PSP 2013: The Future Value in the Professional Association

The social media challenge ACS tackled

In the first session at the Professional Scholarly Publishing conference, Harrison Coerver asked if associations still have a future. The following panel outlined the value they provide in the internet age and what services they will have in 2018.

Madeleine Jacobs, CEO of the American Chemical Society (ACS), provided an overview of their membership and services. They have over 163,000 members, with 187 local sections and 32 technical divisions. 87% of members have degrees in chemistry and more than 60% of members work in business and industry. 15% of members live outside the US and the offices have two main locations in Washington DC and Columbus, Ohio. They have a governing board for publishing and run - wait for it - 485 programmes. That's a big association with a lot of programmes.

The ACS has four strategic goals:

1. Provide authoritative and indispensable information
2. Advance members' careers
3. Improve science education
4. Communicate chemistry's value

How are they tackling the Race for Relevance? One of the key initiatives they have focused on has been to set up a tech trends roadmap. They have a group of staff who monitor and review on an on-going basis what the latest technology can deliver and what is relevant for members. They identified four challenges and four solutions:

• embrace social media
• make information portable
• expand electronic publishing
• make ACS national meeting presentations more accessible.

They have launched award winning apps, expanded their electronic publishing, focused on providing information through the Chemical Abstract Service and continue to build more virtual services. With 92-93% of revenue coming from publishing, it is critical that they continue to adapt and deliver value.

Her final piece of advice? Hire the very best tech people you can find. Steal people from other organisations who have done well. And don't forget to empower great people you already have on staff.

James Prendergast, COO of the IEEE, outlined the historic merger between AIEE and IRE, driven in the main part because the IRE were moving a lot faster through their international reach and open welcome to students and young professionals, something Coerver advocates strongly. They were quick to adopt advances, the AIEE recognised this, so they merged in the 60s.

The IEEE has more than 429 members globally. Their Xplore Digital Library has more than 3.25 million articles, they have 900 active standards and 500+ standards in development. They held 1396 conferences globally in 2012 and have 572 already in places for 2013. (Cue sharp intake of breath from the audience.) They have interactive HTML full-text articles with unique and active features - not just vanilla HTML.

Jacobs, Prendergast and Dylla with Coerver

The IEEE has completely endorsed open access and provides options for all authors to do this. All their technical journals are now hybrid with subscription and open access options. They have a number of journals that are now fully open access and announced a new mega-journal in 2012 that will be fully open access and multi-disciplinary.

They launched OpenStand for their standards in August 2012. Informational webinars provide new ways to deliver content. Pre-university outreach portals such as TryComputing and TryEngineering are proving to be a big hit. TryEngineering received 12 million hits in 2012 with the average time on site exceeding 10s of minutes. They are fostering engagement through social media and have expanded online impact through an extreme programming competition and the IEEE Day.

Prendergast advised delegates to focus on mobile. Your services have to be at the right time and in the context of when and where members want to receive that information. As an organisation they provide too much information. They have to focus on getting it right and making services relevant and timely.

Fred Dylla, CEO of the American Institute of Physics outlined the history of the association and the particular, unique circumstances that make their situation unique and challenging: that they are an umbrella body of ten physics associations. They have a membership of approximately 165,000 scientists with 75% based in the US and 25% internationally.

In 2008 they undertook a key strategic re-evaluation. This included divesting the offer of publishing services to members. Post-2008 there was a lot of self reflection. He described their governance structure as akin to the Senate and House of Representatives structure which led to the governance review post 2010 they conducted with the support of BoardSource. This led to them recently establishing the wholly owned subsidiary AIP Publishing LLC.

Professional Scholarly Publishing Annual Conference: The (R)evolution of Value: Innovation and Sustainability. Are associations becoming irrelevant?

Harrison Coerver, author, Race for Relevance

Are associations becoming irrelevant?

That's the question that Harrison Coerver, President of Harrison Coerver & Associates and author of Race for Relevance: 5 Radical Changes for Associations asked the audience at the opening session at the Professional Scholarly Publishing meeting in Washington DC.

Coerver's organisation has worked with over 1400 associations in their time, so he draws these conclusions based on wide experience. He believes that professional associations aren't going away. They will probably exist, but will they have vibrancy, relevance and vitality? That's not a future we all want for professional societies. So we need to do something about it.

To do this, he believes we need to face up to the "New Normal" for Associations. This is dictated by time, value, membership diversity, generational value, competition and technology. These six trends converge to create an environment where association relevance is challenged. What do associations have to do to get the situation back in balance? And how do they go about it? As a rule, associations are not equipped to tackle a changing situation, so this is no mean feat.

Time
Executives don't have time any more. Institutions are time intensive. Meetings, seminars, events, member queries, reading publications, government affairs: they all take time. When do you hear people saying they have spare time now? You don't. Associations need to acknowledge this. There is no more time.

Value/ROI
Face the fact: associations are competing for people's time so you have to add value and provide a good return on member investment. You used to just join your relevant association. In the 70s and 80s people started to question the value of their dues: what do they get for their money? There's nowhere to hide now.

Membership diversity
Members all used to be the same, but then a funny thing happened: they started to diversify with sub-sections within sections. Coerver cites the American Medical Association who lost members while associations in medical specialisms grew.

Generational values
Demographics are a key factor. The highest satisfaction ratings of associations come from those in their 60s. This drops as you go down the age groups. There is an ageing phenomena that needs to be tackled. Beware the thinking of 'Millennials': those born in the 80s who will find information and arrange events themselves using modern social technology, and resent paying someone else to do it.

Competition
Associations don't like to think of themselves as competitive organisations. From for-profits to non-profits, co-ops to media companies, and from the internet itself: all these traditional and not-so-traditional competitors are taking a piece of the association landscape. You have to a) acknowledge this is competition, then b) understand there are alternative propositions, and c) if competitors do it better than you do, then you are in trouble.

Technology
Associations have been slow to adapt technology and we are behind. Apps, social media are all good examples. With social media - associations have allowed Facebook and LinkedIn to own their networks. Compromised by the lowest common denominator, associations have tended to focus on the one person who still doesn't have a fax machine. A key challenge is to balance member services and satisfaction and not losing the progressive members who will get frustrated by slow progress and go elsewhere (those non-traditional competitors mentioned before, maybe?) Why can't we use the technology that we use everyday in our lives?

So how do associations fix this? Coerver recommends you adopt five radical changes:

1. Establish a five member competency based board - keep it small and tight for effective decision making
2. Empowered the CEO and staff - you can't run a strong association on part-time amateurs
3. Rigorously define the member market
4. Rationalise programs and services (learn from the music industry: think about providing singles rather than albums)
5. Build a robust technology framework

Mismatch between model and environment

The key mistake associations make is equating the volumes of services to the value they provide to members. This is a fast track to over-extending the organisation and not delivering the most important services to members. This is about the power of focus and if you ignore this and technology, it's a short cut to irrelevance, ignore technology.

Strategies for success read like any good business methodology. Create a sense of urgency. Ask loaded questions. Use data. This is critical due to strong traditional ties to services. The best way to confront that is by putting data in front of those who are wedded to historical ways of doing business.

Invest in youth. Get youth on the board as soon as possible. You don't know what will they will say, but you have to evolve from within and learn how to adapt and become relevant to the next generation. Accelerate the adoption of technology. Associations spend more on meals at events than they do on technology. That is a scandal. And finally, harness political skills. Human capital is one of the biggest strengths. Use your board for lobbying and ensure you have the best and brightest team working for your association.