We Have Always Done It That Way

As membership-based organizations, associations by definition must create themselves in a way that allows them to satisfy a large number of stakeholders. Within their membership alone they are guaranteed to find a broad range of preferences and priorities, and that range only expands when you consider other stakeholders (business partners, staff, policy communities, the public, etc.). Obviously there is value in creating a variety of experiences, products, services, etc. so that your differing stakeholders can extract different types of value.

For example, AARP produces a very successful magazine. A few years back they experimented with two versions of the magazine, including a new one focused on a specific generation””the newest retirees, the “Baby Boomers.” As they evaluated the success of the new venture, however, the results were disappointing, and they cancelled the new magazine. But they did not go back to one magazine for all of their membership. They started producing three slightly different versions of their magazine based on age groupings rather than generations: one for members in their fifties, one for members in their sixties, and one for members seventy and above. This approach has been more successful.

So shifting in response to diversity among stakeholders can be a good thing, but it also has its dark side, and associations too often fail to see this. At a high level, the dark side is obvious and captured in platitudes we hear all the time. You can’t be everything to everyone. Trying to go in too many directions at once makes it impossible to move forward. We all know that there is a limit to our ability to please all the different perspectives, interests, or motivations among stakeholders.

But we still try to do it. The problem is our devotion to our members. We take a good platitude (providing member value will make your association successful) and take it to an extreme that ignores the platitudes we mentioned above about being everything to everyone. We start, innocently enough, by doing research about the various needs and interests of our members and stakeholders. The more sophisticated we get with our research, the larger the variety of interests we discover. We use that knowledge to tweak our services or processes and we get good results (retention up! satisfaction up!). So we keep doing it.

Unfortunately, over time, it provides us with too many choices, and we begin to see clearly how many people will be unhappy unless we choose to meet their needs. So we choose to diversify even further. In the end, we lose the capacity to make choices, because we don’t want to make any stakeholder unhappy. It happens over time. No one makes the explicit decision that making choices is bad, but that is what happens. We add new programs without taking anything away. We respond to every member demand. We abandon a strategy if a focus group objects to it. We just end up there.

You have to choose. You have to take some people’s interests and desires and give them a higher priority than others. You have to make some people unhappy with your decisions, because if you don’t, then you are making weak decisions, and success requires strength. You have to choose some courses of action, knowing that you are ruling out a host of other options. You don’t have to be blind to what others want, and we don’t encourage you to ignore stakeholder groups and their varied interests and opinions. But you do have to choose.

Tags: Leadership, Membership, Strategy, The Way We Think // 3 Comments »