Tom Kelly hit a few notes I could harmonize with in his article for T&D’s September issue, “Hitting the Suite Spot: How Learning Leaders & Executives Can Speak the Same Language.”

Not only did he get me thinking about how we need to communicate to the two bosses about results (see previous posts), but this quote of his from a 2007 Forrester Research report got me thinking along different lines:

“[I]nformal learning continues to gain ground in the corporate training environment…. But there’s a disconnect: most organizations still spend the majority of their training dollars on formal learning even though most employees now learn primarily through informal activities.”

Cost of Formal Training

Associations are living the same disconnection: investing thousands of dollars — millions, for large associations — on one-time events that will reach a relatively small percentage of members. Think about it: if you spend $300,000 on your annual conference, and 700 people attend, you’ve just provided a one-time event that cost almost $430 per attendee.

If you keep in mind that the cost of an event isn’t just the dollars spent, but the time spent as well, then you can begin to see how much your formal training is actually costing.

Let’s also say that your annual conference requires one full-time meeting planner, and the part-time assistance of another three staff members. Let’s say the full-time meeting planner costs the association $50,000/year in salary and benefits, and the combined hours of other staff members (hourly rate x number of hours they spend preparing for and attending the conference) is another $50,000.

The real cost of your conference is now $400,000 and the cost per attendee is over $570.

Cost of Informal Training

Now let’s say you implement some ways your members can connect informally, over distance, using Web-enabled tools. You provide blogs, wikis, forums, and discussion groups, all using free Web applications.

You allocate one staff member to monitoring and guiding these informal, online activities. Maybe sometimes the blogs generate continued conversations about a topic from a live event, for example.

Now let’s say you hire that person full-time and their total cost (salary and benefits) is $50,000/year.

Let’s say these informal activities reach 1000 of your members.

Do you see where I’m going?

So here’s the real question:

If you can justify $500,000 to benefit a small percentage of your members, why can’t you justify a smaller investment to benefit a larger number of members?

Justifying the value of attending a learning event is just the beginning. 

If you want your members to return to the same event (your national conference, for example), you’ll have to convince your members — and their bosses, who sign the  travel and expense requests — that the program will be different this time.

Otherwise, your members and their bosses will think they already got everything they could out of attending, and will opt to go somewhere else. (Yes, to someone else’s conference. It does happen!)

Be proactive. Tell them about the new:

• Topics that will be covered
• Approaches to previously presented but ever-important topics (last time it was a panel discussion; this time it’s a sharing of best practices, for example)
• Content leaders and other experts you’ll be featuring this year, and how they plan to attack their topics

Answer the question your members’ boss is likely to ask:

“Didn’t I just send you to that program? What will you get this time you didn’t get then? Why should I pay for it a second (or third or fourth…etc.) time?”

But that’s just the beginning.

Mine your smile sheets and other feedback evaluations to let your members — and their bosses — know how others have benefitted from attending.

• What one thing have they implemented or done differently as a result of attending your program?
• What specifically has resulted from that implementation or change? (For example, have they reduced employee turnover because of more effective orientation materials?
• Have they reduced the time it takes to process an application or other transaction?)
• How much time or money have they saved their organization by implementing that change?  Over what period of time?

If you’re not already gathering this sort of feedback, start now.

Use the information ruthlessly. Get permission to use specific quotes and data. Use them in call-outs in your brochures and online announcements.

Convince your members — and give them the information they need to convince their bosses — that your programs have value to them. Chances are very good your competitors are doing this very thing — or will be soon.

We all know competition for our members’ time and dollars is at an all-time high. Don’t lay down in the middle of the railroad track. The train is coming.

I’m catching up on reading, which is why I’m just now coming around to posting about an article from the September issue of  T&D (ASTD’s magazine). In “Hitting the Suite Spot: How Learning Leaders and Executives Can Speak the Same Language,” Tom Kelly writes:

“The most successful learning leaders operate more like a profit center than a cost center, whether or not they actually bring in any direct revenue. This means approaching each decision as an investment — a business decision with a measured, quantifiable return in top-line revenue; productivity; or satisfaction and loyalty.” (p. 50)

Business leaders are focused on business outcomes. Learning leaders are focused on learning outcomes.

The fact is, what you’re focused on is not necessarily what your leadership is interested in hearing about.

