Remote? Mobile?

In response to a comment I made awhile back about being a “remote” member to the associations I’ve joined, someone said, “All members are remote.”

Not exactly. As an MSAE member (Michigan chapter of ASAE) in Lansing, I was local to the organization’s office. I could be on the premises to help as a volunteer within ten minutes. I watched for the events that were held in the office or in town to see if my schedule would permit me to attend. I felt connected.

But because I was outside the DC area, I didn’t feel as connected to ASAE. I volunteered on “remote” projects — helping with Associopedia’s original content, writing for the PD enewsletter, serving as a chat leader for the eLearning Conference.

Now, living on the road, I’m not only remote to those associations (and the eLearning Guild, and other associations I’m a member of), but I’m mobile as well.

I’m on the move.

So you’d think I’d be the idea target audience for mobile learning (“m-learning”).

m-Learning has been trending for awhile as a way to deliver training via cell phones. It’s a great way to get JIT (just-in-time) nuggets of information, data, and training to folks on the go.

• Sales people can access updated training on the newest features of the products or services they sell — in the cab on the way to their next appointment.
• Consultants can quickly learn about the latest advances in their clients’ key industry before walking down the hall and into the meeting room.

The possibilities are endless!

But don’t design your m-learning strategy with someone like me in mind.

All tech and adoption issues aside (how readable is some of that stuff on those tiny screens, anyway — especially to older eyes?), there’s a more fundamental reason I’m not your model learner:

I’m remote and I’m mobile, but I don’t use my cell phone for anything other than the occasional call.

Sounds old-fashioned, I know.

But the fact is, those maps you see floating over people’s heads in TV commercials still show a lot of white, empty reception areas.

We’ve been on the road for nearly a year and often find ourselves in places where there is no cell phone reception.

Or getting reception requires going someplace like the top of a hill:

Yes, I’m probably in the minority. My situation is probably unique.

But maybe not. How well do you know your members?

Too often we’re quick to make assumptions about what our members want and need. When you live in an environment, use your cell or iPad or Blackberry or other gadgets for certain tasks, it’s easy to assume that everyone else does the same thing. “Remote” and “mobile” might be connected, but they’re not the same thing.

So before you spend a lot of time on m-learning, and especially before you make an investment in it, find out:

• who your mobile learners are
• whether there are enough of them to justify m-learning
• and if they’ll be able to access the m-learning you deliver

To do otherwise is to waste resources and create excitement or interest around something that just isn’t worth it. At least not yet.

Your time is better spent figuring out ways to keep your “remote” members feeling connected by giving them ways to contribute.

Life Support Can Be Expensive

Didn’t think your conference sessions need life support? In Jeff Hurt’s Midcourse Corrections post, “The Conference Session is Dead,”  he writes, “The conference session is a triumph of standardization and it is so ingrained in our thinking we still buy and sell seat time rather than performance improvement.”

He is so right.

In his discussion — and the great comments posted by others — lots of reasons for the stagnancy are mentioned and deconstructed.

One I didn’t see mentioned is $$.

Fact: Many associations rely on conferences/conventions to generate a significant part of their annual non-dues revenue.

Fact: Conferences/conventions are a twisted mutation of business meetings and educational events, both of which have sprouted arms and legs from their foreheads.

Fact: Every conference relies on the generosity of their sponsors and their booth space sales to generate their revenue goals.

Fact: Sponsors make those donations and vendors make booth space commitments based on attendance predictions — the higher the number of attendees, the more likely the money will pour in. [For more on sponsorship connections to conferences, Brian Birch has some ideas at Acronym .]

Fact: The more attendees an event attracts, the more difficult it is to design and lead effective educational events.

Fact: Associations are less willing than they should be to part with the $$ necessary to make those educational sessions true learning events.

Example:

A few years back, the education committee decided to offer a pre-conference event for our foodservice members that focused on Web 2.0 options. Because our members were all at colleges and universities, some were already starting to use podcasts and Twitter to promote daily specials, and other members were curious about how they were doing it. Great fit, right?

I’ll cut to the chase:

Few sponsors saw a link that was direct enough for them to donate funding. Even though we explained that the same decision-makers would be in the room, they opted out. They didn’t say so, but my guess is that they didn’t see any potential podium time.

So we didn’t have much funding to operate with.

I envisioned at least four break-out sessions, each highly interactive: podcasts in one, blog and Twitter in another, using social networking like Facebook in yet another. We’d have laptops set up so all attendees could play along as the session leader talked them through examples and gave them opportunities to try everything on their own.

Peers would lead the sessions so members would learn from each other. The environment would be set for a free exchange of who’s doing what, why, how. The underlying assumption would be, “If I can do it, you can do it” which breaks down any resistance to learning some feel with technical topics when “experts” lead sessions.

Well, most of our session leaders were peers, but things generally didn’t work out the way we’d planned for several reasons:

• Internet connections in the hotel meeting rooms were exhorbitantly expensive
• Laptop rentals were difficult to find locally 

Solution:

We combined the most Internet-interactive sessions into one room to save wifi costs. We used small-group discussion and other methods of collaboration in other breakouts to engage the learners. Powerpoint presentations were verbotin.

