Association magazines and hybrid print-online solutions

by Anne Gentle

I’ve been assisting with a report for the Society for Technical Communication about social media for professional organizations. I’m also on an editorial advisory panel helping to shape the articles and authors for their Intercomm magazine, which is printed 10 times a year and has over 10,000 subscribers. Survey results show that members still want a printed magazine, but also value the speed and interaction that an online presence can provide. So, I’ve been trying to find good examples of association magazines that work well online also.

Building a brand, educating, or raising awareness?

I’m finding that association magazines are sometimes thought of as a branch of “brand” magazines. There’s a bit of controversy on this point though. I read this blog entry that asks, “Are association magazines just flashier custom pubs?” The author says “While some associations work with custom publishers to produce their magazines, the publications they create are not marketing-based vehicles for a particular brand. To use a custom publishing study to explain habits of association magazine readers seems like a stretch.”

I suppose “branding” isn’t quite the right term for what professional associations offer their members. Is it “raising awareness” instead?

I also found a reference to the Roper study that the blog entry above cites. The bullet points they choose to highlight are:

• 85% view custom publications as a preferred source of information because they provide targeted information
• 79% view companies that produces a custom magazine as believing in its product
• 69% after reading a custom magazine feel they know more about the company
• 65% view companies that produce a custom magazine as caring about its customers

The print to online spectrum

I subscribe to a great association magazine for an association called CHADD called Attention magazine. I appreciate their hybrid approach for print and online even though it’s a pretty simple implementation with PDF files secured behind a membership login. It’s not interactive, as in, there are no comments on articles that I can see. The site touts their recent (June 2008) award for redesign from the Society of National Association Publishers.

What’s also interesting to me is that there’s another magazine called ADDitude that does a great job of online engagement. It’s free for online content and a paid-subscriber magazine for printed content. It’s interesting that the market can bear two similar magazines, but there you go. It appears is a huge range of the amount of online and print offered.

One association magazine that is a great example of online engagement even after the printed magazine has been mailed is the Associations Now magazine from the ASAE (American Society of Association Executives). There’s an RSS feed so you can subscribe to updates to the magazine’s main page. You can rate an article or write a review of it, and bookmark or share it with others with an AddThis widget.

Looking at a brand name example

An interesting note, if you do want to correlate brand and custom pubs as being similar to association magazines, Adobe magazine had probably half a million subscribers but stopped doing print production (as far as I can tell) in 2000. Archives are still available online. Adobe is miles ahead in print-online hybridization, and apparently tried a 2.0 magazine, but isn’t offering it now.

There may be lessons learned in these examples. What are some of your favorite association magazines, and how much engagement is online?

What We’re Reading, Week of 10/12

From Acronym…
What have your members taught you?
A great way to wind down week! This post from Acronym reminds us that we should not only look at what we can DO for association members, but what we can LEARN from them.

From AFP Blog…
New Video Series Helps Exempt Organizations Understand Redesigned Form 990 Requirements
AFP posted a link to a helpful video for exempt organizations that explains recent changes to the Form 990.

From NTEN…
Blog Action Day 2009 Climate Change: Technology in the Climate Movement
NTEN and 9,427 other blogs from 150 countries with 12,896,974 readers are smashing the debate  about what impact the online world has on offline action with these numbers and think about the over 12 million people around the world who are raising their consciousness about climate change. NTEN posts some highlights.

What We’re Reading, Week of 10/5

From TechSoup…
Happy Birthday, TechSoup New Zealand!
TechSoup celebrates the anniversary of their New Zealand partners and their rapid growth.

From Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog…
What Nonprofits Can Learn from Politico’s Success
Kivi takes an interesting look at the success of the Politico website and draws some interesting comparison.

From Acronym…
My Top 5 Things to Remember in 2010 as an Association Professional
Acronym takes a look to a new year and what it will take to be successful in 2010.

From A Small Change…
Eating Excellent Fundraising For Breakfast
Jason at A Small Change has some interesting and inspirational musings about the important of breakfast and successful fundraising.

