Organizations can develop these attributes, according to Maddie, by becoming more open, trustworthy, generative, and courageous.

Thought Into Action

Maddie readily acknowledged that there are many more human attributes than those four, but said she and Notter thought these were “ones that we can specifically translate to a work environment.” Their thesis is that if you cultivate these attributes, “you can really flourish in a much more social digital world.”

This is an important point. Talking about “humanizing the organization” would be little more than management consultant fluff without some indication of how to actually accomplish it in the real world. For this reason, the principles laid out in Humanize are designed to be applied, experimented with, tested.

And we’re not just talking about the marketing department! As Maddie makes clear, this book is not a “social media” book; it is a leadership book. The object of it is not to help you run better campaigns on Facebook or Twitter; the intent is to drive organizational change.

In the podcast, Matt pushes back on a lot of our ideas – including our assertion that best practices are evil. Listen to it – I think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation. I know I did and I’m grateful to Matt and MarketingProfs for inviting me to discuss the ideas in Humanize.

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This is the handbook that the National office of the Red Cross share with their local units (like chapters). Pretty self-explanatory and definitely awesome.

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This post is by Jacob Smith, co-author of the The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit.  The book is so awesome that I asked Jacob to post excerpts from it here for you, every Friday for ten weeks.

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Maybe you have an amazing board of directors that has perfect chemistry and does five times more than you could imagine asking of them. They support you and the organization, they hold you accountable, they challenge your thinking and broaden your horizons, and they raise more money than you budgeted. (If that’s the case, feel free to skip this section.)

But if your experience running a nonprofit is anything close to average, your board of directors will be one of your greatest frustrations. As Boardsource reported, “[a]ccording to chief executives and board members themselves, nonprofit board performance is mediocre at best.” Or, as nonprofit consultants and researchers Richard Chait, William Ryan, and Barbara Taylor ask in an oft-cited book on nonprofit governance, “Why is there so much rhetoric that touts the significance and centrality of non-profit boards, but so much empirical and anecdotal evidence that boards of trustees are only marginally relevant or intermittently consequential?”

It is more likely that your board will either be well-meaning but inept or mediocre but dysfunctional. And because you’ve heard so many times about the importance of building a strong board— from the nonprofit management books, from your nonprofit management classes, from your peers and funders, from your own board members—you may feel a sense of urgency about making board development a top priority.

Get over it.

It’s not a bad thing to help your board become stronger and more effective, of course, and a good board really can contribute mightily to an organization’s success. An effective board can set clear performance expectations for the executive director and hold her accountable to those expectations. A high-performing board can help the executive director stretch and grow in the role. Boards have important fiduciary responsibilities, and a strong board can provide critical financial oversight, making sure the executive director is asking the right financial management questions and catching problems before they become catastrophes. A good board can productively collaborate with the executive director on the organization’s long-term vision and high-level strategy decisions. Heck, some boards actually do the one thing most executive directors crave: raise lots of money for the organization.

But you only have so many hours in the day, and everything you do has an opportunity cost. You can spend an incredible amount of energy trying to figure out who to put on the board, how to manage them, how to push them, and how to convince them to be big fundraisers. Sometimes, a small bit of work will produce lots of benefit. But most of the time, herculean effort on your part won’t produce equally sizable results. And the time and energy you spend on your board is time and energy you can’t spend on anything else. Give your board some attention, but don’t let board management be a major source of stress (there are plenty of other things to stress about).

In other words, have an optimization strategy for dealing with your board. Find a comfortable balance between how much effort you expend on your board and how much value for your organization you get from it. A filmmaking nonprofit working in central Africa charges its three-person board of directors with financial oversight of the organization but created a separate advisory board to provide strategic guidance. In this way, they are getting more out of their boards by making sure to get the right people assigned to the right job.

One executive director and the board of a nonprofit that helps urban kids develop strong academic and business skills scrapped the traditional function-based committee structure (e.g., finance, governance, audit) and instead organized the committees around the major strategic plan goals: debt reduction, the capital campaign, and program enhancement. Each board member was consequently part of a team with clear, well-delineated goals that tracked directly to the organization’s output and outcome goals.

