We are delighted to share this blog by Roy Kaufman, Managing Director of
New Ventures at the Copyright Clearance Center which draws some interesting parallels between learned societies and social networks and highlights what we can learn from their example.
Social networking a la Facebook and Twitter may seem to be a product of the Internet
age, but it is actually nothing new. If you think about it, learned societies - which
aim to bring together people in a given field or area of professional interest - are
actually built on the original idea of a social network, to wit: a network of social interactions and
personal relationships, as Webster’s
defines it.
Yet today’s academic societies, charged
with connecting individuals who share professional interests and providing a
forum for communication and collaboration, continuing education, and career
opportunities, are facing declines in membership, particularly among people
under age 30. Fewer than half (48%) of all
millennials belong to a society compared with 83% of baby boomer researchers, according to Wiley’s recent survey of nearly 14,000 research
professionals.
Facebook and Twitter (and more
researcher-focused sites such as Mendeley) have something to do with that age discrepancy;
they are favorites for early-career researchers who want to actively network in
both their professional and personal life. With so many online opportunities
for making contacts and interacting, societies are tasked with finding new ways
to provide meaningful benefits that will attract and retain members, as well as
keep their revenues growing.
Perhaps scholarly and professional
societies can learn something from Facebook, too. Just as that online social
network continues to expand (and gobble up money) by using member data in ever more
ingenious ways (linking all those Likes,
learning from them, and tailoring content to members accordingly), so societies
can use technology to better serve their members and become more relevant and
profitable in the process.
From
disconnected data to smart data
Fully leveraging data they already have
is an often-overlooked way for societies to grow their membership and keep
current members engaged enough to renew year after year. Take the example of researchers
who submit an article to a society journal. It is a good bet that the article
will contain the names and contact information of multiple coauthors. Wouldn’t
it make sense if, instead of isolating those names within the editorial system,
societies could use them to their advantage, connecting them with other data
points throughout the organization?
That process could start at article
submission by determining the needs of corresponding authors and co-authors,
simply by asking questions like the following:
- Are the authors already members of the society?
- If yes, are their memberships up for renewal?
- If no, will a special offering (such as an APC discount or free author reprints) entice them to join?
- If they have an .edu address, are they taking advantage of institutional arrangements for payment of open access fees?
- Are they registered to attend the next society conference?
- Do they need continuing education credits?
- Do they even know about these benefits?
Chances are, members and would-be
members
don’t know all the benefits
of membership. In the Wiley survey, 15% of respondents said they’d never been
invited to join an academic society; 12% said they didn’t know what offerings
were available, and another 12% said that joining had never occurred to them.
As the folks at Wiley put it, “This means that 37% of non-members are either
waiting to be asked to join, or might be persuaded to join…With so many
non-members just waiting to be asked, societies may find they are often pushing
at an open door.”
But societies are not yet pushing on
that door. One reason is that in many learned societies, different departments,
and the data they house, are “siloed,” cut off from one another and not
communicating effectively. “When a member interacts with an organization,
they’re interacting with education, or a group that does grants,” says Ann
Michael, DeltaThink CEO and former president of the Society for Scholarly
Publishing, who moderated a recent webinar on society membership by the
Copyright Clearance Center. Silos, says Michael, make it difficult for members to
see the organization as a whole, which makes it hard for organizations to serve
members’ needs effectively.
In the same webinar, Alex Taylor, head
of communities and events at the Institution for Engineering and Technology,
admitted that for a long time, the IET was “lost in a labyrinth of our own
making .…We offer so many different things, [there are] so many different teams
and departments…that there’s most definitely a [silo] culture, a lack of
joined-up collaborative thinking.”
The key, then, is for members and societies
to come together, to increase satisfaction and engagement on one side and
revenues on the other. That starts with knowing what members and potential
members want and need. For example, in
Wiley’s survey findings, 26% of respondents said their strongest reason for
joining a society was to take advantage of opportunities for continuing
education. But the continuing education platforms seldom, if ever, talk with
the editorial ones.