What We’re Reading, Week of 9/28

From Beth’s Blog…
How LIVESTRONG Uses Social Media To Animate Its Community
Guest blogger Brooke McMillan contributes this insightful post to Beth’s Blog, taking a look at a few tips utilized by LIVESTRONG to ensure success in the use of social media.

From Acronym…
Purpose-driven membership
What is membership? This lengthy blog post at Acronym takes a look at this somewhat existential and lofty question with some interesting thoughts.

From A Small Change…
Results Oriented Fundraising
Jason at A small Change discusses a comment left by one of his readers to an earlier post about quantifying donations and support.

What We’re Reading, Week of 9/21

From A Small Change…
Musings on the Future of Fundraising
Jason at A Small Change writes about the changing landscape of fundraising and his predictions for the future.

From Beth’s Blog…
How to translate social listening into good twitter conversation that supports your objectives
Beth Kanter takes a look at how organization’s can better utilize social listening (the practice of using social networking sites to listen to their members and potential donors) and turn that into constructive communications via Twitter.

From Acronym…
How secure is that golden handcuff?
An interesting article about how organizations should approach at their “golden handcuff” (a program or product so important to a member that it effectively binds them to the organization).

From NTEN…
Online Donors: Why They Leave and How to Win Them Back
NTEN takes a look at an interesting problem and opportunity when it comes to online donors which they have dubbed “the young and the generous” (they tend to be under 40 and their gifts are around $100).

What We’re Reading, Week of 9/14

From NTEN…
IT Alignment Is Mission Alignment
An interesting article discussing ways in which IT departments can “realign” themselves to better ensure that they are well placed and helping to achieve a myriad of goals across the company.

From Beth’s Blog…
Dear Causes: Please Share Your Cause Exit Survey Data With Nonprofits
Beth Kanter takes a look at Facebook causes and a surprising feature that should prove useful to organizations who do outreach through causes.

From Acronym…
Why should members join?
Acronym from ASAE poses the questions for readers to sound off on, “Why should members join?” See what people have to say.

From The Chronicle of Philanthropy…
Followers and Friends Not the Only Measure of Nonprofit Success Online
Are non-profits using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook successfully? This is the charge posed by marketer Seth Godin, though Peter Panepento (the author of the post) disagrees.

What We’re Reading, Week of 8/24

From A Small Change…
Building Community Online
This post from Jason at A Small Change blog takes a look at how organizations should go about building their online community by, in part, creating an intentional culture that fit the various cultures of your donors.

From Acronym…
Facebook fundraising: Feeding America shows good taste
Acronym from ASAE examines the effectiveness of one of the early adopters using Facebook for fundraising. To do this they look at Feeding America’s (formerly Second Harvest) latest campaign on Facebook, a “virtual Sandwich Swap n’ Share” involving the unusual duo of Hellmann’s and Best Foods Mayonnaise with musician Billy Ray Cyrus.

From Beth’s Blog…
Seven Thoughts on Slacktivism
This guest post by Ali Cherry of Beaconfire Consulting takes a look at the growing trend of “Slactivism”, the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem

From NTEN…
The Shrinking Generational Digital Divide
Sami Hassanyeh of AARP contributes this post looking at trends in demographics of the use of technology and where these are headed. Some of the findings about current usage demographics may surprise you (they did us)!

What We’re Reading, Week of 8/17

From AFP Blog…
Super Bowl of Conventions Under Way in Toronto
This post from AFP Blog talks about the American Society of Association Executives and the Center for Association Leadership’s annual meeting and exposition. Dubbed the “Super Bowl of conventions”.

From Acronym…
Living through short-term pain
A fantastic article looking at the speech made by Fareed Zakaria at the ASAE closing general session and one of his final points; that “we have got to learn to impose short-term pain for long-term gain.”