Results:

Less than optimal, based on what I was envisioning. But the feedback on the session was the best I’d seen for any we’d ever done. The attendees, after all, didn’t see the planning, just the outcome, so they didn’t know what they were missing.

Attendees appreciated the highly interactive sessions and — naturally — took a lot away from them that they put to immediate use.

Fall-out:

We lost money on that session. When I looked the executive director in the eye and said, “But it was one of the best learning experiences in a pre-conference they’ve ever had,” he agreed that it was worth it.

Unfortunately, no organization can do that too often.

So yes, we want to offer more interactive sessions.

Yes, we want to engage our learners.

No, conferences are not the ideal place for that.

But the fact remains that money drives everything, and until there’s another financial model, these are the facts we’ll have to live with.

In the meantime, we’ll have to keep finding ways to trick the system.

That’s our life support for the time being.

Remember the Smell of that Cooking?

We all know how hard it is to get presenters to abandon the safe familiarity of the podium and Powerpoint slides and become true facilitators of learning, so I was tickled to see so many interactive sessions included in the ASAE Great Ideas Conference.

These three in particular caught my eye:

• “Speed Learning for Professional Development Specialists,” facilitated by Tony Ellis of NACS and Bill Scott of The Obesity Society.
• “Cookin Up Leadership[tm],” facilitated by Rhea Blanken of Results Technology
• “Leadership through Golf: Learning from Life’s Divots,” led by Ron McNally and Reggie Henry of ASAE and The Center, and Tom Pierce of Pierce Management Development

I can tell these were interactive from the titles, the photos posted online (okay, that’s pretty much a dead giveaway), and from the handouts.

When the handouts consist of worksheets, supplemental readings, checklists and other job aids instead of Powerpoint printouts, then I know something interesting must have been going on in that session. Of course it also means that I won’t learn much without the context around them, but that’s okay. Face-to-face events should benefit those who are there, not those of us mining the handouts after the fact (remote learning and face-to-face learning should be conducted differently, you know).

Hurray for these content leaders who dared to be different — who found ways to make their key points interesting and — hopefully — memorable!

Because it’s all about being able to remember what we learned when we need it, right?

Educational researcher Will Thalheimer, PhD, explains why and how the learning environment (from the room you’re in to the noises around you) impacts how learners remember what they learned. If learner’s can’t recall what they were taught, they won’t be able to apply it.

The report, “Aligning the Learning and Performance Context: Creating Spontaneous Remembering,” (54 pp, $295 value) is one of several research resports, articles, and job aids he’s made available free from his Web site. (If you’re not familiar with his work, you should be. Plus he’s available for consulting!)

In it, Dr. Thalheimer writes, “When people are in an environment in which they learned something, the environmental stimuli trigger their memories and thus aid recall of the information that has become associated with the environment. When people imagine an environment without being in that environment, their memories for that environment can still trigger the appropriate memory pathways to aid retrieval of the learned information” (14).

Trying to remember what you learned?

Think about holding that golf club, or the smell of the cooking, or the faces around the speed learning tables.

Ah! Now it’s coming back to you!

Why ANY Revenue Increase is a Good Thing

It probably wasn’t the intention of ASAE and The Center to suggest otherwise, but that’s what I got out of one of their recent reports.

I didn’t attend the Great Ideas conference, so I’m pouring over the handouts, blogs, and other summaries about the event in general and the sessions in particular.

Because I wasn’t there, I might be missing some connections by perusing the materials without hearing the accompanying speakers. As always, I’ll just call it as I see it and welcome comments and corrections.

So where did the title of this post come from? What’s gotten me all riled up on such a beautiful day?

Monica Dignam’s presentation at the Great Ideas Conference, “The Economy — An Update on How Associations are Doing,” drew on studies conducted by ASAE and The Center and compared how well CEOs and executive directors across the ASAE membership predicted the actions they and members would take in light of the economic downturn last year and what they actually ended up doing.

The brief report that accompanied the presentation, “Associations and CEOs: A Report on Two Studies During a Down Economy,” did include a surprising bit of data.

Of course the section about education — online learning in particular — grabbed my attention.

According to the executive summary of the report,

“Executive optimism appear to persist despite unmet expectations in the case of online programs. In the Spring, a large majority (60.9 percent) of respondents believed their organizations would receive more revenue from online education
programs in the coming year. In fact, only a third (33.3 percent) reported such an increase.”

First of all, a 33% increase is still an increase — by a third, remember. That’s nothing to go into mourning about. Most organizations would say that if they shifted their learning by a third to a methodology that provides quality education at a time when learners can’t travel as often or for as long, then this is a number to celebrate, not wring their hands over.