The bottom line: If the membership, continuing
education, and conference departments are not connected with each other or linked
up with the editorial department, opportunities for generating new members and
retaining existing ones will be missed. Think about the benefits to all
involved if these systems talked to one another. In that scenario, it would be easy
to notify an individual who recently submitted an article on a particular topic
about an upcoming workshop on the same subject. Or, having just published that
article, to let the author know that his society membership renewal comes with
the benefit of 25 free article reprints.
What all of this requires is a smart network
of links among databases that enables societies to target their marketing to
specific individuals with personalized messages and offerings, at opportune times
(when you already have their attention, for example, at article acceptance or other
key points in the editorial workflow). That is the difference between blasting
members with renewal notices three days after they’ve renewed and instead telling
them something they truly want to
know (i.e. that they are due for CME credits). Rather than putting off members
and would-be members with more junk mail, suddenly, you are providing them with
a higher level of service.
One way to make the data connection
easy is with an enterprise content management system that does the sorting and
linking of member information automatically. An investment in an ECM system is
worth it, because it allows societies to provide a higher level of service. Knowing what members need and offering it to
them when they need it will bring in higher revenues in the form of new and
renewing members, who can now avail themselves of services they were previously
unaware of. Or, to put it another way, societies will be able to maximize
revenue sources already at their disposal, and members will understand the
value proposition that comes from joining and engaging with a learned society. Talk
about pushing an open door.
Adopt
some standards
Besides enterprise content management
systems, another crucial step toward connecting data and better serving members
is to adopt standards such as ORCID IDs, Ringgold names, IP addresses from
Publisher Solutions International, and identifiers from FundRef. Once employed,
societies can identify institutional affiliations, funding agencies,
geographical locations, and membership status, and then launch relevant
messaging. You might, by ORCID ID, identify
an author member as hailing from a particular institution and take it from
there, reaching out to let a Harvard-based author know that she’s eligible for
an institutional discount on open access charges. Combine these standards with the
member data derived from your enterprise content management system, and
suddenly, you get to the nirvana of data connection, without having to reinvent
the wheel, and without having to bother the author.
Create
new businesses to keep members happy
To keep growing, societies also need to
consider new sources of revenue. It makes sense that the first thing a
membership-driven society should consider when it thinks about growing its
bottom line is the needs of its members. For example, the Wiley survey asks
members what they value. Some key
services mentioned in the Wiley survey are continuing education (64%), keeping
up to date with the latest research (50%) and job openings (32%). Once
societies have this information in hand, they should ask: Do I have a business around this? If the answer is no, the next
question might be: Should I have a
business around this? If learning is a key reason members renew, a society
may want to look at whether they have adequate continuing education offerings.
If career networking is a top priority, a society might send out alerts when
jobs open up in members’ areas of interest. That’s known as data driven messaging, whether a society
tells a researcher who has just submitted an article on kidney cancer about an
opening in the nephrology department of a major research hospital, or reminds her
to register for the upcoming American Society of Nephrology Conference.
Attracting and retaining members - even
millennials - is not rocket science, and we can learn from the companies who do
it well. It is about figuring out why people join, and asking: Have I done enough here? Because
sometimes, by asking relatively simple questions, offering opportunities vis-Ã -vis the needs of
members, and doing some obvious things like adopting standards, it is possible
to create the building blocks that raise a society to the next level - and make
it go viral.
Roy Kaufman is Copyright Clearance Center's Managing Director of
New Ventures. Prior to CCC, Roy served as Legal Director, Wiley-Blackwell, John
Wiley and Sons, Inc. He is a member of, among other things, the Bar of the
State of New York, the Copyright and Legal Affairs Committee of the
International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers. He
was the founding corporate Secretary of Crossref, and formerly chaired its
legal working group. He has lectured extensively on the subjects of copyright,
licensing, open access, text/data mining, new media, artists’ rights, and art
law. Roy is Editor-in-Chief of Art Law Handbook: From Antiquities to the
Internet, and author of two books on publishing contract law. He is a graduate
of Brandeis University and Columbia Law School.
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