From Frogloop…
Online Video: Why I’m a Believer
Changing gears, this post from Frogloop is written by a video convert. Shirley Sexton discusses her initial hesitance at jumping on the video bandwagon and what changed her mind!

Removing Barriers to Online Dues Payment

One of the common barriers that associations have with their website is usernames and passwords. These credentials are obviously imperative to ensure security around personal and financial information, however in many cases members may only visit the website once a year… to pay their dues. Of course most websites will offer a “forgotten password” option to enable members to find their own username and password themselves, however this contradicts evidence that implies that one of the most common calls to member services is “I’ve forgotten my website password”.

Recently I saw an association with a great solution to this problem, a partial login based on a link in an email.

At renewal time an email is sent to all members containing a link that they can click on to pay their dues, this link takes them to a webpage that recognises the member based on the information in the link. The website draws some very basic information from the database such as their name and their dues total, it’s important that only a minimal amount of information is drawn from the database for security’s sake. This page contains credit card payment options also so that the member can provide those details and pay their dues from a single page. As soon as the member attempts to do anything beyond this page such as view the member profile or change their password they are immediately prompted to login to continue that process. Importantly it’s the link in the original email that made this all work, so anyone who clicks on that link would also have access to that webpage. So it’s possible that if that member forwarded that email to someone else then that person would also be able to click on the link and see the same information, however I’m yet to come across a member who would be upset if someone else paid their dues.

Of course this is not going to work for every association, I understand that some renewal processes are more complicated however a large proportion of membership bodies could use this approach. It reduces demand on membership services staff as members don’t need a username and password and it provides a quick and easy experience for the members to pay their dues, a single page with no login required.

Here’s how it works (a little techy, so you can skip this if you really want to):

1. At dues renewal time, each member’s identification number is allocated an encrypted piece of text, so as an example the member number 114235 might end up looking like F6132B19-E33C-4d90-9B8E-7CDD4552A29A. This number uniquely identifies the member but at the same time does not expose the member number in any way.
2. A broadcast email tool is used to send a personalised email to each member which includes a link to the dues payment webpage including the unique number above.
3. When a member clicks on the link the web page takes in the unique number and compares that against the database, when it finds a match it draws out their name and total dues amount and presents this information on the web page along with fields for credit card payment. This page will need to be encrypted with SSL to ensure credit card details are transmitted securely over the internet.
4. When the page is submitted (with payment details) to the server it processes the dues payment and updates member details accordingly such as paid through date and dues balance.
5. An email receipt is forwarded onto the member and they are presented with a thank you page.
6. If the member attempts to gain access to any other personal information on the website they are redirected to a login page, this is managed and enforced by the content management system for the site.

I believe this is a great solution to a common problem. Especially as the focus moves away from the website being the “transaction engine” for associations and more towards it being the community it should be. Members shouldn’t be caught up in complex renewal processes, they should be engaged in interactions that will benefit themselves, other members and you on your site.

What We’re Reading, Week of 8/10

From A Small Change…
Reasons Your Organization Should Blog
This article from A Small Change asks the questions Does your nonprofit use blogging to advance your mission? Why not? What’s holding you back? It goes on to list a few advantages that blogging can bring to what you do.

From Kivi’s Nonprofit Communication Blog…
Nonprofit Blogs: 5 Reasons You Do & Don’t Need One
In sort of an alternate post to the last one we read from A Small Change, this article from Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog gives you 5 reasons your organization needs a blog…AND 5 reasons you DON”T.

From Frogloop…
Five Tips to Ramp Up Your Nonprofit’s Fan Pages
Does your organization have a Facebook fan page? Frogloop takes a look at a few quick and easy steps to increase the effectiveness of your fan page and discusses how, even if you’re not raising much money of your Facebook fan page, these pages can be good for your organization.

From Beth’s Blog…
Study Released: Untapped Opportunity to
Engage High Dollar Nonprofit Donors via Social
In this article, Beth over at Beth’s Blog discusses how some organizations are missing out on the potential to target high dollar donors using their social networking outlets.