Another example: Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, in The Networked Nonprofit, describe how the American Jewish Committee switched from standing committees to all ad hoc committees to create more focus and flexibility. As the organization’s needs change, the board can rapidly change structure to adapt.

The key is to be smart and realistic about your board’s role and contributions, to have a solid grasp of how much energy you expend working with them, and to make sure the value to the organization is reasonable for the effort you are putting in. of course, it wouldn’t hurt for you to develop strong board management skills, so you can guide your board toward the questions you want it to answer and away from those you don’t (now that’s a course they ought to teach in nonprofit degree programs). One simple starting point: figure out what questions you really want them to engage with and which ones you’d rather they leave alone, and create your meeting agendas and packets with this in mind. Whatever you do, don’t try to create a Bionic super Board.

“Good enough” really is OK.

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Click on the image below to take a test assessing your organization based on the four human elements we describe in Humanize as defining (for us) a human organization. The test will take about 15 minutes, and we’ll send you individual results.

See how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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The HIP Network Hybrid Event “Understanding Meetings Cost in the New Reality” is happening today from 2:30 – 6:00 pm ET.

Follow along here! (If you can’t see the CoverItLIve window below, click here.)

McKinsey Quarterly has an interesting article about the adoption of social technologies in business (you have to create a free account to read the whole thing). Honestly, the graphs and charts about social media use didn’t interest me that much (though it’s good to have some solid data in those areas), but the very last page interested me the most, because it talked about how our organizations are changing as a result of the adoption of social media. This is obviously a core theme in Humanize.

They asked the people in this survey (over 1400 responding) about which management processes they thought would be changing over the next 3-5 years as constraints in using social technology continue to disappear. 35% said that the boundaries between customers, employees, and vendors were going to blur. About the same percentage felt that hierarchies were going to flatten and teams would self-organize. Those were the changes that got the most agreement (even though it was only about 1/3 of the respondents). At the lower end of the scale, a smaller number of respondents (less than 13%) expected to see things like employees having a greater role in choosing their own leaders, peers having an impact on compensation decisions, and employees having more say in what tasks they get to work on.

At one level, I guess I am pleased that there are folks out there who have their sights set on these kinds of changes. These are the kinds of things we talk about in Humanize. We suggest some radically new ways of looking at compensation, urging companies to be more transparent as part of building trust both internally and externally. We talk a lot about what it means to “flatten” the hierarchy when we talk about cultures that embrace decentralization in open organizations. And we give examples, like Whole Foods that shares ALL of its salary and compensation data internally (yes, with everyone). Or W.L. Gore and Associates, where the employees are the ones who give out the “leader” title (which is the only title in the company), and they are the ones who take it away, too.

So yes, I am glad people are paying attention to it, but part of me is also quite disappointed by this report. There are solid examples of very successful companies who are already employing several of these ideas (and some of those examples are already several years old), yet only a small percentage of those surveyed could even agree that these things might happen sometime in the next three to five years!?!?

That’s a problem. While we are making progress in terms of identifying ways in which we need to change our organizations to become more human, we haven’t seemed to shift our expectations about how long organizational change takes. Over the last fifty years we have developed a certain “comfort zone” about organizational change, where we expect a process of identifying new ideas, trying them out slowly, measuring the results, and then maybe moving towards a large-scale change management process to make it happen. It takes time–like three to five years, apparently.

I’m offering a different hypothesis. Change does not need to take as long as we think it does, and it definitely doesn’t require as much worry and angst as we put into it now. I’m looking at social media and I’m seeing faster change, with less drama. I’m watching the development of new ideas–even new ideas related to Humanize, and I am seeing them build off each other faster. I feel like the sequel to Humanize won’t be written by Maddie and me, because everyone else will simply take what we’ve built and make the next leap.

There’s a lot we need to do to change our organizations to make them compatible with our 21st Century world, and maybe the first thing is to readjust our comfort zone when it comes to the speed of change. Let’s start by accepting that change will be swift and far reaching. That just might enable us to do it.

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