Our association leaders are interested in whether we’re meeting budget, generating revenues, and providing value to our members so they’ll renew. I don’t mean suggest these are cold people, but really — the board of directors wants to make sure the association stays solvent and the executive director of CEO wants to make sure we stay out of legal trouble *and* solvent.

Association leaders want proof that your programs:

• advance the association’s mission and value to members
• provide information and training that will protect the association from any legal action or illegal activity
• promote the image of the association
• contribute to membership growth and revenue

What’s more, the association leadership constitutes just one of two bosses we need to satisfy.

The other boss is the member’s boss, the person who signs requests for attending our educational sessions and conferences. They also want to see results. They want to know that the money they spent for your association member to attend your event was worth it. 

• How has the professional development event enhanced the attendee’s ability to contribute to his or her organization?
• Is that person now more productive as a result of attending?
• Did he or she learn new skills or develop new ideas that can be implemented to the organization’s benefit?

Answer those questions for your members so they can justify the expenditure to their bosses, and you’ll have won most of the battle.

Most? Not all of the battle? That’s coming up in the next post…

There’s probably no proving my theory, but I’ve long believed that associations and non-profits lag behind corporate and academics when it comes to adopting adult learning theory and the use of technology in education, among other things. The first — adult learning — is worthy of a separate post, so I’ll leave that aside for the time being.

And lagging in technology is easily explained: associations are generally more risk-adverse. This is a good thing. Countless organizations have invested hundreds of thousands (and in the cases of some corporations, millions) of dollars in technology just to get an edge, only to see those investments fail to earn back even a portion of their cost.

We need to be good stewards of our members’ investments in our organization, and that means being cautious.

But we’re slowly catching up.

According to Ambient Insight’s report, “The US Market for  Self-Paced eLearning Products and Services: 2009-2014 Forecast and Analysis,” the growth of self-paced elearning among NGO’s, non-profits, and associations will rise just over 5%. Highest growth sectors are projected to be the healthcare industry and academics (K-12 and higher education).

Why are associations and non-profits expected to grow more rapidly than corporations? Primarily because we’re just catching up to their reliance on self-paced elearning, which is established among for-profits but still relatively new for us. They haven’t given up on self-paced elearning, their growth in that type of elearning hast just stabilized while they focus on other initiatives.

And why is this important for you to know? Benchmarking across the training industry — not just across other associations — is essential if you want to continue to offer leading edge educational events. Stand-alone, self-paced, asynchronous elearning can be a big part of that, so if you’re not devising a strategy for your association’s growth in this area, you’re going to be behind the eight ball before you know it.

More and more associations are starting to feel the pressure of encroaching competition from all sides:

• For-profit corporations are better equipped than ever to offer free Webinars and other opportunities to customers (our members), often providing the same or similar content that we would have to charge a fee to offer.
• Institutions of higher education are functioning more like member associations, offering social networking and other ways of connecting and sharing experiences and knowledge.

The technology necessary for self-paced elearning and social networking is less expensive, more available, and more accessible every day. Ambient Insights reports that the largest investments (across all sectors) that will be made in elearning include hosted platform services (for example, social networking and/or learning management systems housed by the vendor on the Web, rather than on your server) and non-IT, self-paced elearning content. [For access to a free, downloadable executive summary of this report and others, click here.]

Aren’t these the very things your association is considering? Obviously, you’re not alone.

But here’s another factor in this equation that deserves some attention. Bear with me for some important economics. As the recession loomed, investors anticipated that elearning would get more attention and business, and acted accordingly. They dropped over a billion dollars in learning technology companies, particularly those specializing in academics. Tens of millions of those dollars went to companies that provide learning platforms to corporate and government clients.

Those companies now have lots of money for research and business development which they will then offer to their customers — in the corporate and government sectors.

Of course, you’ll benefit in the long run from those investments in a sort of “trickle-down” fashion — the corporations and government will continue to finance the newest innovations at the highest cost, and we’ll reap the rewards of systems and programs that will have the bugs (mostly) worked out of them, with efficiencies that will make them more affordable and stable. 

The trick will be to find that most opportune time to incorporate those innovations — early enough to avoid losing your members’ attention to corporate competitors, yet late enough to get an affordable, working solution.

Does your elearning strategy position you well for this? Are you ready?

