The Use of Codevelopment and Networking to Improve Professional Association Membership Services
Friday, June 1, 2007 at 07:57AM Anna Caraveli in the Journal of Association Leadership has published a lengthy and thoughtful article titled Building the Future on Member Value: Codevelopment as a Key to Customer Relationships in the 21st Century. This is Caraveli's first paragraph (thanks to The Association Renewal Blog for bringing this article to my attention):
Many association leaders worry that today’s professionals lack interest in joining organizations, and they point to the declines in some association membership levels as evidence. But the likelier explanation for such declines is that today’s professionals are getting what they need from other sources—namely, relevant and targeted information; convenient and up-to-date delivery service; interactive membership experiences; and, in general, meaningful engagement in communities of practice.
Caraveli says a core problem for many associations is not delivering real value to their members. She questions whether improved marketing and increases in the number and type of benefits really improves the value members gain from membership. This reflects some of the same points I made in Are Social Networking and Social Media Threats or Opportunities for Professional Associations? There I described membership associations as competing for the attention, time, and dollars of an increasing number of alternative professional relationship experiences.
Caraveli describes the work of the Veterinarian Information Network (VIN), which shares some similarities with the services provided by the recently announced American Medical Association network. VIN is a small specialized association of veterinarians built around the principals of networking and knowledge sharing enabled by technology. Here is how she describes the VIN business model:
The basis of VIN’s business model is the network itself. There are three primary avenues for delivering member benefits: peer interaction; specialist advice and help in medical problem solving; and up-to-date medical research, along with tools and breaking news that keep members current.
She uses the word "codevelopment" to describe the distinguishing characteristic of how members relate to the organization:
Codevelopment is the mode of relationships created by VIN. Members are afforded opportunities to shape, not merely read about, news and trends in their profession. They are engaged in new product development and innovation.
Those who are involved with commercial and marketing applications of "web 2.0" technologies, social media, and social networking techniques will recognize these concepts instantly. Progressive companies apply social media and networking technologies not to a one way delivery of products and services but to engaging and involving customers in the development -- among themselves -- of valuable products and services.
Underlying all the hype, evangelism, and buzzwords we see and hear about this is one very simple concept: organizations can provide value to customers and members by providing a mechanism for people to interact and share information about how to solve problems. If you want a good place to pick up on how concepts like this are already being discussed, check out the web site of the Social Media Collective, a group I belong to that gathers together the thoughts on web 2.0 and social media from dozens of different practitioners and experts.
The good news is that the technologies to support networking, relationship development, and knowledge sharing among association members are readily available and continually dropping in price and complexity.
The bad news -- and this is not really addressed in detail by Caraveli -- is that some associations may not be prepared for the culture shift that effective adoption of these technologies involves. Adoption involves more than installation or operation of software; it also may involve changing the relationship an association has with its members. This change in turn can impinge on existing organizational structures, governance patterns, and member benefits.
Whether or not this change is viewed as a threat by the association's management will determine to a great extent the speed with which social media and social networking are adopted. I say "to a great extent" since such media are already being adopted in many organizations on a bootstrap basis since it is so easy to join professional networking organizations or to start blogging or using wikis to support project management.
For such technologies to truly enhance member value the way Caraveli envisions it, though, there needs to be management support for the implementing of a consistent strategy so that everyone is "on the same page" and adopts tools that enable barrier-free information sharing among all association employees and members.
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This "adoption process" is one that interests me greatly as I work with associations and corporations in my own consulting. In addition to checking out the Social Media Collective, here are a few more sources:
- For my other articles related to professional associations click here.
- My "del.icio.us" shared bookmarks to blog posts, web sites, and documents that I have tagged with the term "adoption" are located here.
- To see a list of my articles related to technology and web 2.0 adoption, use the search box on the left side of this page to search for "adoption," or if you are reading this via a feed reader, click here to bring up my web site's search box.
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Reader Comments (2)
Glad I ran across your site. Completely support your views on more compelling ways to provide member value through better customer engagement that drives value from collaboration among the masses.
The challenge for associations today is the same as their corporate counterparts:
1) Overcoming the "not invented here" POV. This one lies at the heart of many large assns. They worry that the "unwashed" masses will somehow retard their "peer reviewed" content. The irony is that whatever you want to call it (peer production, co-development, content co-creation, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding...) is really "peer review" but on a massive scale. You only need to integrate product development methodology along with the desire to let your audience of consumers participate to improve the product's value (and the member experience).
2. Value propositions should be defined from the stakeholders POV not the association's. Too many organizations think about selling what they have not delivering what and how the customer wants (which is solutions to real world problems).
3. You need an organizational strategy that supports customer intimacy and then align operations, customer mgmt, and product development to it.
4. Adopting more open means of customer engagement which could include new more open business models, co-dev of products and services, and two way communication strategies across all distribution channels.
5. The more closed and insular a corporate culture the less viable and adaptable in its appeal to younger professionals. Studies show this time and again. People want to volunteer and be creative not deal with policies, procedures, and turf wars that dont address real world needs of the rank and file.
I hope assns will be able to integrate the innovative approaches being practiced in the for profit space (InnoCentive, NineSIgma, SellaBand, Magnatune,etc). I only know of one association that has developed an open business model for one of its services and they are in Australia (Australian Industry Group's InnovationXchange.com).
Lastly, a good case study to examine is Gannett. They adopted a strategy that goes after the audience they refer to as the "lean forwards" - those who dont want to sit back and consume but participate actively in the process of news production and consumption.
Look forward to following your posts and the Social Media Collective too.
I agree there is a lot of similarity between corporate and association adoption of more collaborative approaches. A major distinction though is an obvious one -- associations have members who have already made a commitment to the group. This seems to me to be a natural opportunity for applying social media and social networking techniques; many corporations don't have this luxury since they do business through intermediaries.