The summary goes on:

“Yet a majority of association executives still anticipate significant new
revenues from this type of activity. This may speak to an anticipation that online
tools will provide new revenue streams, but such hope is out of line with the
mood of association members, who (according to a pair of ASAE & The Center
economic surveys conducted in 2008-09) still strongly prefer face-to-face learning,
even despite tighter travel budgets.”

Of course people prefer face-to-face learning. Someone else brings the snacks, after all. And networking is usually more fun in person.

There are a few flaws with concluding that anticipating new revenues from alearning is “out of line”:

The first flaw is assuming cause and effect: even people who prefer face-to-face learning don’t always have the means to attend such events. I might prefer to earn a million dollars a year, but that doesn’t mean I will or that I’d turn down a half-a-million if it was offered instead.

The second flaw is that the conclusion is based on a false choice: association members don’t have to (always) choose online learning OR face-to-face events. They can choose both or neither. Just because respondents prefer face-to-face doesn’t mean they won’t avail themselves of online learning if it meets their needs.

Even if we assume these association leaders were disappointed with a 33% increase in revenue from online learning instead of 60.9% (a huge assumption), we don’t have other information around this data to form the full picture. Did organizations make huge upfront investments in white-label social networking sites (maybe included here in online learning? who knows?) only to discover their earn-back time will take much longer than a few months or a year?

Faulty conclusions aside, what the report does give us is a comparison between the anticipated impact of travel restrictions and budget-tightening, and what actually happened within a relatively short window of time.

What we don’t have — at least not here — is how many individuals attended face to face and online educational events in 2008 or 2007 or 2006.

How do we know how far we’ve come if we don’t know where we started? How will we know when we’ve fully recovered?

Maybe a 33% increase in online revenue is ten times higher than each of the last four years. Rather than being a hand-wringing piece of information, this would be evidence of an astounding accomplishment.

My advice? Don’t read too much into the data — at least not as reported here about elearning.

You’d do well  to keep focusing instead on a workable alearning strategy that will expand your association’s educational reach.

Exit Interviews for NonRenewing Members

With thanks to the good people at ASAE and The Center who posted several entries covering sessions at their Great Ideas Conference, I’m getting a feel for what I’m missing. This is good. Engagement from afar and all that.

Summer Faust’s takeaways from Bob Stearn’s “Refresh, Renew, Ignite…” session combined with some insights from Guy Kawasaki’s session particularly snagged my attention in her post, “A Different Way To Look at Lost Members.”

I’ll try to summarize:

Should we chase down members we’ve lost to find out if something we could have done differently would have saved their membership?

OR

Should we just let them go and focus on those we still have instead?

Here’s what I’d call a Great Idea: why not implement an Exit Interview for members that don’t renew?

When I’ve left certain employers in the past, I’ve participated in an Exit Interview, conducted as the very last thing before I walked out the door. It was an opportunity to bring closure to my tenure at the company, to make suggestions for things I saw that could have been improved, and to thank those who provided me the opportunities that had helped me grow.

When conducted properly, valuable information can be exchanged in such a conversation.

Don’t tell me associations can’t chase down non-renewals to have such a conversation. Pah-lease. If you’re not able to do that, you’re doing something very, very wrong and should have your answer for their non-renewal right there.

What’s the angle for alearning professionals? Why not take the bull by the horns and contact those lagging members yourself? If you’re in a huge organization and those numbers are in the hundreds each month, then select a relative sampling. But even thirty lapses a month can be tackled by making one call a day (and doubling up a couple of days for February).

Create your own exit interview. Plan your questions ahead of time, but be flexible during the conversation so you can follow their lead. Let them know what you’re up to at the start of the call so they won’t wonder about the purpose of your call.

Check their membership records to see what educational programs they have attended, what products or services they have purchased. Find out if they’ve contributed to your association’s publications, blogs, or have volunteered in other ways.

Even though you have this background information in front of you, don’t refer to it.

Instead, ask them if the ever attended a face-to-face educational program or took an online course. If not, why not? If they say they didn’t, but you have records showing otherwise, be careful not to contradict them; you’ve already learned something: they didn’t have a memorable experience, or they didn’t remember it was an event your association held, which is also revealing.

Ask them if your educational offerings had anything to do with their decision to not renew.

Ask them if the cost of attending your educational events has become prohibitive.

Ask them if the content has become predictable or otherwise unappealing.

Ask them if they could make one suggestion regarding your association’s educational programs that could have made the difference about their renewal — or something you might implement in the future that could attract them back — what would it be?

Ask them if they’d be interested in attending any of your programs as a guest rather than as a member. Don’t be shocked. What you want to find out is if they’d like to continue to attend your programs — or attend something for the first time — by paying a non-member fee, rather than paying dues in addition to paying the fee.

You might find that some of those nonrenewals still want to be connected, still want to attend, but are seeking more frugal ways to do it.

Help them find those ways.

Without an Exit Interview, you won’t know which nonrenewals those might be, and which ones should be kept on your mailing list for non-member invitations.

Who knows? Maybe someday they’ll become dues-paying members again. And you’ll already have a relationship with them when that day comes. All because you gave them a call for an Exit Interview.