Or “Why Providing Education and Training Is Good for Your Members.”

Okay, we all know that, or we wouldn’t be in the field of education. But we’re also surrounded by those who keep demanding that we show some results for all the money we spend on our educational events — face-to-face and online.

For more than ten years, Laurie Bassi and Dan McMurrer have been studying the relationship between corporate training investments and their profitability. They’ve concluded — time and again — that companies providing training and PD to employees are consistently more profitable, even allowing for the wild market swings we’ve recently seen.

What does this matter to you and to your non-profit organization?

Too often we think of our association members as “members” rather than as professionals taking what they gain from our programs back to their medical practices, educational institutions, business offices, or other places of employment. They contribute there, which further contributes to the bottom line of their company or institution.

Here’s the challenge:

• Mine your registration and completion data (for all programs) to find the members (or institutions, if you’re a trade association) that have participated most frequently in your educational programs.
• Ask those individuals or institutions for data related to their profitability for a specified period. Have they consistently performed in the top 10% of their market segment? 20%? (Your measurement standard might differ, depending on the field.)
• Look for a correlation. If  data from Bassi and McMurrer holds, you should be able to see a positive relationship between the amount of professional development and the level of profit realized.  

Now you have data that can come in handy in at least a couple of ways:

• Shows your board of directors the effect your educational programs are having in your members’ businesses, institutions, etc.
• Demonstrates to your members the value they’re getting from the educational programs you’re offering.
• Provides your members with data they can take back to their superiors that helps make the case that the investment in your association and its education programs is worthwhile.

Sure, correlations are just that, and there can be many reasons for profitability. There are likely many organizations spending little on professional development but raking in the dough and at high profit margins.

But when someone just wants to see numbers, and when you can make a strong case for their validity, you’d be remiss not to at least take a whack at it.

Interested in reading more? Here’s the article summary, from Workforce:
http://www.workforce.com/section/11/feature/26/60/15/266018.html

I’m admittedly bad at titles, so I’ll summarize what you’re about to read:

Those smile sheets most of us use to “evaluate” an educational event are nothing to smile about.

Refresher: “Smile sheets” are those questionnaires handed out (or worse, left on tables or chairs) for attendees to fill out at the end of an educational session. They usually ask for a numerical rating of the session and/or presenter and are generally limited to less than a page. They’re supposed to help us determine whether the session and its presenter(s) delivered on the promise the attendees felt was given.

Smile sheets don’t work.

• They’re overused
• They’re poorly written
• They’re inaccurate

Overused: We’re busy people, no doubt about that. To be more efficient, we take every possible shortcut, including making a generic smile sheet and using it for all of our events. What’s worse, when smile sheets are the only means of soliciting feedback and results about our programs, we are asking them to do something they’re not designed to do: assess final learning and application of that learning to the workplace.

Poorly Written: Because they’re so generic, they don’t have the specificity needed to generate helpful responses. Asking an attendee if the presenter was knowledgable about the topic or if they will be able to apply what they learned back on the job is useless. Forming useless questions in perfect ways won’t help, either.

Inaccurate: Generic, poorly written smile sheets won’t provide accurate feedback. And if you ask the smile sheet to do more than it can, you’ll believe you’re getting guidance from your members about future programs that they’re really not providing. Smile sheets are not accurate for determining whether learning occurred. It won’t even tell you whether the session had value for those attending.

Why not? Because that’s not what a smile sheet should be designed to do.

What should a smile sheet do? A smile sheet can be very useful for gathering feedback on:

• Location: Was the hotel/conference center conducive to learning? Was the city a desirable place to be for this topic, theme, or session? Why or why not? Answers to location questions can help you determine if you leveraged the local environment sufficiently for your event. If people are going to travel to attend your conference or other events, make it worthwhile. Then find out if it was.
• Content: Asking the attendees to list three things they learned that they will be able to apply back in the “real world” (whether the “real world” is at work, at home, or in other actvities) will help you determine whether any key information was new to the general group, whether any of the content “stuck,” and if what was presented was done in a way that made people believe they could do something with what session covered.
• Format: Were they engaged the entire time? If not, why did they disconnect? Were any questions they had answered?
• F&B: If your sessions include providing refreshments of any sort, ask about them. Was there enough variety? Were special dietary needs met?
• General: If you’ll be using the same location in the future, you should ask about the room and service: was it comfortable? Were they able to stay focused? Were there distractions (for example, did hotel staff disrupt the session when they came in to clear the refreshments?)?

The bottom line is that people will have an immediate reaction to their environment (“That was great! The food was awesome!”), a general idea about what they’ll find useful (“I loved that idea about using Twitter to send my cookbook customers tweets about what I’m ordering at the restaurant for dinner tonight.”), and whether they found the session interesting or not (“That guy seemed to know his stuff, but sitting for 90 minutes and hearing him talk just couldn’t hold my attention, no matter what an expert he is.”).

To find out what your members end up applying back in the real world, conduct separate, follow-up surveys or interviews.

Basing your decisions about content on smile sheets will lead you down the wrong path. And basing your ROI (return on investment) will take you down even worse roads.

Remember that alarm that went off last year? The loud one that seemed to wake up PD and education leaders in associations everywhere? Remember scrambling to figure out alternatives to face-to-face meetings and educational events because you worried that members might not be able to attend them?

Even those most reluctant to move into online learning saw real value in developing elearning for their members. Many actually implemented new initiatives or ramped up existing alearning programs.

But what happened when the alarm bell went silent? Did your alearning strategy go back on the shelf?

If you have a hard time justifying the value of elearning outcomes to your association leaders or members, here’s another piece of evidence for you:

Relative to learning efficiency, according to Brandon Hall, online learners are twice as efficient in learning times as ILT learners. In other words, depending on the structure of the course, online learners may be able to acquire the needed information in half the time they would in a traditional classroom. If a learner can jump ahead or skip around in an online module to get exactly what they need, instead of sitting in a classroom for a designated amount of time, he or she will potentially save the organization time and money.    — From the e-Learning Guild’s report, “Building the Case for eLearning”

[ILT = "instructor-led training" or classroom instruction]

Because of all the focus on collaborative and social learning, we sometimes overlook the fact that our members sometimes have very good reasons to learn individually rather than in a group, in person, face-to-face, sitting at the feet of an expert instructor.

Yes, it’s true!

If your association membership includes competing entities (for example, medical supply companies that compete with each other for the same customers), then you might have attendees who would prefer not to reveal what they don’t know. In this case, they might avoid attending a face-to-face session that they *would* take online, privately.

If your association membership includes individuals within the same organizations but at different levels of responsibility, online learning can appeal to those who’d prefer to review basic information privately, online, than to expose their need publicly at a face-to-face event. For example, if I’m relatively new to my industry and I know that I’d benefit from attending a certain session, I might be reluctant to register because I don’t expose my knowledge gap to my direct reports or peers. Even if I attend, I might be less willing to fully participate, which won’t result in the best learning outcome.

If your association members possess a range of educational and experiential levels, providing face-to-face events that adequately cover all needs is impossible. Providing online learning that allows everyone to register and to skip around the content as needed, then you will have leveraged the online event to meet the maximum number of members for the best financial investment, resulting in targeted learning for the attendees. In this case, it’s important that you avoid emphasizing “completion” of the course or module; instead, suggest skipping content that’s already familiar and focusing on what’s needed. Even better, design the content so they only need to access and pay for what’s needed — i.e., create brief segments based on specific topics or a problem that needs solved, versus developing a broader module or course.

You can do this.

You need to do this.

If you don’t do this, your members will eventually drop out, fading away just like the blaring of that persistent alarm a year ago.

Kudos and deep thanks to Jeff Cobb and his team at Tagoras for the significant effort they undertook in compiling, editing, and publishing their report, “Association Learning Management Systems.”

Eleven companies responded to an extensive list of questions about their systems, resulting in a report of 400+ pages that include tables, profiles, and product reviews, as well as a valuable list of questions you can use or modify as you investigate your LMS options.

How much for such a valuable report?!? With apologies to Tagoras, I’ll be frank: it’s CHEAP!! Okay, I’ll be polite: it’s VERY INEXPENSIVE.

At just $199, this report will save you bookoo bucks in equivalent time spent trying to gather the information. Do the math: let’s say you earn $20/hour. Let’s round up the report cost to $200. Now I dare you to try to get this sort of information on your own in just 10 hours.

Can’t be done. Can’t. Be. Done.

So stop reading and go buy the report. Or take a look at the overview.

Oh, did I mention the importance of having sorted out what you’ll need from an LMS, based on your elearning strategy?

Tack another $25 onto your investment and get the aLearning: A Trail Guide to Association eLearning first. That way you’ll get the best value from the Association Learning Management Systems Report.

And we sure don’t want to waste money, do we?!?

If your assocation has decided to incorporate an internal social network (“white label network”) — a network that resides in your Web space, attached to your Web site and usually connected to your AMS, as opposed to FaceBook, LinkedIn, and other publicly-available systems — then you’ll want to get your hands on this new white paper from Socialfish.

Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer have pulled together a great starting point for anyone considering implementing a system. Drawing from interviews with key vendors, the 50 or so page document summarizes the companies and their systems, with details about the features, backend structures (important to make sure members will be able to access the system and you’ll be able to provide it), pricing models, and contact information.

They intentionally didn’t provide one of those checkmark charts, but you might decide to create your own in order to sort through the narrative comments.

And keep in mind that these are vendors Socialfish knew to contact — rather than a comprehensive representation of all available vendors and systems. Keep your eyes and ears open to any other companies you hear about, because this is not a complete list. The white paper provides a good model for the sorts of questions you can ask to begin exploring those companies.

More than that — make sure you have done your homework! You won’t know what you’re looking for if you don’t know what you need.

It’s like ordering at your favorite restaurant — you could order everything on the menu (it all sounds so good, right?!), but that gets expensive and you’ll be full before you get through everything.  Going in with an idea of “what you’re hungry for” will help you narrow your choices and make the best decisions.

Get your copy of the white paper here: http://socialfish.org/wp-content/downloads/socialfish-vendor-whitepaper.pdf

Let’s say you’ve been spending the last few years on the other side of Mars and just tuned into the blogosphere to find out where online learning is today.

What would you discover?

With all the focus on social networking and social media (SN/SM) you might conclude that online learning — especially asynchronous elearning — had gone the way of the manual typewriter, 8-track tape, and those TV dials that used to change the channel and adjust the volume.

Advocates of SN/SM probably don’t see a problem with that (who wants to get up, walk over to the TV, and change the channel anyway?!?).

But here’s the thing:

Mentoring and training are not the same thing. They serve different purposes, take different amounts of time, and require different skill sets.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say your fundraising for program development in your association is conducted by volunteer members from a committee. The committee of five rotates 2 or 3 members off and on each year.

Which is the most effective way to prepare your volunteers for their responsibilities? (Select one answer.)

A. Call each individual and explain to them what’s expected.  This is individual mentoring.

B. Convene a general call with the full committee and explain everything. This is group mentoring.

C. Create a brief tutorial that covers all the essential information, and make sure all committee members complete the tutorial. This is training.

D. None of the above.

Best answer? D. Why?

A& B are more personal, but you risk leaving something out that could have significant legal or financial implications. A requires a lot of patience and time. B requires you to decide whether to have the entire committee on the call (with some attendees who have heard the information already) or just the newcomers (who won’t gain from the experience of those who served on the committee the previous year).

If planned carefully, a tutorial will ensure you have covered the essential tasks, requirements, legalese, etc. But even the best online training can’t anticipate every question that could come up.

So the best way to prepare this committee is to provide an asynchronous tutorial that gets everyone on the same page followed by individual and/or group mentoring to answer questions that the volunteers might still have.

If you expect your volunteers and members to learn everything from you (as a staffer) and each other via SN/SM, you’re guaranteed to discover gaps and misunderstandings.

There is no mistaking it: online social networking sites (whether they are interal or public) provide for excellent mentoring.

But mentoring is not the same as training, and shouldn’t be substituted for it.

Social networking/social media are not the same thing as training, and shouldn’t be substituted for it, either.

So let’s not let the big discussion (necessary though it is) to cloud over the continuing importance of online training.

eLearning is not the 8-track tape. It’s the electric guitar you could hear on the 8-track and the cassette, and now hear via CD and digitally in other ways. The guitar will likely change over time, and the delivery of how you access it will certainly change, but the instrument itself is here to stay.

SN/SM is the tape deck, the turntable: it’s the platform. It’s another way of delivering content.

Don’t mistake the CD player for the music you hear when you turn it on.